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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.
diverse perspectives, engendering a striking range of foci and emphases, and exhibiting different interpretations of and responses to the categories ‘sound’ and ‘image’. Yet as a whole, the collection expresses a commitment to evaluative criticism that places individual programmes at the centre, and that attends sensitively and appreciatively to their particular achievements. Attending to sound and image In television, sound came first, in that the many inventors and developers of television thought of it as
whole ( 2008 : 153). John Ellis's Visible fictions ( 1992 ) and Rick Altman's ‘Television/sound’ ( 1986 ) take such a comparative approach and both agree that our engagement with television is intermittent in comparison to the filmic gaze. Sound, for example, merely functions to call the viewer's attention back to the medium's poor image quality (through narrative cues for instance). 4 The comparison with film therefore casts TV sound as purely functional rather than a source of aesthetic or affective value. Such
. 3 For more on the disregard for television sound, see Hilmes ( 2008 ). 4 Of the various accounts written about the troubled notion of an artistic medium of television, Newcomb's ( 2014 ) is the most robust. 5 The title of this section derives from a
, when our football teams met up in the league, we went up there to Derby and then they came down here. (Interview 4) There is undoubtedly a trend towards increased individualised media lifestyles. Cheaper media hardware and software allows an increasingly personalised media environment. For young people, a television, sound system, or games console may be a central part of their ‘bedroom culture’ which helps them create a space of uninterrupted privacy within the family home (Bovill and Livingstone 2001; Livingstone 2007). Yet we would also agree with those who
be built into a single housing – a stereo mike. An M + S mike can be pointed at, for instance, the principal speaker and the tracks can be adjusted simply, or even separated, to vary the stereo image. It is also easy to hear, or, if necessary, create, a mono version of the soundtrack. M + S mikes went through a time of popularity with television Sound Recordists, but seem to have fallen out of favour. Now you are as likely to find mono mikes in use, leaving the stereo sound image to be built up at the dub. (However, 5.1-capable mikes like the Holophone might well
. This demolition of the informative capacities of sound coupled with ZAZ's visual-led gags and audiovisual disjunct style constituted, in the early 1980s, a type of comedy incompatible with – and almost a direct challenge to – the very substance of television: sound and audiovisual mirroring. Conclusions: the comedy is in the details Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons (Fox, 1989–present), the longest-running prime-time scripted series in history (Cavna 2018 ), whose brand of comedy owes much to ZAZ's, reportedly said
idea of television's sound/image relationships, however, that the conclusion of the episode contests. While Don's face dominates the image at the episode's end, our view of his face, and our sense of what it expresses, is not shaped by camera and actor alone. We see Don's face in a way that is coloured by both the silence that hangs between him and Megan and by the music that washes over the image. Heard in relation to this picture of Don and Megan's marriage, the buoyant song by Friend and Lover cuts two ways. It is an ironic counterpoint to the pair's alienation
born in the hopes of bringing the people into the governance process, but it has led to a kind of audience democracy. Voters have become consumers of television sound-bite campaigns and new-media messaging, not authors of the laws they give to themselves. It was supposed to take the role of money out of politics but it has, instead, created a vast appetite for advertising. Getting on the ballot costs millions of dollars to pay for professional signature gatherers because the threshold of signatures required is so high (5 percent of the number of voters who turned out
, their occupations, and the roles that they are qualified or willing to undertake. While they include a bank manager, finance director, retired storekeeper, archaeologist, retired GP, factory operative, and lone ‘housewife’, over half of the volunteers have a background in engineering. They have variously been in electronics, television sound, power plants, the print industry, railway signalling, or worked