The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics presents a much-needed collection of essays that attempts to address all things captured under the ever-expanding audiovisual umbrella: from film, television and game music, to music video, installation art, sound design and iPod culture. Structured in six parts, this weighty and well-presented volume offers a review of current audiovisual concerns and practices, and also raises important questions, topics and problems for future work in the field to confront. The diverse range of expertise and professional experience represented by the pool of contributors affords the book a good sense of balance and enables it to avoid too much bias of subject and discipline.

Despite the deliberate categorisation of the book's content, there is considerable fluidity of themes and theories running throughout its pages. The theoretical pressure points explored in Part 2 are consistently related to more object-specific lines of enquiry in the rest of the book. For example, problematising the centrality of the diegetic–non/extra-diegetic binary in audiovisual scholarship, Kassabian (Part 2, Chapter 5) suggests that today's rapid technological developments are permanently altering the ways in which society engages with audiovisual material. This results in the erosion of our presumption (inherited primarily from our experiences of film music) that the chief function of music and sound in the audiovisual is narrative. Halfyard's essay (Part 3, Chapter 10) on the evolving sound of the superhero demonstrates that even in film music, traditional, linear narrative functions are receding. Here, she suggests that the earlier Batman and Superman films needed big symphonic scores to compensate for (or distract the audience from) the flaws of visual effects technology, and that, due to technological developments, subtler approaches to scoring were necessary in the later remakes. Other responses to the problems of diegetic distinctions focus on the immersive sensory experience of certain audiovisual forms, such as contemporary cinema (Chion, Chapter 19), installation art (Rogers, Chapter 29; Turim and Walsh, Chapter 30) and gaming (Kerins, Chapter 33).

Further supporting this move away from the prioritisation of representational narrative functions, Donnelly (Chapter 21) advocates for an appreciation of music in film (and presumably, by extension, an approach to composing) that is ‘something more akin to a genetic integration’ (p. 370). This notion of co-composing sound and image is exemplified by sound designer Randy Thom's report on sound design in contemporary animated films (Chapter 13), and resonates with Rogers' account of what she calls the ‘integrating birth’ of video art-music (Chapter 29). In a similar vein, Cook (Chapter 3) proposes the term ‘musicimage text’ to signify ‘a single compositional process encompassing both audio and video’ (pp. 59–60).Footnote ¹ These discussions, focusing on different aspects of the evolving audiovisual composition process, are exemplary of one of the strengths of this publication: the consistent linking between theory and practice, often by writers who are themselves practitioners. Rather than being left wondering if the academic theories bear any relation to the experiences of industry professionals like Thom, the reader is able to make direct comparisons between the two.

Interactivity is another theme discussed by several of the book's contributors. Collins' discussion on the implications of interactivity for sound in gaming deals with the subject most explicitly (Chapter 32). Highlighting the inadequacies of applying film theory to player-controlled game sound, she turns to theories from other disciplines (such as computer science, interactive design and cognitive psychology) in an effort to account for this interactivity. In his survey of the audiovisual aesthetics of iPod use (Chapter 36), Bull calls the iPod a ‘gating technology’: the filmic soundtracking of everyday life that constant iPod use engenders represses human interaction and promotes an aestheticised distancing from reality. Rather than the retreat of self from world that iPod culture cultivates, other audiovisual technologies encourage greater human (if virtual) interaction and expression. Discussing the current state of the music video, Inglis and Hearsum (Chapter 27) credit the invention of YouTube with its emancipation from the binding vetting and homogenising regulations of previously monopolising organisations such as MTV. YouTube, far from curtailing or creating a barrier to interactivity, provides opportunities for individual audiovisual expression, experimentation and remote collaboration. These discussions constructively outline and theorise some of the ways in which sound and music plays a part in different types of interactivity.

The password-protected companion website provides a potentially useful accompaniment to the book, containing various video clips of material discussed in three of the chapters, and an extensive list of hyperlinks for viewing the music videos discussed in Chapter 28 (although incorrectly listed as Chapter 22 on the website). However, this resource could have been better exploited; it seems that a 38-chapter book discussing multifarious aspects of the audiovisual would have been able to use audiovisual examples to support more than a mere three chapters. At the very least, a list of hyperlinks relating to the content of the other chapters could have been useful, making the website a more coherent companion to the book. On the other hand, I wonder why the companion website was deemed necessary at all when an overwhelming majority of the audiovisual material under discussion is so freely accessible online (indeed, I almost always had a YouTube window open when I was reading the book to look up the examples cited by the various authors).

This must not, however, detract from the strengths and accomplishments of this important publication, which will no doubt soon become regarded as a key text of audiovisual studies. Although the editors, in their introduction, confess that they don't expect it to provide any answers to the question, ‘What methods are appropriate to the study of audiovisuality in all its various forms?’ (p. 31), the book is all the better for it. Taking into account the various angles from which the wide-ranging subject of audiovisuality can be contemplated, at the core of this publication is a celebration of diversity and the importance of cross-disciplinary and professionally inclusive discourse, and for that I consider it a great success.