Our lives in the 21st century can no longer be understood without audiovisual culture, which not only conditions our daily lives, but also the way we access and understand reality. This book, formed by the contributions of 11 researchers, analyzes different aspects in order to better understand the relationship between image, music and audiences. It attends to mainstream culture, studying the meaning of music in products such as The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter, Blade Runner, La mala educación and Treme. In short, the book explores the relationship between audience.
How do musicians play and talk to audiences? Why do audiences listen and what happens when they talk back? How do new (and old) technologies affect this interplay? This book presents a long overdue examination of the turbulent relationship between musicians and audiences. Focusing on a range of areas as diverse as Ireland, Greece, India, Malta, the US, and China, the contributors bring musicological, sociological, psychological, and anthropological approaches to the interaction between performers, fans, and the industry that mediates them. The four parts of the book each address a different stage of the relationship between musicians and audiences, showing its processual nature: from conceptualisation to performance, and through mediation to off-stage discourses. The musician/audience conceptual division is shown, throughout the book, to be as problematic as it is persistent.
"This timely volume engages with one of the most important shifts in recent film studies: the turn away from text-based analysis towards the viewer. Historically, this marks a return to early interest in the effect of film on the audience by psychoanalysts and psychologists, which was overtaken by concern with the 'effects' of film, linked to calls for censorship and moral panics rather than to understanding the mental and behavioral world of the spectator. Early cinema history has revealed the diversity of film-viewing habits, while traditional 'box office' studies, which treated the audience initially as a homogeneous market, have been replaced by the study of individual consumers and their motivations. Latterly, there has been a marked turn towards more sophisticated economic and sociological analysis of attendance data. And as the film experience fragments across multiple formats, the perceptual and cognitive experience of the individual viewer (who is also an auditor) has become increasingly accessible. With contributions from Gregory Waller, John Sedgwick and Martin Barker, this work spans the spectrum of contemporary audience studies, revealing work being done on local, non-theatrical and live digital transmission audiences, and on the relative attraction of large-scale, domestic and mobile platforms."--Publisher's website.
Music and the Broadcast Experience explores the complex ways in which music and broadcasting have developed together throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. It brings into dialogue researchers working in media and music studies; explores and develops crucial points of contact between studies of music in radio and music in television; and investigates the limits, persistence, and extensions of music broadcasting in the Internet era. The book presents a series of case studies that address key moments and concerns in music broadcasting, past and present, written by leading scholars in the field, who hail from both media and music studies. Unified by attentiveness both to musical sound and meaning and to broadcasting structures, practices, audiences, and discourses, the chapters in this collection address the following topics: the role of live orchestral concerts and opera in the early development of radio and their relation to ideologies of musical uplift; the relation between production culture, music, and television genre; the function of music in sponsored radio during the 1930s; the fortunes of musical celebrity and artistic ambition on television; questions of music format and political economy in the development of online radio; and the negotiation of space, community, and participation among audiences, online and offline, in the early twenty-first century. The collection's ultimate aim is to explore the usefulness and limitations of broadcasting as a concept for understanding music and its cultural role, both historically and today.
The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound provides a detailed and comprehensive overview of screen music and sound studies, addressing the ways in which music and sound interact with forms of narrative media such as television, videogames, and film. The inclusive framework of "screen music and sound" allows readers to explore the intersections and connections between various types of media and music and sound, reflecting the current state of scholarship and the future of the field. A diverse range of international scholars have contributed an impressive set of forty-six chapters that move from foundational knowledge to cutting edge topics that highlight new key areas. The companion is thematically organized into five cohesive areas of study: Issues in the Study of Screen Music and Sound—discusses the essential topics of the discipline Historical Approaches—examines periods of historical change or transition Production and Process—focuses on issues of collaboration, institutional politics, and the impact of technology and industrial practices Cultural and Aesthetic Perspectives—contextualizes an aesthetic approach within a wider framework of cultural knowledge Analyses and Methodologies—explores potential methodologies for interrogating screen music and sound Covering a wide range of topic areas drawn from musicology, sound studies, and media studies, The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound provides researchers and students with an effective overview of music’s role in narrative media, as well as new methodological and aesthetic insights.
Explains what happened to music—for both artists and fans—when music went online. Playing to the Crowd explores and explains how the rise of digital communication platforms has transformed artist-fan relationships into something closer to friendship or family. Through in-depth interviews with musicians such as Billy Bragg and Richie Hawtin, as well as members of the Cure, UB40, and Throwing Muses, Baym reveals how new media has facilitated these connections through the active, and often required, participation of the artists and their devoted, digital fan base. Before the rise of social sharing and user-generated content, fans were mostly seen as an undifferentiated and unidentifiable mass, often mediated through record labels and the press. However, in today’s networked era, musicians and fans have built more active relationships through social media, fan sites, and artist sites, giving fans a new sense of intimacy and offering artists unparalleled information about their audiences. However, this comes at a price. For audiences, meeting their heroes can kill the mystique. And for artists, maintaining active relationships with so many people can be both personally and financially draining, as well as extremely labor intensive. Drawing on her own rich history as an active and deeply connected music fan, Baym offers an entirely new approach to media culture, arguing that the work musicians put in to create and maintain these intimate relationships reflect the demands of the gig economy, one which requires resources and strategies that we must all come to recognize and appreciate.
Popular Music on Screen examines the relationship between popular music and the screen, from the origins of the Hollywood musical to contemporary developments in music television and video. Through detailed examination of films, television programs and popular music, together with analysis of the economic, technological and cultural determinants of their production and consumption, the book argues that popular music has been increasingly influenced by its visual economy. Though engaging with the debates that surround postmodernism, the book suggests that what most characterizes the relationship between popular music and the screen is a strong sense of continuity, expressed through institutional structures, representational strategies and the ideology of "entertainment."
Sounds, Screens, Speakers provides a broadly comprehensive survey of the emerging field of music and media. Music has been present at the advent of nearly every new media form since the turn of the 20th century. Whether we look at the start of sound recording, film, television or the Internet, music has been a crucial participant in the social changes brought about by these new tools for making and listening to music. This book examines such changes starting in the late 19th century to the present. From the introduction of the microphone all the way through to music in reality television, the purpose of each section is not simply to move chronologically towards the present, but to focus especially on the tangible social relationships created through specific forms of mediation. With readings at the end of most chapters, key questions to facilitate additional discovery and research, and direction to additional readings and resources on popular websites and news sources, this text serves as the ideal introduction to popular music and media.
The question of why we laugh (or don't laugh) has intrigued scholars since antiquity. This book contributes to that debate by exploring how we evaluate screen comedy. What kinds of criteria do we use to judge films and TV shows that are meant to be funny? And what might that have to do with our social and cultural backgrounds, or with wider cultural ideas about film, TV, comedy, quality and entertainment? The book examines these questions through a study of audience responses posted to online facilities such as Twitter, Facebook, review sites, blogs and message boards. Bore’s analysis of these responses considers a broad range of issues, including how audiences perceive the idea of "national" comedy; what they think of female comedians; how they evaluate romcoms, sitcoms and web comedy; what they think is acceptable to joke about; what comedy fans get excited about; how fans interact with star comedians; and what comedy viewers really despise. The book demonstrates some of the ways in which we can adapt theories of humour and comedy to examine the practices of contemporary screen audiences, while offering new insights into how they negotiate the opportunities and constrictions of different online facilities to share their views and experiences.
