This edited volume of ten chapters is just one part of a new series on ‘Music and the Moving Image’ (series editor Kevin Donnelly), whose main focus is ‘screen music’ and intended primary audience (according to the back cover) most naturally that of media studies. The text reviewed here is divided into four sections, covering Fandom and Music Videos, Video-Game Music, Performance and Presentation, and Production and Consumption, and contains a good proportion of work that may be of interest to readers of this journal. For instance, there are chapters on sound art and electroacoustic music, the former justified as being most often a multimedia practice, and the latter the limiting case of the audio modality (via the acousmatic mode), and thus a useful asymptote for analysis.
(By the way, this review does not presume that readers have no interest in film music – in Nicholas Cook’s sense of audio subservient to visuals – though perhaps many here might care a little more about the attention given to the audio modality than the film music cliché of music and sounds acting as non-diegetic emotional prop and synchretic foley art respectively. Besides, the book often pays homage to the usual references, such as Michel Chion.)
Much of the contents of the volume is intriguing, from Dana Milstein’s case study of anime fan videos, which will have you checking animemusicvideos.org, through Jem Kelly’s dissection of the modern multimedia pop concert and the Gorillaz in particular, to the final section encompassing website sound, young people’s attitudes to music, and the ubiquitous iPod study. Scholarship on video game music, as provided in section two by Rob Munday’s survey and Zach Whalen’s semi-semiotic case study of Silent Hill, is a welcome territory, and most definitely an important growth area of academic engagement (nay-sayers here should look up recent statistics on games sales versus the film industry, for example http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/28/games.filmnews).
As it stands, Section Three’s dissection of Performance and Presentation is perhaps of most general relevance to this journal. Some interesting coverage of sound art is provided by Jamie Sexton himself, with a certain bias to the Sonic Boom catalogue curated by David Toop. Randolph Jordan’s ‘Case Study: Film Sound, Acoustic Ecology and Performance in Electroacoustic Music’ is as much as anything a selection of attitudes to acousmatic music and diffusion, one hopes to the benefit of many media theorists!
The main omission in this book is a lack of coverage of live audiovisual practice in VJing or live cinema. The title might lead the reader to expect some, but the index will disappoint, and a close reading will prove the absence, despite almost getting there on pages 107–8 in a couple of oblique references to ‘audiovisual technologies’ and ‘contemporary technologies’. It may be that a commissioned chapter was lost in the editing process; it happens. There are other sources for this information, but the breadth of the book (which is admittedly wide to begin with) would have been further aided by this topic. It would also have been interesting to have seen the opposite asymptote to the acousmatic, visuals alone, covering for instance silent visual music such as Fischinger’s Radio Dynamics.
A further list of quibbles could be presented, but, as per any edited volume, there is a natural variation in writing style and the odd infelicity must creep in to provide character! Barthes, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari are not to everyone’s taste, but fortunately do not appear in every chapter; Rob Munday makes most use of them, also mixing in a little (inadequately referenced) neuroscience too, in his personal theoretical analysis of video game music. The ‘postmodern field’ is still trod upon on p. 114 by Jem Kelly; it’s probably quite a difficult field to ever escape using the meta-stile. At various locations throughout the book, there is a tendency towards armchair philosophy and uncorroborated claims without further data or citation as evidence. Whilst the theoretical contribution of work throughout the volume is not particularly ground-breaking, and often just has the status of review, nevertheless some interesting points are presented, including a salient discussion of Nicholas Cook’s theory of multimedia in Jamie Sexton’s introduction. In case it wasn’t already apparent, practical information for artists is not really part of the book’s mandate.
Best to review a copy yourself in a library or bookshop, or via Amazon’s Look Inside feature before purchase. There is something (happily?) quirky about this volume that makes it hard to review in a uniform sense, though I hesitate to use the word ‘gallimaufry’ as per page 114. Depending on your needs, this book may provide some useful input to projects concerning multimedia. Yet whilst The Residents adorn the cover, you won’t find them inside; Resident Evil lurks there instead, and a host of other unexpected, sometimes awkward and sometimes nourishing information.
