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In television scholarship, sound and image have been attended to in different ways, but image has historically dominated. The chapters gathered here attend to both: they weigh the impact and significance of specific choices of sound and image, explore their interactions, and assess their roles in establishing meaning and style. The contributors address a wide range of technical and stylistic elements relating to the television image. They consider production design choices, the spatial organisation of the television frame and how camera movements position and reposition parts of the visible world. They explore mise-en-scène, landscapes and backgrounds, settings and scenery, and costumes and props. They attend to details of actors’ performances, as well as lighting design and patterns of colour and scale. As regards sound, each chapter distinguishes different components on a soundtrack, delineating diegetic from non-diegetic sound, and evaluating the roles of elements such as music, dialogue, voice-over, bodily sounds, performed and non-performed sounds. Attending to sound design, contributors address motifs, repetition and rhythm in both music and non-musical sound. Consideration is also given to the significance of quietness, the absence of sounds, and silence. Programmes studied comprise The Twilight Zone, Inspector Morse, Children of the Stones, Dancing on the Edge, Road, Twin Peaks: The Return, Bodyguard, The Walking Dead and Mad Men. Sound and image are evaluated across these examples from a wide range of television forms, formats and genres, which includes series, serial and one-off dramas, children’s programmes, science fiction, thrillers and detective shows.
Sound effects: Hearing the early modern stage, 1576–1625 uncovers the soundworld of early modern drama and turns up the volume. Offering new vocabulary, it offers innovative ways of listening to the distinct and subtle kinds of sound which echo from play to play, from sounds which invoke memories to sounds which are divided from sight, to sounds conjured only in the mind. Over the fifty years of theatrical history discussed here (1576–1625), the use of sound on the early modern stage was radically experimental, from the brash noise of explosions and trumpets to the increasingly allusive and unreliable sonic markers of later Stuart drama. Ranging from the particular sound effects (trumpets, gunshots, fireworks, thunder, bells) to particular settings (nocturnal scenes and noises in the night) to particular playwrights (from Jonson’s violent use of sound to Shakespeare’s narrated and imagined sonic worlds), this book insists that sound effects are not homogeneous bangs and crashes. Together, these chapters argue that sound is not only spatial (understood in terms of where it is heard within the playhouse) and material (constructed by instruments or voices) but also, crucially, bodily. Far from being an intangible phenomenon which cannot be traced beyond the moment of its performance, this book shows sound to be a system, produced by bodies and received by the open ear, the memory and the emotions. Sound is given meaning by the bodies which make it and the bodies which receive it; transformed when it is heard, sound is both effect and affective.
Experiments It comes as something of a surprise to discover that the first successful attempts to marry sound with pictures are alleged to have occurred as early as 1889 when Thomas Edison’s young laboratory assistant W. K. L. Dickson is supposed to have presented Edison with a projected image on a screen, roughly synchronised with sound. In actual fact no evidence of Dickson’s claim exists; if Dickson
◂◂ Back to the future II 1935, 1937, 1940 The model of sound–image relations proposed by Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov in The Sound Film: A Statement from the USSR (1928) was formulated as a reaction to the introduction of synchronous sound – a post-hoc theorisation offered in response to the
1 Sounding: Henry David Thoreau We know what Thoreau meant by Walden, or at least, we know what he meant for it to do. We know because he told us, on the title page of his book, where by way of an epigraph he quoted himself: I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.1 So that’s clear then. In fact, Thoreau could be hardly be clearer. What could be clearer after all, as he amplifies later in the chapter called ‘Sounds’, than a cockerel crowing clear
Like the sounds of ground noise and optical crackle discussed in the previous chapter, electronic sounds have also been figured as noise. In part, electronica has been framed in this way because of its status as a strange sound. As the cultural theorist Jacques Attali states in his seminal work on noise, ‘In music, the instrument often predates the expression it authorises, which explains why a new
flow of the television mystery crime genre is disrupted and the viewer is launched into the terrifying moment of a nuclear bomb blast. Through a fusion of agonising soundtrack and turbulent visuals, a range of physiological and emotional affects are encouraged in the viewer. This potentiality for the sound–image relationship to foster sensorial affect can be attributed to Lynch's meticulous attention to the materiality of sound, not in terms of its creation, as this is a rare instance of his use of an existing classical piece in the programme – Krzysztof Penderecki
‘No digas todo eso sin música, Diego.’ (‘Don’t say all that without music, Diego’) Nancy (Mirtha Ibarra) to Diego (Jorge PerugorrÃa) in Fresa y chocolate (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1993) Like all forms of sound, music is – in John Connell
Throughout the long nineteenth-century the sounds of liberty resonated across the Anglophone world. Focusing on radicals and reformers committed to the struggle for a better future, this book explores the role of music in the transmission of political culture over time and distance. The book examines iconic songs; the sound of music as radicals and reformers were marching, electioneering, celebrating, commemorating as well as striking, rioting and rebelling. Following the footsteps of relentlessly travelling activists, it brings to light the importance of music-making in the lived experience of politics. The book argues that music and music-making are highly effective lens for investigating the inter-colonial and transnational history of radicalism and reform between 1790 and 1914. It offers glimpses of indigenous agency, appropriation, adaptation and resistance by those who used the musical culture of the white colonisers. Hymn-singing was an intrinsic part of life in Victorian Britain and her colonies and those hymns are often associated with conservatism, if not reaction. The book highlights how music encouraged, unified, divided, consoled, reminded, inspired and, at times, oppressed, providing an opportunity to hear history as it happened. The examples presented show that music was dialogic – mediating the relationship between leader and led; revealing the ways that song moved in and out of daily exchange, the way it encouraged, unified, attacked, divided, consoled, and constructed. The study provides a wealth of evidence to suggest that the edifice of 'Australian exceptionalism', as it applies to radicals and reformers, is crumbling.
Ground noise and optical crackle: the sound of film There are a number of important cinesonic elements that escape the traditional tripartite division of the film soundtrack into speech, music and effects: one is noise, another silence and the third the sound of the technology of film itself. This last