The Society for Music Theory's Film and Multimedia Interest Group (FMIG) recently announced that Karen M. Cook, associate professor and chair of music history at The Hartt School, is one of two winners of a 2024 SMT FMIG Publication Award.
Cook's article, "8-Bit Affordances: Jun Chikuma's Soundtrack to Faxanadu," appeared in Volume 29, Issue 3 of Music Theory Online, a journal of the Society for Music Theory.
According to the journal's editor, Cook's article "casts new light onto a composer and game soundtrack overshadowed—in scholarship as in the marketplace—by Nintendo tentpole franchises such as Super Mario and Zelda. Cook reveals how Chikuma used the memory limitations of the early Nintendo console to creative advantage, pioneering solutions involving sounds layers and audio loops to create a soundtrack of almost unprecedented variety and complexity."