Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:59:30am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Timbre, Technology, and Digital Musical Interface Session Chair: Florian Walch, West Virginia University | |
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“The level is the song, and you are playing it”: Speedrunning as Music Cornell University What happens when the result of a performance on a musical instrument is not music? Over the last several years, music has been increasingly centered in speedrunning – the popular practice of playing video games as quickly as possible, typically in front of in-person or virtual audiences and often with constraints placed upon the player to make the game more difficult. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic research to examine the intersections between music and speedrunning, focusing particularly on the use of musical instruments as video game controllers. When a musical instrument is substituted for a traditional video game controller, specific actions in the game are mapped to specific notes and articulations on, for example, a MIDI saxophone. Playing the game is thus performing on a musical instrument, where instead of sheet music there is a “route” – the speed-optimized path through the game, well-known to members of the community. Just like a violinist playing a Bach partita, speedrunners are evaluated on the fidelity of their performance to the route and judged as virtuosic based on not only their fluency with the route but also their ability to artistically improvise within it. It can be tempting to read these practices as “misuses” of musical instruments for non-musical purposes; the outcome is not clearly musical, after all, as this is not the skeuomorphic mapping of a musical instrument-shaped controller onto an in-game musical performance that is found in games such as Rock Band and Guitar Hero (Miller 2012, Moseley 2013). Drawing on scholarship theorizing musical instruments as media interfaces (Dolan 2012, Moseley 2016, Rehding 2019), theories of video game play as performance (Fernandez-Vara 2009, Huuhka 2020, Travinor 2017), and the burgeoning academic literature on speedrunning (Hope 2023, Schmalzer 2024, Scully-Blaker 2016), I argue that we should instead learn from the ways that speedrunners themselves discuss gameplay in musical terms. By viewing gameplay as itself musical, we can better understand not only the aesthetics of speedrunning performances but also expand ongoing debates over the ontology of music itself. | |