An exciting new strand in The Television Series, the ‘Moments in Television’ collections celebrate the power and artistry of television, whilst interrogating key critical concepts in television scholarship. Each ‘Moments’ book is organised around a provocative binary theme. Sound / image reassesses the synergy between televisual images, and sounds and music, as a key creative interaction warranting closer attention. Through close scrutiny of visual and sonic elements, the book’s chosen programmes are persuasively illuminated in new ways. The book explores an eclectic range of TV fictions, dramatic and comedic. Contributors from diverse perspectives come together to expand and enrich the kind of close analysis most commonly found in television aesthetics. Sustained, detailed programme analyses are sensitively framed within historical, technological, institutional, cultural, creative and art-historical contexts.

A visionary new approach to the Americas during the age of colonization, made by engaging with the aural aspects of supposedly “silent” images Colonial depictions of the North and South American landscape and its indigenous inhabitants fundamentally transformed the European imagination—but how did those images reach Europe, and how did they make their impact? In Sound, Image, Silence, noted art historian Michael Gaudio provides a groundbreaking examination of the colonial Americas by exploring the special role that aural imagination played in visible representations of the New World. Considering a diverse body of images that cover four hundred years of Atlantic history, Sound, Image, Silence addresses an important need within art history: to give hearing its due as a sense that can inform our understanding of images. Gaudio locates the noise of the pagan dance, the discord of battle, the din of revivalist religion, and the sublime sounds of nature in the Americas, such as lightning, thunder, and the waterfall. He invites readers to listen to visual media that seem deceptively couched in silence, offering bold new ideas on how art historians can engage with sound in inherently “mute” media. Sound, Image, Silence includes readings of Brazilian landscapes by the Dutch painter Frans Post, a London portrait of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison’s early Kinetoscope film Sioux Ghost Dance, and the work of Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School of American landscape painting. It masterfully fuses a diversity of work across vast social, cultural, and spatial distances, giving us both a new way of understanding sound in art and a powerful new vision of the New World.

This original and radical book challenges dominant parameters of literacy by comparing the oral tradition of the Tamils in South India with the Western culture of printed text. In India, traditional texts are always performed; as a result, form and meaning can change depending on the occasion. This is the opposite of Western communication through publication which is a static representation of knowledge. The author examines the reasons for the differences between the Indian and Western textual traditions, and describes how text lives through the performing arts of words, sound and imagery. She argues that interactive multimedia is the first Western communication form to represent oral traditions effectively.

Exploring how music is used to portray the past in a variety of media, this book probes the relationship between history and fantasy in the imagination of the musical past. The volume brings together essays from multidisciplinary perspectives, addressing the use of music to convey a sense of the past in a wide range of multimedia contexts, including television, documentaries, opera, musical theatre, contemporary and historical film, videogames, and virtual reality. With a focus on early music and medievalism, the contributors theorise the role of music and sound in constructing ideas of the past. In three interrelated sections, the chapters problematise notions of historical authenticity on the stage and screen; theorise the future of musical histories in immersive and virtual media; and explore sound’s role in more fantastical appropriations of history in television and videogames. Together, they pose provocative questions regarding our perceptions of ‘early’ music and the sensory experience of distant history. Offering new ways to understand the past at the crossroads of musical and visual culture, this collection is relevant to researchers across music, media, and historical and cultural studies.

This book explores the key role of sound and image in the perception of nations throughout the history of the Americas. It subverts the strict chronology previously upheld by historians regarding the formation of national identities by looking at the development of countries in varied cultural, economic, and political situations.

The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media surveys the contemporary landscape of audiovisual media. Contributors to the volume look not only to changes brought by digital innovations, but to the complex social and technological past that informs, and is transformed by, new media. This collection is conceived as a series of dialogues and inquiries by leading scholars from both image- and sound-based disciplines. Chapters explore the history and the future of moving-image media across a range of formats including blockbuster films, video games, music videos, social media, digital visualization technologies, experimental film, documentaries, video art, pornography, immersive theater, and electronic music. Sound, music, and noise emerge within these studies as integral forces within shifting networks of representation. The essays in this collection span a range of disciplinary approaches (film studies, musicology, philosophy, cultural studies, the digital humanities) and subjects of study (Iranian documentaries, the Twilight franchise, military combat footage, and Lady Gaga videos). Thematic sections and direct exchanges among authors facilitate further engagement with the debates invoked by the text.

The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Western Art examines, under one umbrella, different kinds of analogies, mutual influences, integrations and collaborations of audio and visual in different art forms. The book represents state-of-the-art case studies with key figures of modern thinking constituting a foundation for discussion. It thus emphasizes avant-garde and experimental tendencies, while analyzing them in historical, theoretical, and critical frameworks. The book is organized around three core thematic sections. The first, Sights and Sounds, concentrates on the interaction between the experience of seeing and the experience of hearing. Examples of painting, classic and digital animation, video art, choreography, and music performance are examined in this section. Sound, Space, and Matter explores experimental forms emanating from the expansion of the concepts of music and space to include environmental sounds, vibrating frequencies, silence, language, human habitats, the human body, and more. The reader will find here an analysis of different manifestations of this aesthetic shift in sound art, fine art, contemporary dance, multimedia theatre, and cinema. The last section, Performance, Performativity, and Text, shows how new light shed by modernism and the avant-garde on the performative aspect of music have led it - together with sound, voice, and text - to become active in new ways in postmodern and contemporary art creation. In addition to examples of real-time performing arts such as music theatre, experimental theatre, and dance, it includes case studies that demonstrate performativity in fine art, visual poetry, short film, and cinema. Sitting at the cutting edge of the field of music and visual arts, the book offers a unique, at times controversial view of this rapidly evolving area of study. Artists, curators, students and scholars will find here a panoramic view of cutting-edge discourse in the field, by an international roster of scholars and practitioners.