Composing Audiovisually

What does the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink have in common with Norman McLaren’s Synchromy? Or with audiovisual sculpture? Or contemporary music video? Composing Audiovisually interrogates how the relationship between the audiovisual media in these works, and our interaction with them, might allow us to develop mechanisms for talking about and understanding our experience of audiovisual media across a broad range of modes. Presenting close readings of audiovisual artefacts, conversations with artists, consideration of contemporary pedagogy and a detailed conceptual and theoretical framework that considers the nature of contemporary audiovisual experience, this book attempts to address gaps in our discourse on audiovisual modes, and offer possible starting points for future, genuinely transdisciplinary thinking in the field.

Electronic Visual Music is a comprehensive guide to the composition and performance of visual music, and an essential text for those wanting to explore the history, current practice, performance strategies, compositional methodologies and practical techniques for conceiving and creating electronic visual music. Beginning with historical perspectives to inspire the reader to work creatively and develop their own individual style, visual music theory is then discussed in an accessible form, providing a series of strategies for implementing ideas. Including interviews with current practitioners, Electronic Visual Music provides insight into contemporary working methods and gives a snapshot of the state of the art in this ever-evolving creative discipline. This book is a valuable resource for artists and practitioners, as well as students, educators and researchers working in disciplines such as music composition, music production, video arts, animation and related media arts, who are interested in informing their own work and learning new strategies and techniques for exploration and creative expression of electronic visual music.

This handbook provides powerful ways to understand changes in the current media landscape. Media forms and genres are proliferating as never before, from movies, computer games and iPods to video games and wireless phones. This essay collection by recognized scholars, practitioners and non-academic writers opens discussion in exciting new directions.

Audiovisual and Digital Ethnography is a state-of-the-art introduction to this dynamic and growing subject. The authors explain its fundamental aspects in a clear and systematic way. The chapters cover topics including: learning to see and listen in the field and the role of sensory attention the mediation of the senses doing anthropological fieldwork with video observational filmmaking ethnographic drawing multimodal anthropology digital ethnography interactive documentary the ethics and management of audiovisual and digital data. The result is a much-needed, up-to-date and concise guide to both the fundamental skills required for audiovisual and digital ethnographic production and the essential theoretical knowledge relating to this. It will be particularly useful for students and scholars in the fields of Anthropology, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Social Sciences, Media, Design, Art Practice and Sound Studies.

The pioneering film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein is known for the unequalled impact his films have had on the development of cinema. Less is known about his remarkable and extensive writings, which present a continent of ideas about film. Robert Robertson presents a lucid and engaging introduction to a key area of Eisenstein's thought: his ideas about the audiovisual in cinema, which are more pertinent today than ever before. With the advent of digital technology, music and sound now act as independent variables combined with the visual medium to produce a truly audiovisual result. Eisenstein explored in his writings this complex, exciting subject with more depth and originality than any other practitioner, and this is an accessible and original exploration of his ideas. Winner of the Kraszna Krausz Foundations' And/Or Award for Best Moving Image Book of 2009, "Eisenstein on the Audiovisual" is essential reading for students and practitioners of the audiovisual in cinema and related audiovisual forms, including theatre, opera, dance and multimedia.

The Synergy of Music and Image in Audiovisual Culture: Half-Heard Sounds and Peripheral Visions asks what it means to understand music as part of an audiovisual whole, rather than separate components of music and film. Bringing together revised and updated essays on music in a variety of media – including film, television, and video games – this book explores the importance of partially perceived and registered auditory and visual elements and cultural context in creating unique audiovisual experiences. Critiquing traditional models of the film score, The Synergy of Music and Image in Audiovisual Culture enables readers across music, film, and cultural studies to approach and think about audiovisual culture in new ways.

The edited volume Audiovisual Media and Identity Issues in Southeastern Europe is an attempt to meet the challenges of text-based scholarship, to break medial one-dimensionality dictated by textuality and to shift the focus to the aural and visual dimensions of identity in a part of Europe heavily marked by the dynamics of political, cultural and social change, particularly during the last decades. The objective of this endeavour is to examine identity in Southeastern Europe by means of its communication media, specifically that of the photographic image and the sound recording. How are identities communicated? How are they performed and made physically perceptible? Brought to a point, the primary issue is one of how people perceive themselves and their environment on the basis of communication media, seen through a lens of different disciplines (social anthropology, ethnomusicology, media studies, sociology and history) and methodologies from the point of view of scholars from Southeastern Europe and their Western European colleagues. The book pursues a distinct comparative and historical perspective, examining the media representations from socialist and pre-socialist periods in relation to the role media play in the postsocialist discourse. Another focus is laid on local media representations and their impact on local self-images. This distinct historical and local approach allows new insights into how identities are constructed, performed and negotiated in the light of media, resulting in different forms of interpreting, re-appropriating and re-evaluting the past and traditions. This opens up questions on the role of media in relation to cultural policies and their potential to preserve or to transform local cultural heritage. The book is also an important contribution to the field of postsocialist studies in anthropology. It sheds a distinct cultural view on postsocialist transformation processes. Through a wide range of examples and first-hand results of basic field research from Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Albania and Slovenia this volume provides an opportunity for a comparative reconsideration of similar phenomena across national borders. It may serve also as a methodological reference work for scholars who are interested in the different ways of how to develop and practice “media reflexivity” in their own field research.

In the present time electronic media are the most powerful factory that influence music culture. They change social functions of music, they affect musical behavior, music taste and aesthetic ideals of the society. The power of film, television and other media is based on the fact that the media trigger complex audiovisual perceptions or they determine the ways of how music evokes extra-musical imaginations. Audiovisual Media and Music Culture struggles to systematize and classify the basic categories of audiovisual communication, it explains music in media as a category of space and time, reveals the laws of the music culture development, the advantages and disadvantages of civilization trends and it also separates value constants from transition episodes.