Associate Professor Dan Golding

Biography

I am Associate Professor and Deputy Chair of the Department of Media and Communications at Swinburne University of Technology, as well as an award-winning composer, broadcaster, and writer.

As a researcher and teacher, I am interested in the intersection of technology and media, including history, cinema, videogames, and digital music. Here at Swinburne I largely teach final year Cinema and Screen units, and previously spent many years running our first year Introduction to Media Studies unit. I am the author of Star Wars After Lucas (2019), a monograph published by the University of Minnesota Press, which traces the development of the Star Wars franchise under Disney.

I have also won awards for both my journalism and my composing, and I created the soundtrack for the BAFTA, DICE, and GDCA winning Untitled Goose Game (2019). The soundtrack album, the first ever from a videogame to be nominated for an ARIA award, is out on Decca Records and on vinyl through iam8bit. I created Swinburne's next_gen now audio brand which you'll hear in all video advertising, and in 2022, I composed the theme music for the ABC's flagship podcast, ABC News Daily. In 2022, my music for Untitled Goose Game was performed live by Orchestra Victoria in collaboration with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in one of the world’s only live-to-game videogame soundtrack performances. Other composing includes the soundtracks for Push Me Pull You (2016) and the Frog Detective series, for which my score for The Haunted Island (2018) won the APRA-AMCOS Australian Game Developer award for Best Music.

I have a special interest in film music, and I am the host of ABC Classic's weekly 'Screen Sounds' program, which is broadcast nationally on FM and digital radio. I have also hosted a number of events for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, including hosting a 2022 Sidney Myer Music Bowl concert to a capacity crowd of 10,000 people. I also co-host a podcast about film music called Art of the Score. I make popular video essays about film and music - my YouTube channel has achieved more than one million views, and in 2018, I co-presented the 15-part miniseries What Is Music for ABC iView and Triple J with Linda Marigliano. I am a member of the Australian Screen Composers Guild as well as APRA AMCOS.

For over a decade I have written and published in publications include ABC Arts, The Guardian, The Saturday Paper, Meanjin, The Walkley Magazine, Buzzfeed, Kill Your Darlings, and Metro Magazine (where I'm currently on the editorial board). My journalism for Crikey saw me awarded the 'Best Games Journalist' award at the 11th Annual Australian IT Journalism 'Lizzie' awards. I also wrote, presented, and edited the audio documentary series 'A Short History of Video Games' which was broadcast on ABC Radio National in 2015. I was the Director of the Freeplay Independent Games Festival, Australia's longest-running independent games festival, from 2014-2017, and a member of the festival's governing board from 2017-2022.

In 2016 I co-authored my first book, Game Changers: From Minecraft to Misogyny, the Fight for the Future of Videogames for Affirm Press with Leena van Deventer. I have published academic work on special effects (digital faces and deepfakes), VR, videogames, and blockbuster cinema in journals like Convergence, TEXT, Senses of Cinema, and Continuum.

You can find further information and links to my broadcasting, video essays, podcasts, soundtracks, and books, and profiles of me in the media (including by Limelight Magazine and The Saturday Paper) at dangolding.com