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CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
X-WR-CALNAME:Guest Lecture: Ithaca Music Forum: Dana Plank: "To Smother You
 r Furies and Banish Your Fears...": Trauma\, Psychosis\, and Empathetic En
 gagement in the Music of the Hellblade Games
X-WR-TIMEZONE:Eastern Time (US & Canada)
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20260913T075516Z
UID:tag:localist.com\,2008:EventInstance_50530114474763
DTSTART:20250912T210000Z
DTEND:20250912T223000Z
DESCRIPTION:"To Smother Your Furies and Banish Your Fears...": Trauma\, Psy
 chosis\, and Empathetic Engagement in the Music of the Hellblade Games\n\n
 With speaker Dana Plank\, PhD\n\nFriday\, September 12 at 5:00PM\nIthaca C
 ollege Center for Music\nNabenhauer (JJWCM 4308)\n\n \n\nThis event is fre
 e and open to the public\, with a reception.\n\nHellblade: Senua’s Sacri
 fice (Ninja Theory\, 2017) follows a Pict warrior on her quest to recover 
 the soul of her dead lover. Senua is joined by voices she calls the Furies
  that whisper constantly around her\, urging her to turn back\, encouragin
 g her forward. Audio team David García and Andy LaPlegua utilized binaura
 l audio techniques to simulate a three-dimensional space\, rendering the e
 xperience more immediate and visceral. The rich timbral textures of the mu
 sical score place particular emphasis on the blurring of the line between 
 sound design and musical composition through vocal writing\, synthetic noi
 se\, echo\, and distortion. The resultant soundscape envelops the player i
 n Senua’s recurring traumatic flashbacks and/or schizoaffective disorder
  symptoms and makes the player question their ability to distinguish under
 score from diegesis\, atmosphere from information. Senua’s Saga: Hellbla
 de II (2024)\, with music by García and Scandinavian experimental folk tr
 io Heilung\, focused on Senua’s path to healing from complex trauma.\n\n
 In this talk\, I explore these games’ evocative soundscapes through the 
 lens of music and disability studies\, trauma studies\, and studies of emp
 athy and subjectivity\, demonstrating how the scores' emphases on stasis\,
  fragmentation\, and reverberation serve to characterize Senua’s traumat
 ic experiences as a disruption of normative time\; situate the games' hall
 ucinatory interjections into the soundscape through the voices of the Furi
 es\; and to reflect on the games' ultimate potential as persuasive media a
 nd a site of potential empathetic engagement. Even if the developers manag
 e to capture the look and sound of Senua’s psychotic symptoms\, to what 
 extent will that feeling translate across an affective\, experiential gap 
 to the player? To what extent is this merely a sympathetic experience vers
 us true empathy? We cannot ever fully cross into another’s embodied expe
 rience (Ayers\, 2021)\, but that doesn’t mean we can’t reach out a han
 d across the divide and be changed by the encounter itself.\n\nSpeaker Bio
 : Dana Plank is an independent scholar whose work focuses on intersections
  of music and representations of identity\, particularly video game sound 
 and gender\, sexuality\, and disability. She is the editor-in-chief of the
  Journal of Sound and Music in Games. She served as co-editor of The Inter
 section of Animation\, Video Games\, and Music: Making Movement Sing with 
 Lisa Scoggin (2023\, Routledge)\, and has a second project under contract 
 with Routledge entitled Gender and Sexuality in Video Game Sound co-edited
  with Karen M. Cook and Michael Austin. She serves on the boards for Game 
 Sound Con and the North American Conference on Video Game Music. In additi
 on to her scholarship\, she is active as a freelance violinist and violist
 \, chamber musician\, transcriptionist\, arranger\, and Twitch streamer\, 
 co-hosting a weekly stream on video-game music with Ryan Thompson\, Julian
 ne Grasso\, and Karen Cook on Thursdays at 9 p.m. Eastern at twitch.tv/bar
 dicknowledge.
LOCATION:Nabenhauer Recital Room
SUMMARY:Guest Lecture: Ithaca Music Forum: Dana Plank: "To Smother Your Fur
 ies and Banish Your Fears...": Trauma\, Psychosis\, and Empathetic Engagem
 ent in the Music of the Hellblade Games
URL;VALUE=URI:https://events.ithaca.edu/event/guest-lecture-ithaca-music-fo
 rum-dana-plank
CATEGORIES:Concert/Recital
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