Did the Byzantines have access to any Sappho that we do not? What interaction can we trace by them with the fragments that they did know? Chapter 23 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho examines an often neglected aspect of this ancient author’s reception.

Chapter 33 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho examines the reception of Sappho’s poetry in China and Japan, examining figures such as Lord Byron, Liang Qichao, Zhou Zuoren, Luo Luo, Xiaofei Tian, Ozeki Iwaji, Ueda Bin, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Shao Xunmei, Yoshiya Nobuko, and Takayama Chogyu.

If, as suggested by Donald T. Campbell,1 the result of our particular abilities in sensing and perceiving is that we are distanced from a fundamental reality,2 then what precisely is the nature and role of presence with respect to that reality? Furthermore, given the theme of this companion, what is the role of sound in relation to presence in virtual gameworlds? These are the two questions that underpin this chapter and to which I provide some answers. One question that might be asked, but which I do not attempt to answer, is: what is the role, if any, of music in presence in virtual gameworlds? The answer to this particular question I leave to the reader to attempt once the companion has been read. Other chapters in this companion deal more directly with music and its relationship to narrative and ludic processes or its abilities to provoke emotion in the game player and to establish meaning. These are areas, I suggest, that might be helpfully informed by answering questions about music and presence. Here, I content myself merely with providing some of the groundwork that will help the reader attempt the question. Before moving on to deal with my two questions, I must first clarify some terminology in order to furnish a framework from within which I can then debate them. I begin with a definition of sound.

Around 1450 Johannes Gutenberg began to change the literary culture of Europe by using movable type to print books. In 1466 Cicero’s De officiis became the first classical text to be so printed. In 1472 Catullus was printed for the first time by Vindelinus de Spira in Venice. Before the invention of printing, books could circulate only if they were manu scripti (‘copied by hand’). Catullus lived at a time when for the vast majority of literary works these copies were made on rolls of papyrus, to which and to other materials for writing he refers quite often.

For a work of classical literature to be read in modern times, at least one manuscript copy had to survive until printing brought about more widespread dissemination. This survival depended, so to speak, on the text’s being able to leap over several hurdles.

Whereas the famous sepulchral epigram for Virgil recorded in the Vita Suetonii Donatiana (VSD 36) has the poet refer to his poetic accomplishment as pascua, rura, duces (‘pastures, the countryside, leaders’), summing up in broad terms the thematic content of the three canonical works of Virgil (Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid), Catullus does not at any point in his extant poetic corpus offer any similar encapsulation of the themes of his works.

Terry Eagleton perfectly stated the most fundamental lesson about identity when he penned the line: ‘Nothing ever happens twice, precisely because it has happened once already.’1 In other words, a second iteration of an event is always different to a first occurrence, and changes in context, temporal or spatial, reconfigure the meanings of objects and events. When we posit sameness, even sameness to self, there’s always something we’re missing, some difference we’re failing to account for. Our failure to realize that the secondness of the later happening in Eagleton’s sequence makes it different from the first stands in nicely for all the differences we fail to consider when we experience people or things as possessing identities.

Chapter 3 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho considers Sappho’s position in, and contribution to, ancient discourses on sexuality, as well as how modern theorists of sexuality have categorised Sappho.

Video games are an international phenomenon. That statement is true both in the colloquial sense – games are a tremendously popular media form enjoyed by more than a billion players around the globe – but also in the sense that they are profoundly international. Games on my phone, computer or shelf right now were created in countries including: Canada (Assassin’s Creed), Germany (Risen), Japan (Final Fantasy XV), Poland (The Witcher 3), South Africa (Desktop Dungeons), South Korea (Magna Carta), the United Kingdom (The Room), the United States (Fallout) and Uruguay (Kingdom Rush) – amongst others. Despite this diversity, however, relatively few video games are overtly identified as products of any particular geographic region. Instead, developers often deliberately eliminate or minimize region-specific identifiers through a process called localization, in which aspects of a game are adapted to fit the perceived cultural norms and preferences of a target market.1 This process most obviously includes translation of all game text into different languages, which can be in itself a fraught process. Yet localization also involves a wide range of minor, or possibly major, alterations to game content.2 The economic allure of localization is immense, and well documented. As Rebecca Carlson and Jonathan Corliss have noted, the fundamental concept is that ‘products must appear as if they were manufactured domestically, suggesting that consumers only want goods that feel familiar and “local”’.3 Moreover, in some cases developers must localize games to accommodate legal restrictions, as in the case of Germany, where certain types of imagery and violence are restricted in games.

Within narrative-based video games the integration of storytelling, where experiences are necessarily directed, and of gameplay, where the player has a degree of autonomy, continues to be one of the most significant challenges that developers face. In order to mitigate this potential dichotomy a common approach is to rely upon cutscenes to progress the narrative. Within these passive episodes where interaction is not possible, or within other episodes of constrained outcome where the temporality of the episode is fixed, it is possible to score a game in exactly the same way as one might score a film or television episode. It could therefore be argued that the music in these sections of a video game is the least idiomatic of the medium. This chapter will instead focus on active gameplay episodes, and interactive music, where the unique challenges lie. When music accompanies active gameplay a number of conflicts, tensions and paradoxes arise. In this chapter these will be articulated and interrogated through three key questions:In the following discussion there are few certainties, and many more questions. The intention is to highlight the issues, to provoke discussion and to forewarn.

Since the late 2000s, the distinct field of ludomusicology has gained momentum. Reportedly, the neologism ludomusicology was coined by Guillaume Laroche and his fellow student Nicholas Tam, with the prefix ‘ludo’ referring to ludology, the study of games.1 In early 2008, Roger Moseley also used this term and introduced an additional dimension to the meaning:

This chapter focuses on the Japanese game development company Capcom (CAPsule COMputers), arguably ‘a well-established developer and publisher’,1 known for some of the most popular action arcade games of the 1980s and early 1990s, including Ghosts ’n Goblins (1985), Commando (1985), Bionic Commando (1987), Final Fight (1989), Ghouls ’n Ghosts (1988) and Street Fighter II (1991), developed with male players in mind. The music for these action games was provided by the mostly female Capcom Sound Team. Ayako Mori and Tamayo Kawamoto joined Capcom in 1984, and other core members of the team included Junko Tamiya, Manami Matsumae, Harumi Fujita, Yoko Shimomura and Tamayo Kawamoto, most of whom left the company in 1990 shortly after their seminal soundtrack work as a team on the arcade game Final Fight had been completed. Yoko Shimomura, who composed the memorable themes for Street Fighter II, left Capcom for the game developer Square in 1993 to pursue her dream of scoring orchestral music for role-playing game (RPG) titles, bringing to an end the domination of Capcom’s female Sound Team. This collective of female composers went on to influence a host of game composers through their pioneering work on early arcade hardware. Yet in versions of games ported from the arcade to home consoles and computers, their work was left uncredited. Popular recognition for their work has been relatively slow, due to a number of factors that include the use of pseudonyms and the company’s crediting policy, as well as the routine exscription of women in a male-dominated game industry.

The study of poetry is a study of technique – metaphor, simile, sound, syntax, and so on. Chapter 11 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho illuminates the technical features of Sappho’s poetry, to help us understand why she was so famous an example of lyric expression in the ancient world.

Even more than writing music for film, composing for video games is founded on the principle of interactive relationships. Of course, interactivity is particularly obvious when games use dynamic music systems to allow music to respond to the players. But it is also reflected more generally in the collaborative nature of game music production and the way that composers produce music to involve players as active participants, rather than simply as passive audience members. This chapter will outline the process of creating video game music from the perspective of the composer. The aim is not to provide a definitive model of game music production that applies for all possible situations. Instead, this chapter will characterize the processes and phases of production that a game composer will likely encounter while working on a project, and highlight some of the factors in play at each stage.

Chapter 2 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho investigates the island of Lesbos, home of Sappho, during the archaic period (sixth and fifth centuries BC), and how its geography – both of the island itself, and of its place within the wider Greek and Mediterranean worlds – is reflected in her poetry and in the poetry of her contemporary, the poet Alcaeus.

Chapter 17 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho gives an account of the papyri of Sappho discovered over the past century as historical artefacts in their own right – what do they tell us about who was reading Sappho, and where and when was this reading taking place? What do we learn from them about the transmission and eventual loss of her poetry?

Composer Ben Babbitt is one third of the game development team Cardboard Computer, along with Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy. Cardboard Computer is best known for the critically lauded adventure game Kentucky Route Zero, which was released in five instalments between 2013 and 2020. Here, Babbitt describes his background, philosophy and experiences writing music as part of a small team of game creators.

Games present us with virtual spaces and universes, and ask us to interact with them. These worlds are virtual, because they cannot be sensed directly like our everyday reality, but instead, we perceive them through the channels of audio, video and, sometimes, touch, that the game apparatus provides. Audio and music are part of how we come to understand the game environments that are shown to us – sound helps to construct the worlds and shapes how we engage with them.