Fanny Rebillard, grantee of the FNRS, Traverses and Liège Game Lab (ULiège), IReMus (Sorbonne University) is one of the authors and editors of "Global Histories of Video Game Music Technology", published by Brepols this year. The aim of the book? To bring together scientists and video game designers to write about the relationship between music and technology in video games.
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he aim of the book was to move away from the generally highly globalized English-language viewpoints on the relationship between music and technology in video games, to favor more local visions, with the premise that the video game industry does not experience the same reception in every region of the world (Melanie Swalwell, 2021).
This work has taken the form both of analyses led by specialists in ludomusicology and of transcriptions of testimonies gathered by the book's authors, from three angles:
Created in 2016, Liège Game Lab is a collective dedicated to video game research, teaching and mediation at the University of Liège, and is attached to the research unit Traverses within the Faculty of Arts and Letters.
In co-editing the book, researcher Fanny Rebillard worked with the Liège Game Lab team, of which she herself is a member, in particular to identify ludomusicologists in French-speaking Belgium (via Fanny Barnabé). The work of other Lab members has also influenced her editorial and theoretical approach to video games: Björn-Olav Dozo on the history of videogames in Belgium, Boris Krywicki on the French videogame press, Pierre-Yves Hurel on amateur videogame development communities in Switzerland, and François-Xavier Surinx on the differences in the manipulation of genre labels between French- and Italian-speaking male and female players of the videogame Dante's Inferno.
"I often present my work as an exercise in translation, which isn't just linguistic. It's about translating music into words, describing it through a social, aesthetic, historical, technical and technological prism. In the digital world of video games, we also have to 'translate' complex data into accessible language, and this involves navigating through several information formats."
Fanny Rebillard
While the discipline has never really been in the spotlight, a number of initiatives are emerging as evidence of institutional interest. One example is the Video Games & Music exhibition at the Philharmonie de Paris to be held in 2026, on which researcher Fanny Rebillard is carrying out fieldwork for her thesis. Video game music also occasionally features in the programming of the OPRL (Orchestre Philharmonique de Liège), notably next year with the OPRL + Fantasy: Final Symphony concert.
ULiège will also be hosting the first international symposium on the subject in French-speaking countries, organized in collaboration with the University of Namur and the University of Tours in France, on September 15 and 16, 2026.
Find out more about the symposium
All three scientists are members of the GIGA Institute and are receiving this grant for their ambitious projects in paediatric neuroscience and oncology.
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