Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo

Notation Cultures: Towards an Ethnomusicology of Notation

“…Moseley, in his exploration of the relation between play and music, emphasizes the Gadamerian insight that 'all play is a being played', highlighting the mechanism inherent in play, the degree to which 'reciprocity between the animate and the inanimate world' is a central aspect of musical performance. 98 Learning to play a piece of music involves a disciplining of the body to make it able to interact with the mechanistic workings of instruments and other forms of technology. Automated musical instruments have raised questions about the agency of musical performers at least since the Enlightenment, being either praised as the perfect performers or feared because they were seen to dehumanize music.…”

Orchestra Machines, Old and New

“…At the same time, these separate instruments are necessarily coordinated , and this coordination is achieved via pinned cylinders. Like the punched paper rolls used by player pianos or mid-twentieth-century synthesisers, a pinned cylinder represents a musical code that is meant to be run , not decoded (Moseley 2016: 11). As Carolyn Abbate puts it, it is ‘a material trace of the musical work, yet not a score (a symbolic prescription for the work’s realisation) and not a gramophonic impression of the work’s sound (a recording)’; it is a place ‘within the machine where notation and fingers can become one’ (Abbate 1999: 485–6).…”

“…The article draws on and contributes to emerging discourse on instrumentality, increasingly referred to as ‘critical organology’. Such approaches combine the technical and historical study of instruments with more philosophical perspectives, including actor-network theory (Bates 2012), Foucauldian ethics (Tresch and Dolan 2013), media archaeology (Moseley 2016; Rehding 2016a, 2016b) and phenomenology (De Souza 2017). Such thinking approaches musical epistemology and ontology via musical technics.…”

The Music of Microswitches: Preserving Videogame Sound—A Proposal

“…In fact, counterbalancing the attention paid to animation, character design and other aspects of graphical representation with serious scrutiny of sound and music is not unique to academic enquiries of videogames and such an 'auditory turn' is similarly identifiable in studies of film and television (Rietveld and Carbone 2017). Nonetheless, despite a growing body of excellent scholarship mapping the field (Collins 2008;Cheng 2014;Donnelly et al 2014;Moseley 2016;Summers 2016), undertaking detailed technological accounts of platforms (e.g. Collins 2006aCollins , 2006bCollins , 2007Marquez 2014;McAlpine 2017;Newman 2017), exploring practice (Phillips 2014;Sweet 2014) and even offering musicological analyses of specific videogame scores (Schartmann 2015), it is only marginally melodramatic to note that game studies as a whole remains deafeningly silent.…”