Ryan Thompson
Bio
Dr. Ryan Thompson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Information, where he serves as the resident musicologist for the game development program, teaching and researching about a variety of issues related to sonic activity in video games. He received his Ph.D in musicology from the University of Minnesota in 2017. He has published on how gameplay is communicated to players via audio, on understanding Final Fantasy VI as opera, and currently researches how games are both scored and re-scored in order to channel a specific nostalgia for past generations of musical material and hardware as re-releases, remasters, and remakes continue to dominate discussion of popular culture. He hosts a weekly Twitch stream alongside Drs. Dana Plank, Julianne Grasso, and Karen Cook that serves as a locus for the greater community of scholars pursuing research and teaching in game audio at twitch.tv/bardicknowledge. He has published and presented with the Journal of Sound and Music in Games, the Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music, at GDC, GameSoundCon, and the North American Conference on Video Game Music, which he hosted at Michigan State University in 2024. He is passionate about public-facing scholarship that builds community relationships between game scholars and game industry professionals.
