Asynchronous Papers
| On-Stage, Backstage: Sonic Cartography and the Exposed Architecture of Theme Park Sound in HBO’s Westworld Hee Seng Kye |
| HBO’s Westworld (2016–2022) presents an immersive Western-themed amusement park whose sonic design marks territories while concealing the work behind that atmosphere. Studies of Ramin Djawadi’s player-piano arrangements have described the instrument as narrative informant (Marshall 2019), prosthetic organology (Waltham-Smith 2024), and audiovisual prolepsis (Dosser 2023). Building on these accounts, this paper positions the series as a critical dramatisation of theme-park sonic cartography itself. The show depicts a sharp division between on-stage and backstage sound. In Sweetwater, guests hear saloon piano, street ambience, and Host dialogue; in the Mesa Hub, diagnostic tones and mechanical hums constitute a sonic backstage inaudible to visitors. Season 1, Episode 6 (“The Adversary”) dramatises this division directly: Maeve is escorted through the Mesa’s manufacturing floors, her passage rendering audible what guests never hear. By following Hosts who traverse both areas, the series renders audible the regime of audibility that operating parks such as Disneyland and Universal Studios rely on by design. This fictional case therefore generates transferable analytic questions for actual parks, including how speaker placement naturalises themed borders, how live performers stabilise acoustic identity along walking routes, and how contemporary automation cultivates the fantasy of endless, cost-free performance. Reading the player piano as the series’ central figure for automated sonic labour, the paper argues that sonic maps organise not only themed space but structures of hearing that separate guests from production. Westworld defamiliarises that practice and offers a conceptual toolkit for studying real entertainment environments as ideological deployments of sound. |
| 8-bit Magic in the Air: Double Diegesis and Existential Authenticity in Adventures in the Magic Kingdom Thomas B. Yee |
| What do Disney, video games, and Japanese composer Shimomura Yōko (村 陽子) have in common? Though most would answer “Kingdom Hearts,” there is another game that fits the bill: Adventures in the Magic Kingdom (Famicom, 1990). Rather than follow an original narrative premise as Kingdom Hearts does, Adventures invites players to virtually visit Disney’s Magic Kingdom theme park. “8-bit Magic in the Air: Double Diegesis and Existential Authenticity in Shimomura’s Adventures in the Magic Kingdom” demonstrates how Shimomura’s music facilitates players’ experience of double diegesis and existential authenticity. Rather than arranging music from Disneyland, Shimomura encodes the subjective experience of the park and rides. Shimomura only directly quotes pre-existing Disney music in the introductory track: ‘Mickey Mouse March,’ drawing on the iconic 1959 Japanese adaptation of the show and theme song. In ‘Title’ and ‘Stage Intro’, Shimomura channels the theme park musical topic through orchestration, ascending sentential melodies, and sequential harmonic tonicisation. The game’s ride levels eschew any pre-existing ride music (e.g. ‘Grim Grinning Ghosts,’ ‘Yo Ho – A Pirate’s Life For Me’) in favor of promoting the ‘existential authenticity’ of experiencing the rides themselves (Lind 2022). For example, ‘Space Mountain’ presents a bombastic, driving melody with soaring gestural flourishes. ‘Big Thunder Mountain’ blends narrative signification and ludic function with a timbre suggesting fiddle double-stops and tempo increasing to blistering speeds invoking a runaway train. Shimomura’s strategy exemplifies the concept of ‘double diegesis,’ where parkgoers become protagonists in the narrative of their visit (Camp 2017). Adventures in the Magic Kingdom enhances theme parks’ double diegesis with the interactive agency of video games. |
| Harmonic Cartography: Mapping Key Area Relationships in Disney’s “Rise of the Resistance” Lauren Crosby |
| The soundtracks for movie adaptation rides are often medleys of familiar songs or cues from the film. While many of these ride soundtracks contain a handful of longer cues stitched together at transitional moments in the ride, the score for Disney’s “Rise of the Resistance” is more of a megamix mashup (Boone, 2013) of much shorter cues and iconic leitmotifs from John Williams’s film scores. Williams’s scores for the nine films of the Star Wars Skywalker saga have been adapted and arranged for television (Crosby, 2023; Lawson, 2023; Tripp, 2023), video games (Bradford, 2022), podcasts, audiobooks, and theme park attractions (Camp, 2022). This paper adds to the study of adaptations of Williams’s work by exploring William Ross’s arrangement of Star Wars cues for the soundtrack to “Rise of the Resistance.” This paper sets out to demonstrate how Ross’s adaptation is far more than just musical quotation or collage; it stays true to Williams’s harmonic language (Lehman, 2018) through the use of chromatic mediant relationships at the seams that connect Williams’s iconic themes. In keeping with the conference theme of sonic cartography, the primary methodology employed in this study is the mapping of the key area relationships between adjacent cues in voice-leading spaces using Neo-Riemannian analysis. The visual paths provided in this analysis represents a rider’s aural journey through harmonic space in parallel with their physical journey through the “Rise of the Resistance” ride. |
| Cartographic Sonicity in Virtual Theme Parks: Honkai Star Rail’s Clock Studios Clair Nguyen |
| Theme park soundscapes construct “fictional real worlds” (Lawson 2024) with heightened interactivity, hyperrealism, and complexities beyond film and video games. Ironically, Epic Universe’s Super Nintendo World turns the virtual into reality, while Universal’s app-only augmented reality and Wizarding World activities turn physical park experiences increasingly virtual. Such comingling of the real and virtual become most pertinent when video games recreate theme parks. Therefore, my presentation posits that virtual open-world theme parks can reconstruct and deconstruct the “theme park” concept to distill a set of key definers. The definers also underscore how strategic sonic mapping and simulation of theme park areas, mascots, and branding can compensate for the lack of definers such as physical thrill rides and waiting queues. Clock Studios from the RPG game Honkai: Star Rail is a virtual theme park set in a designed world space (Lukas 2013). Waltz-like main street music (Yee 2025), Roaring Twenties jazz, and realistic soundscapes are mapped onto “Area” music (Camp 2024) for themed restaurants, hotels, shops, attractions, and minigames. In addition to cartographic design, the stylized music also features compounded functions of (ludo)narrative, transmedial, and/or affective purposes, even when the musical content belongs to a fictional game world. Analyzing for these compounded cartographic functions demonstrates how, like physical theme parks, virtual theme park soundscapes can facilitate interactivity, escapism, historicity, and nostalgia grounded in parkgoers’ own realities. And, these functions manifest in real-life park experiences that reconstruct the virtual through app-based experiences, augmented reality, and reconstructions of video game franchises. |
| The Sound of Silence: The Enchanted Forest’s Sonic Specters Karen M. Cook |
| In 1955, a small theme park opened in Ellicott City, Maryland. The Enchanted Forest was filled with nursery rhyme-themed buildings (e.g. Three Blind Mice; Hickory Dickory Dock), characters, and, later, rides. Piped music filled the air, and most exhibits had an audio feature (Kusterer & Clark). The rides themselves also had sounds particular to them, such as the chug of Little Toot the Tugboat. In 1989, the park closed; arson later destroyed several buildings, other buildings were razed, and the rest were left to the elements. However, between 2005-2015, over 100 of the park’s original artifacts were relocated to nearby Clark’s Elioak Farm and lovingly restored. Last year’s 75th anniversary witnessed Little Toot’s long-awaited unveiling. Clark’s has given people of a certain generation a unique opportunity to relive their childhood through the restored artifacts of this long-closed theme park, in which, as Rone might say, “nostalgia has been crystallized.” (8) And yet, a crucial aspect of the Enchanted Forest is missing: its sound. Only one single theme from the original park still plays, and most of the rides are no longer operational. It is, in a way, less a theme park than a memorial, the silent physical remains acting as a Peircean sign, plumbing the depths of our fractured musical memories for hints of their former cacophony (Turino). Musical studies of nostalgia (van Elferen, Pozderac-Chenevey, Aksoy et al, Botstein) have focused on how sound evokes nostalgia; here, however, I address how the new park’s uncanny silence generates nostalgia for the lost soundworld of the Enchanted Forest. |
Thursday 18th June
| Panel 1: Spatial Design – Octonauts, Trolls and Minions |
| Music, Sound and Spatial Design at Alton Towers CBeebies Land Dan White |
| This paper presents findings from an ongoing mixed-methods study of music and sound design in CBeebies Land at Alton Towers, UK. Focusing on a child-centred theme park environment rooted in CBeebies’ most popular IPs, the project examines how music and sound function across different rides, attractions, and themed areas to shape guest experience. Particular attention is paid to the use of pre-existing musical material from CBeebies television programming—including theme tunes, character-associated motifs, and familiar sonic cues—and how these are adapted, looped, and spatially distributed within the theme park setting. Drawing on ethnographic observation, sonic mapping, and (pending funding) visitor survey data, the paper analyses how music contributes to immersion, recognition, and emotional engagement, while also operating as a spatial tool and guide. Area music, ambient sound, and ride soundtracks are likely to play key roles in demarcating zones, signalling narrative cues, and guiding visitor movement. Music is especially significant in enabling transitions between adjacent attractions and areas, smoothing shifts between distinct fictional worlds while maintaining a coherent overall soundscape. These transitions often rely on overlapping musical material, changes in texture or instrumentation, and graduated shifts in volume and audibility. The paper further explores how musical continuity across spaces reinforces brand familiarity and supports intergenerational engagement, addressing both children’s recognition of CBeebies characters and adults’ mediation of the experience. By foregrounding sound as an active agent in spatial design rather than a passive backdrop, this research contributes to emerging scholarship on theme park music, soundscapes, and the transmedial adaptation of screen media into physical environments. |
| Sonic Overlap in the Horror-Themed Worlds of Alton Towers Scott Wearing |
| At Alton Towers Resort, the musical identities of individual areas serve principally to immerse guests within themed areas of the park. In turn, this generates a kind of sonic cartography that allows for quick identification of the current themed area through listening alone. Sonic overlap—musical connections between the soundworlds of separate areas—helps to connect these differently themed areas of the park, as well as contributing to a sense of coherence across the entire resort. Much of the music in Alton Towers’ horror-themed areas are united by subtle or explicit variations on Edvard Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King (1875), frequently created by production company IMAscore. Through score analysis I reveal the methods used to develop variations of Grieg’s iconic theme to evoke specific themed areas. I also undertake spectral analyses of the same soundtrack music, revealing that unintentional connections between unrelated areas of the park are also being generated in timbre and balancing, undermining the distinctiveness of individual themed areas and aggregating the park’s sonic identity. This presentation considers sonic overlap as both a unifying tool and as an undermining of individual themed areas’ identities. I consider the tension between IMAscore’s commercial agenda—generating a coherent sense of corporate musical identity—with the need for distinctive themed music for rides and areas within the park. The ultimate aim of this presentation is to explicate the notion of sonic overlap in theme parks and to critically evaluate its impact on the sonic cartography of Alton Towers Resort. |
| Minion Music: Spatial Transmedia, Soundscapes, and Immersion at Universal Studios Orlando’s Despicable Me-themed Land Rebecca Williams |
| This paper builds on existing work on music within themed spaces (Camp 2017, 2025; Carson 2004: Hodge 2018; Nooshin 2004; White 2023, White 2025, theme parks and transmediality (Freitag 2025; Williams 2020), and the experience economy (Pine and Gilmore 2011) by focusing on the use of sound within the Minion Land area of Universal Studios in Orlando. Consisting of two attractions (Despicable Me: Minion Mayhem, and Villain Con Blast), a meet-and-greet location, several shops, and a themed café, the land utilises a range of music from the Despicable Me/Minions franchise as well as a range of diegetic (i.e. in-world) sounds. These include popular songs from the movie soundtracks (such as the use of the Bee Gees’ ‘You Should Be Dancing’ in a Minion dance party), tracks from the scores (played on the soundtrack in the Minion Café), covers of songs by the Minions themselves (including ‘YMCA’ which plays at a Minion meet-and-greet at the Illumination Theatre), and effects including sound effects such as Minions working in the kitchen at the Minion Café. The paper thus argues that, rather than adding solely to the ambience of the area or offering a coherent use of established musical motifs (see White 2023), the use of different forms of music and sound across the Minion Land soundscape opens opportunities for forms of immersion and spatial transmedia (Williams 2020). These, in turn, are linked to this variety of audio cues, whilst also invoking the playful tone and musical eclecticism of the source franchise itself. |
| Panel 2: Corporate Strategies and Changing Sounds – Carousels and Arendelles |
| There’s a Great Big Beautiful Advertisement James M. Bohn |
| One of the inspirations for what became Disneyland were World’s Fairs. This influence can be seen in the early years of Disneyland’s Tomorrowland, particularly through exhibits and sponsored attractions in the park from corporations such as Kaiser Aluminum, Monsanto Chemical Company, The National Lead Company, Richfield Oil, and Transworld Airlines. Disney’s corporate sponsored attractions took a step forward during the 1964 World’s Fair with the inclusion of theme songs, particularly in the Ford Rotunda and Progressland. The Carousel of Progress arguably became the gold standard of such attractions, creating a unique environment of corporate infotainment within a larger themed environment. A survey of how Disney attraction themes have doubled as ersatz corporate slogans illustrates the duality of these presentations. This overview also functions to illustrate the trend of Disney corporate sponsored attractions, peaking with the early years of EPCOT Center. EPCOT’s success in supplanting American interest in World’s Fairs has arguably led towards the decline of corporate interest in sponsoring attractions at Disney Parks, making such dual function environments somewhat of an historical anomaly in the parks. |
| Sounds of a New (Adventure) World: Music and the Walt Disney Studios Makeover Fanny Beuré |
| Opened in 2002, Disneyland Paris’s “second park” is set to inaugurate a new phase in its history in March 2026. After seven years of major construction work, Walt Disney Studios Park will give way to Disney Adventure World. This unprecedented change of name signals a profound reconfiguration of the park’s spatial, thematic, and experiential design. The park’s surface area will be doubled, a central lake will be created, and new lands—most notably the World of Frozen—will reshape both its layout and its identity. Rather than offering a behind-the-scenes exploration of movie-making, the park will now invite visitors to immerse themselves in a series of themed environments based on distinct intellectual properties. This paper intends to examine how music contributes to this new spatial organization and storytelling. It will focus on how music works as a tool of world-building, endowing each themed area with a specific identity while also guiding the visitor’s journey from one land to another. It will analyze the role music plays in the park’s creative and commercial development by considering both the artistic choices involved (which music is used, where, and why?) and the ways in which Disneyland Paris foregrounds music in its promotional discourse, notably as a potential selling point. This paper will also investigate visitors’ perceptions of music in relation to their understanding of the park’s new spatial logic and narrative coherence. Particular attention will be paid to live entertainment, which is expected to undergo significant reconfiguration, notably through the reuse and adaptation of street performances originally developed for the Disney Music Festival held in summer 2025. Methodologically, the paper will adopt a mixed approach, combining ethnographic fieldwork (based on repeated site visits between January and May 2026) with an analysis of promotional materials, fan-produced content, and interviews with park visitors. |
| Panel 3: De Efteling – Wereld vol Wonderen |
| ‘Op een grote paddenstoel…’: Spatial Folklore in De Efteling Maria Schreurs |
| When taking a stroll through the serene Fairy Tale Forest in De Efteling, you are accompanied by soft harpsichord music. In lieu of hiding speakers in the tree branches of the forest, the music instead comes from nearly a dozen speakers modelled after… toadstools Strikingly, these toadstools (modelled after fly agarics), have a ‘magical’ effect on children. It is not an uncommon sight to see children sitting on top of these toadstools, or pressing their ears against it. As a result, the musical toadstools have easily become one of the most photographed elements in De Efteling. But why are generations of Dutch children so entranced with what is essentially a really well-themed speaker? In this presentation I argue that the answer lies in the unique way De Efteling uses Dutch folklore to further enhance the storytelling in their themed environments. In Dutch and Flemish folk tales, fly agarics and other types of toadstools are inhabited by kabouters; magical creatures not too dissimilar from gnomes. I argue that the choice for fly agarics is deliberate, implying that kabouters are responsible for the music emerging from these mysterious fungi. The musical toadstools (and children’s obsession with them) therefore highlight a unique approach to theming within De Efteling, that deliberately adapts well-known elements from Dutch folklore. By using this approach, which I have deemed ‘spatial folklore’, I argue that De Efteling adds another layer of storytelling and makes an already fully themed environment all the more magical. |
| Intermediality and Transperceptual Attention in Rudd Bos’s Efteling Rides Louise Harris |
| Droomvlucht, Fata Morgana, Vogel Rok and Villa Volta at Efteling (four of the park’s most well-regarded rides) all feature original music composed by Ruud Bos, who passed away in 2023. Yet, almost no scholarly research has been done on Bos, whose contribution to the field is highly significant. The experience of all of these rides is completely transformed by their musical landscape; indeed, having experienced two of them both with and without their music, I can personally attest to their being a completely different audiovisual experiences in each case. This paper discusses and considers how approaching these works through a process of transperceptual attention (Harris, 2021) allows us to understand them as sites of complex intermediality in which dynamic audiovisual relationships are constructed and dissolved in participatory experience. Through close readings of each work in turn, and comparative discussion of the four against other, similar rides, it argues for Bos’s uniqueness as a composer for rides in his approach to audiovisual world building, and positions each of the ride examples as points of unique intermedial experience. |
Friday 19th June Park Visit Day
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Saturday 20th June
| Panel 4: Thinking Through Tropes and Traditions – Cranium Command |
| Troll the ancient Yule-tide carol:’ The Disneyland Candlelight Processional, the Commercialization of Christmas, and U.S. American Identity Formation Anna Marinela Lopez |
| Every first weekend of December, a medley of Christmas carols reverberates across Main Street, USA in the Disneyland Resort in Orange County, California. This medley signals the beginning of the Disneyland Candlelight Processional, an annual event that recounts “the first Christmas.” Performed by a 600-piece choir, a symphonic orchestra, and a celebrity narrator on a makeshift stage in town square, the program features classic carols and holiday hymns such as “The First Noel” and “Gloria in Excelsis”. Main Street, U.S.A., Walt Disney’s vision of “a typical American town” set between 1890-1910, transforms into a Christmas fantasy boasting Mickey Mouse-shaped wreaths festooned across rooftops, a snow-lined Sleeping Beauty Castle, a 60-foot-tall Christmas tree, and other strategically designed symbols of the holiday season. This stereotypical “town”, and its subsequent holiday remodel, makes Disneyland an important site for the construction of an imagined U.S. American cultural identity that is linked to the sounds of Christmas. I examine two processes of meaning making—1) the commercialization and canonization of Christmas carols (Leigh-Choate 2020; Decker 2020) and 2) carols as catalyst for nostalgic-nationalism, a term I introduce which dissects the relationship between cultural products, nostalgia, and national identity formation—to conduct a historical and hypertextual analysis of the Candlelight Processional as a manufactured, paradoxical fusion of the commercial and the religious (Schmidt 1995; Manning 2000; Schmalzbauer 2020). In doing so, I demonstrate how, by evoking nostalgic-nationalism through Christmas songs, Disneyland reifies the white, Christian, middle-class as the hegemonic U.S. American national identity. |
| Surfin’ Through Outer Space: Retrofuturism in Disneyland’s Space Mountain Ryan Nason |
| Despite Walt Disney’s claim that Tomorrowland is a “step into the future,” many of its attractions reveal a romantic longing for past visions of the future. I argue that the effect of Space Mountain, a space-themed indoor roller coaster that opened in Disneyland in 1977, is to remind guests of mid-twentieth-century space exploration in its depiction of rocket ships and the promise of space. For its first nineteen years of operation, Space Mountain was without music. But in 1996, the Imagineers determined that music would be a critical element of the ride. To that end, they built new rockets with onboard sound systems. The sound designer Eddie Sotto worked with the composer Aarin Richard to score the coaster as if he were scoring a film. Sotto and Richard’s soundtrack, which accompanied Space Mountain from 1996 to 2003, fused an unusual combination of sounds. Whereas 1950s sci-fi film music might not seem such a surprising choice, the 1960s surf-music rendition of Camille Saint-Saëns’s “Aquarium” from Carnival of the Animals is certainly unexpected. As I’ll argue, all evoke retrofuturism. |
| Heavy Metal and Military Authenticity: The Diegetic Soundscape of Transformers 3-D at Universal Studios Ross Garner |
| This exploratory paper investigates the soundscapes constructed for the Transformers franchise at Universal Studios Orlando. The paper aims to further academic discourses of transmedia tourism (Garner 2019a) by adopting an audio-centric and holistic perspective to address how Transformers 3D: The Ride and its pre-show areas, its accompanying retail space (the N.E.S.T. Supply Vault), and character meet and greets construct the sonic dimensions of how the franchise is experienced across these licensed themed environments (Pine and Gilmore 2019). Sound design was an overlooked aspect of initial definitions of transmedia tourism which instead emphasized technology, intertextuality, and convergence between the digital and material to foreground visual and narrative aspects of media-derived attractions (see Garner 2019b). By adopting a sound-focused perspective, discourses linking transmediality to ideas of expansion can be critiqued by instead highlighting how particular pieces of score, sound effects, silence and narration accentuate mood and reaffirm brand identity (Freitag 2025). In the case of Transformers at Universal Studios these involve reaffirming dominant meanings assigned to the franchise as seen in the film series associated with director Michael Bay (2007, 2009, 2011, 2014, 2017, 2023) and produced by Paramount under license from toy manufacturer Hasbro. Here, the soundscape becomes one of tension, destruction, clashing man-made materials, and military hardware. These stand in contrast to other audio aspects that make up Transformers’s ‘commercial intertextuality’ (see Kinder 1992) from the franchise’s over 40-year history where particular electronically-produced audio themes and cues have been used and popularized amongst the franchise’s adult fans, putting fan tastes and brand identity into conflict. |
| Panel 5: Transmediality – ‘Innoventions’ |
| From Consoles to Concrete: Videogame Sound and Interactive Design in Super Nintendo World Elizabeth Hunt |
| This paper presents a case study of Super Nintendo World (Universal Studios Japan, Universal Studios Florida, Universal Epic Universe) to examine how a videogame soundworld is translated into a physical theme park environment. It considers how music and sound are used to maintain the interactive, communicative, and ludic functions of audio present in the Super Mario videogames, while supporting the gamification of the theme park experience. In Super Nintendo World, the fictional universe of Super Mario is re-materialised as an immersive space in which guests are encouraged to become active participants. This is facilitated through the Universal Studios mobile app and through the (optional) purchase and use of a Power-Up Band, a wearable device that enables guests to interact with the environment in ways analogous to gameplay mechanics. Wearing the Power-Up Band allows visitors to collect virtual coins, unlock challenges, and compete with others, transforming the theme park visit into a form of embodied gameplay. Sound and music play a central role in this transformation. The soundscape of Super Nintendo World is constructed from recognisable musical cues, sound effects, and motifs drawn directly from the Super Mario games. Musical stingers and sound effects are triggered through guest interaction, such as punching question mark blocks, providing immediate auditory feedback that mirrors videogame reward systems. Through these familiar sonic cues, sound functions not only as atmosphere but as a communicative system that guides behaviour, reinforces interaction, and deepens immersion. |
| Performance or Playground?: Virtual Concerts as Themed Experiences and Transmedial Autofiction James Denis Mc Glynn |
| Virtual concerts are increasingly popular online phenomena (Moritzen 2022). Unlike the “quarantine concerts” of the COVID-19 pandemic (Palmer 2022), these events typically entail computer-generated simulations of performances by well-known artists, usually accessible via free updates for videogames, e.g. K-pop royalty BTS’s Minecraft concert (2021), or Norwegian singer Aurora’s appearance in Sky (2022). Consistent with existing models for synergistic marketing in music/media (Smith 1994), these experiences offer valuable cross-promotion opportunities for both the featured artists and the videogames in which they appear. Certain examples have proven especially innovative: one recent event featuring dance duo Daft Punk’s “android” alter-egos seemed highly attuned to the idiom’s potential, boasting an elaborate interactive extension of the group’s long-running transmedial autofiction and neatly exemplifying the virtual concert’s status as a form of digital themed experience. This paper comprises an in-depth analysis of Daft Punk’s virtual concert (2025): a collaboration between Epic Games, Daft Life Ltd., and Daft Punk’s longstanding creative director Cédric Hervet. First, I explore the seemingly special conduciveness of electro/EDM performance culture to this form of virtual themed experience, using the Daft Punk event as evidence of the idiom’s close consonance with live EDM’s sensory maximalism and embodied kinaesthetic qualities (Garcia 2020; Gilley 2024). Thereafter, I assess the experience’s innovative situation of its participants amid Daft Punk’s playful transmedial autofiction, carefully sculpted during the duo’s decades-long collaboration with Hervet (1992–2021). Ultimately, through close analysis of its central attraction—a forty-minute navigable recreation of Daft Punk’s much-mythologised 2006–07 concerts—I frame this event as compelling evidence of recent trends in interactive/immersive technologies, which continue to spark new and unexpected interactions between popular music and media. |
| Theme Park Audiovisual Aesthetics in Cozy Games and Acoustic Territory-Making for Micro-Scaled Cozy Worlds Kate Galloway |
| Cozy video games such as Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo 2020) and Stardew Valley (ConcernedApe 2016) draw extensively from theme park design principles to craft experiences grounded in comfort, predictability, and sensory pleasure. Like theme parks, these games rely on spatial legibility, choreographed movement, controlled temporality, and carefully curated aesthetics. Their audiovisual landscapes featuring soft color palettes, miniaturized architecture, forced perspective, and clearly defined pathways echo the designed micro-worlds of parks, while looping tasks and repeatable activities mirror ride cycles and daily routines that encourage rhythmic engagement. Although often described through tropes of cuteness, pastoralism, or nostalgia, cozy games also operate as immersive, emotionally legible environments structured through multimodal theming, especially sound. Theme parks are not only visual spectacles but carefully managed acoustic spaces, and cozy games similarly construct refuge through sonic consistency and repetition. Animal Crossing: New Horizons organizes its island through zoning, NPC schedules, and hourly musical cues, while Stardew Valley uses Pelican Town as a pastoral hub shaped by seasonal retheming, environmental sounds, and routine-driven social life. In this presentation, I examine cozy games through the lens of theme park aesthetics alongside soundwalking and sound mapping to show how their sonic architectures cultivate familiarity, attentiveness, and comfort. Footsteps on grass, rain on rooftops, cicadas in summer, and recurring musical motifs function as affective cartographies of place. By linking game design to theme park logic, these titles produce worlds that feel both manageable and enchanted—where labor is aestheticized, sociality is curated, and time unfolds with reassuring regularity. |
Theme Park Music and Sound Research 