Like role-playing video games (RPGs) and tabletop RPGs (TTRPGs), Live-Action Role-Play (LARP) involves players taking on a persona in a fantasy game world with mechanics that influence players’ choices. Unlike RPGs and TTRPGs, LARP players fully embody their characters, dressing up in costumes, swinging swords, shooting arrows, slinging spell packets, and, most relevant here, playing music. Music at LARPs sounds like group singing of sea shanties, solitary sonic meditations, bardic competitions, busking, and background tavern music. Further, players voice their characters’ dialogue and mechanical game calls. Ludomusicology has focused primarily on sound and music in digital games. Yet the field still needs to include live, in-person forms of play in conversations of sound and music in games. Building on theories of embodiment and play presented by ludomusicologists, this article argues for LARP’s inclusion into the study of music and sound in games. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews in two US fantasy LARPs, this article listens to LARPers’ musicking and voicing. While sociologists, anthropologists, and game studies scholars have explored LARP for its social organization, mechanics, and aesthetics, sound and music have largely been omitted from these conversations. By addressing non-professional musicians’ contributions to the sonic qualities of play, this article contributes to scholarship on amateur music-making and leisure. This article aims to broaden theories of the body in gaming and diversify ludomusicology by including an underrepresented gaming community.
Lambe et al. (Thu,) studied this question.