The Ludomusicology Research Group: Interview

The Ludomusicology Research Group was founded in August 2011 by three early-career academics, Mark Sweeney, Tim Summers, and Michiel Kamp, as a way to discover who else was researching video game music and to create a hub for connecting them. Their initial aim was to organize a conference and maintain a website, and the group's philosophy has remained centered on an open-ended discovery phase alongside a commitment to interdisciplinary exchange. The inaugural conference, held as a Royal Musical Association study day at St Catherine's College, Oxford, drew keynotes from Anahid Kassabian and Isabella van Elferen and attracted growing delegate numbers in subsequent years, with a shift toward including ethnomusicology, computer science, psychology, and theatre studies alongside musicology, and sustained participation from industry composers.

The interview describes a constellation of related organizations that emerged in parallel, including the North American Conference on Video Game Music (established 2014), Game Music Connect (2013), GameSoundCon (2009), and Audio Mostly (begun 2006). In December 2016 the group joined with NACVGM and Audio Mostly to launch the Society for the Study of Sound and Music in Games, which plans a peer-reviewed Journal of Sound and Music in Games. Conference venues have moved from Oxford to Liverpool, Chichester, Utrecht (the first overseas event in 2015), and Southampton, with a stated intention to alternate between the UK and continental Europe while keeping costs low for an predominantly early-career audience.

Reflecting on the field's development, Sweeney characterizes game audio scholarship as gradually gaining legitimacy comparable to film music studies, while stressing the need for further interdisciplinarity, particularly around virtual reality. He also notes a collaborative rather than competitive culture within the community and a partnership with ThinkSpace Education to link research with professional game audio training. The accompanying edited volume, Ludomusicology: Approaches to Video Game Music (Equinox, 2016), grew largely from papers presented at the 2012 conference.