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A Preliminary Canon of Pinball Music (in a Post-Canonic World)
October 31, 2025 @ 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Free
Irna Priore Music and Culture Lecture Series
Dr. Neil Lerner J. Estes
Millner Professor of Music Chair of Film, Media, and Digital Studies
Davidson College
For roughly two decades, scholars have been researching, writing, discussing, and teaching about music in video games. A recent RILM search for the phrase “video game” yielded nearly 1200 hits, but a search for “pinball” brings a mere 12, only one of which is an essay focusing on music in pinball machines. Pinball music is then an almost entirely unstudied phenomenon, despite the foundational role pinball played as an industry for the emergence of the video game industry in the 1970s. Amidst this torrent of dissertations, journal articles, monographs, and essay collections about video game music, the still-young field has recently and usefully questioned the utility and drawbacks of the canon of video game music that has emerged.
A preliminary canon of pinball music risks repeating some of a canon’s elitist and exclusionary impacts; yet for such an unknown and unstudied topic, a canon may provide benefits by offering potentially illuminating exemplars. Karen Cook’s recent 2020 questioning of video game music canons poses five categories by which a ludomusicological canon might be configured: through a focus on composers, particular musical works, consoles/systems, eras, and technological capabilities/constraints. Using that framework, together with research grounded in archival materials from pinball companies, patent records, industry periodicals, as well as composer interviews and recordings of the games themselves, this presentation will propose a preliminary canon by providing a brief historical overview of sound and music in pinball machines, and then will focus on some of the most aesthetically and thematically innovative game soundtracks. In so doing, this talk will bring recognition and attention to the work of groundbreaking composers such as Suzanne Ciani, Brian Schmidt, Chris Granner, and Dave Zabriskie.
