Hartt's own Karen M. Cook (Associate Chair of Music History, Director of Graduate Studies) and her "Ludomusicology Thursday" colleagues were nominated for a 2026 Game Audio Network Guild (GANG) Award in the category of Best Game Audio Presentation, Podcast, or Broadcast. The Game Audio Network Guild Awards, founded in 2002, annually recognize the best international contributions to game sound design, composition, performance, acting and dialogue, other technological work, and commentary. The episode nominated, #296 from 2025, featured Oscar Award-winning sound designer Damian Kastbauer in an analysis of the 2005 Playstation 2 game Shadow of the Colossus and its 2018 remake. Winners will be announced on March 11, 2026, at the GDC Festival of Gaming in San Francisco.
For more information on this year's GANG awards nominations, visit this page.
The "Ludomusicology Thursday" stream team of Cook, Dr. Ryan Thompson (Michigan State University), Dr. Julianne Grasso (Florida State University), and Dr. Dana Plank (independent scholar/occasional Hartt adjunct) stream live every Thursday night on Twitch.tv, offering scholarly and fan-based perspectives on a wide array of video games and their audio.
For more information on our Twitch stream, please reach out to Dr. Cook at kacook@hartford.edu.