20^th–21^st June 2024, Rosen College, University of Central Florida

“What’s the reason for your visit to the US?” the border agent at Orlando airport asked. “I’m here for a conference,” I replied. “Ah,” he said, “What’s the conference about?” Bracing myself for incredulity, I answered, “It’s about music and sound in theme parks.” Far from the scepticism I had anticipated, responding with “Oh, wow!” the officer seemed genuinely interested. “Well, you chose the right place to have your conference.”

He was right. Orlando’s landscape is dominated by theme parks and their associated industries. Arcs of rollercoaster track interrupt the horizon, boulevards are lined with hotels, and beautifully-manicured flora characterize the city.

Small wonder that one of the few university programmes dedicated to theme park management should be found here, at our host institution of Rosen College of Hospitality Management, University of Central Florida. The College (with a wing sponsored by Walt Disney World), is just opposite the site of the forthcoming Universal Epic theme park. We were right in the heart of ‘theme park country’.  The conference consisted of two days of talks, complemented by a panel of video papers made available in the days leading up to the conference. The programme is archived online, and a selection of papers can be accessed through the University of Central Florida repository.

It’s our understanding that this was the first conference dedicated specifically to theme park music and sound. That’s not to say that the subject has gone unnoticed by scholarship (especially through work by Charles Carson, Laudan Nooshin and Elizabeth Randall Upton, among others). And the music has certainly not gone unappreciated by visitors who have long treasured music for rides, parades, shows and the environment at parks. As areas of study complementary to theme park sound have developed (especially transmediality and video game sound), there has been increasing scholarly interest.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the conference was the combination of different perspectives and approaches. Scholarship grounded in music theory, such as Amy Hatch’s analysis of ♭2 in Disney attractions related to death, purgatory and warnings, sat alongside techniques from ethnomusicology (most obviously in Jessica Getman’s theme park soundwalking and Kate Galloway’s investigation of animal vocalities), and research that emphasized archival work and musical recreation: Len Testa, a well-known figure in the Disney discourse presented material from the Buddy Baker archives, re-creating long lost pieces of music.

Narratological questions were most explicitly addressed in Kincaid Rabb’s discussion of diegesis through the lens of recent Star Wars attractions. The thread of narrative was also an important component of both Matt Lawson’s investigation of musical absence and magic-breaking silence in theme parks, and Dan White’s paper on the live musical performances in Harry Potter theme park areas. These papers developed terminology from film/game/theme park studies to deal with complex diegesis in these physical, virtual spaces. Models from video game scholarship were evident in discussions of interactive settings, like Clair Nguyen’s investigation of interactive wands and sound in the Wizarding World park area.

Perhaps discussions of theme parks might immediately bring to mind roller coasters, and high-thrill rides, but the conference also drew attention to other aspects of theme park sound: Anna Marinela Lopez explored the staged Fantasmic show staged on an artificial river at Disneyland, and Alex Bádue dissected the stage musicals hosted at Disney parks, especially their use of songs in ecosystem marketing.

The conference balanced familiar and unfamiliar materials. James Bohn asked us to listen again to the (all too) familiar it’s a small world, while a richly provocative and performative talk (almost a lecture-recital) was given by Scott A. Lukas. Using a Eurorack synthesizer, Lukas challenged us to imagine alternative ways of hearing the relationship between sound and culture in theme parks, with radical and bold sonic illustration.

Of course, the Disney parks were ever-present as a touchtone for discussion, but lesser-known parks were also given significant attention, too: Reba Wissner presented her ongoing research into the Freedomland amusement park, which hosted a great variety of musicians and performers, and even had dedicated songs by Jule Styne. Cross-cultural discussion was a strong thread of the conference with papers about De Efteling (Maria Schreurs) and Tokyo DisneySea (Thomas L. Wilson and Thomas B. Yee) considering the (re)mediation and exchange of theme park sound across (and through) different cultural contexts. Andy Fry and Andrew Moenning both explored how music is used to construct cultural understandings in theme park music, the former by looking at jazz, the latter at narratives of American history.

Transmedial adaptations between parks and other moving-image media attracted significant discussion: Lauren Crosby described how the adaptation of the famous ‘Cantina Band’ music from Star Wars has been reworked in parks, and James Ellis (on Jungle Cruise) and Elizabeth Hunt (on the Haunted Mansion) focused on the alternative direction of adaptation – from theme parks to other media.

We were fortunate to have insight from industry professionals, too. Olivia Zorab, composer for music at Paulton’s Park in the UK discussed the creative and practical challenges of writing for theme parks. Her talk specifically focused on the music for a dinosaur area recently opened at the park and included consideration of how to invoke stylistic ghosts of well-known dinosaur-themed media, while adjusting the music for the family audience.

In his wide-ranging keynote made possible by the Royal Musical Association and the University of Central Florida Themed Experience programs, former Disney Imagineer Ron Fish gave us insight into the creative and practical challenges of theme park music and sound. He covered the whole lifecycle of a project, and drew from his varied career across all aspects of sound and music for themed experiences, in order to explain what made this kind of sound and music distinctive.

Some of the widest-ranging talks of the conference were given by Gregory Camp, who presented his hypothesis for a ‘theme-park’ style of composition (bolstered by testimony from the professionals present) and Carissa Baker who drew on a vast dataset to reveal global patterns and trends of musical use in theme parks, focusing particularly on pre-existing, or newly-composed, music.

The organizers were delighted with the rich variety and critical rigour of the papers. We hope that continued research in this area maintains the interdisciplinarity, collegiality and open-mindedness we saw at this event. There’s certainly so much more to explore in this area. It turns out, it may not be such a small world, after all.

Tim Summers is Senior Lecturer in Music at Royal Holloway University of London.