Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2013
Summary
Critical analysis of music has been dominated by a focus on sonic matter as a unitary object of analysis. In other words, music is predominantly appreciated as a singular media experience, separated from other media forms, which it may often interact with. To some extent, this approach decontextualises and idealises musical matter. Whilst it has been common to contextualise music culturally and historically – as interacting with the social and as emerging out of cultural traditions – it has not been so frequently analysed in its materiality, in terms of the ways it is transmitted and received, and how it often intersects with other media modes. A core reason for this general analytic trend is that, in order to understand music properly and take it seriously, critics have tended to demarcate it from other media. Understandable though such an approach is, it has led to a relative lack of scrutiny of music's incorporation into broader media forms. I don't want to overstate such neglect: there is plenty of work now being produced on the role of music and other sounds within films, as well as the intersection of audio-vision within music videos. Nevertheless, audio interactions with other media forms have only been partially explored. And, as digital technologies feed into what has generally been referred to as a converging mediascape, the need to address the myriad ways in which sonic matter interacts with other media becomes increasingly pressing.
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- Music, Sound and MultimediaFrom the Live to the Virtual, pp. 1 - 14Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007