Sound and zoonotic spillover: listening to Animal Crossing: New Horizons through the Covid-19 pandemic

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Notes

1. After 6pm, players can request songs from Slider. When performing requested songs, Slider shifts into a “concert” mode of performance: the island is displaced by a black background and the ambient noise disappears.

2. For studies exploring the significance of the game’s valorisation of a market economy to game players living under capitalism in the 2020s, see Vossen (2020) and Agarwal (2023).

3. For further research on the Animal Crossing: New Horizons soundtrack, see Farrell (2022) and Keefer (2023).

4. The name of my own island, Henley-on-Pacifica, reflects colonial practices of displacing Indigenous placenames and introducing those of the “Old World” since Henley is named after the small market town, Henley-in-Arden, where I grew up in Warwickshire, England. Reflecting on this placename – a name chosen both out of childhood nostalgia for the garden, fields and river where I used to play and out of tradition – I am discomforted by how easily I would repeat such colonial strategies under the banner of “tradition” within the game, despite my knowledge of this history.

5. This is in opposition to what ethnomusicologist Kate Galloway identifies in her study of the soundtrack to the video game Stardew Valley, whose interconnected world – and, crucially, the consequences of navigating that world in particular ways – is sonically rendered for the player as they explore that world’s ecosystems and learn responsible agricultural practices (Galloway 2020). In Stardew Valley, anthropocentrism holds significant consequences for the player.

6. When the mutated bacteria or virus successfully jumps to a human host, a new disease may emerge against which human populations have no immunity or means of treatment. See Ellwanger and Chies (2021).

7. For research exploring how Animal Crossing: New Horizons gameplay served as therapy and as mindfulness practice for those affected emotionally and psychologically during the COVID-19 pandemic, see Lewis et al. (2021), Yee and Sng (2022), and Rose (2023).

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Notes on contributors

Jack Harrison

Jack Harrison is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warsaw in Poland. He is a member of an interdisciplinary research team whose current project explores figurations of interspecies harmony in cultural texts of the English-speaking sphere. His research intersects music studies, human–animal studies, and the environmental humanities. Jack’s particular research interests include music’s relationship to sociality and socio-historical categories of difference; more-than-human music and dance; and how power is implicated in concepts of “harmony”—particularly as such claims to harmony are mobilised within multispecies contexts.