The current period of rapid technological change is having a profound impact on the ways in which audiovisual media is conceived, created, and consumed. Not only have the definitions of musician and director become blurred thanks to the new methods of digital production, but also the distribution of consumer attention and engagement across numerous interfaces has resulted in a flow of influence between audiovisual genres and styles that has made discrete categorization an increasingly difficult task. There has been a critical consensus that this new, cross-genre form of audiovisuality is, at the level of both production and reception, a particularly musical one.

Theorists have been quick to respond to these changes. As the time between event and theoretical reaction has diminished, an unusual symbiosis has begun to develop, resulting in an invigorated and innovative form of scholarship. In response to the diversification of media, what began as film music research has now blossomed into the study of audiovisual culture, including music video, internet and YouTube sound, video games, video art, VJing, and expanded forms of new media. The result is an energizing fragmentation not only of subject matter, but also of methodological and theoretical approach. Such diversity is clear to see in two recent books from Oxford University Press that focus on contemporary forms of audiovisuality from the digital turn onwards: Carol Vernallis's Unruly Media and John Richardson's An Eye for Music. While these timely texts tread similar terrain, they are remarkably dissimilar and represent the ways in which recent scholarship has extended well beyond earlier theoretical forays into music for screen media.

At the heart of Unruly Media lies the belief that technological and socioeconomic developments have encouraged the convergence of audiovisual media forms. The notion of a convergent mediascape is not in itself a new idea (it has been amply discussed by Henry Jenkins among others).Footnote ¹ As is often the case, however, those working in media studies have ignored the role of music not only in the immediate, textual moment within a work, but also within the history of media development. Vernallis regards this omission as not just an oversight, but also as a fundamental misunderstanding of recent trends in film making and music video production. Her thesis is simple yet deeply significant: the new ‘audiovisual turn’ (5) has been determined to a great extent by older media forms based on music. According to Vernallis, the new audiovisuality began to emerge when several influential directors and editors of music video, who had enthusiastically embraced new technologies for audiovisual synthesis since the 1980s, made the transition to feature film production, taking with them a habit of affording music a primary seat in the visual flow. This resulted in ‘heightened sonic and visual features’ (4) common across various types of screen media.

Vernallis unfolds her thesis through three clearly demarcated areas. Faced with the labyrinthine diversity of today's digital world, Unruly Media leaves aside TV, video games, and other forms of interactive or live media in favour of a more manageable line of investigation focused on the evolution (and musicalization) of digital media from the early 1990s to 2013, when the book was completed. Operating as ‘three short books’ (21) ordered according to the rise to popularity of three important audiovisual genres, Unruly Media winds its way through post-classical cinema, YouTube, and finally new music video (although it is no longer possible to say with any certainty what this is). Vernallis explains her organizational choice as determined according to each genre's emergence, and yet her continual references to older forms of music video sometimes make this trajectory feel as though her argument is running in reverse. It is not until Chapter 10 that a comparative discussion between early and more recent forms of music video occurs, although this relationship is continually referenced in the earlier sections. If the argument here is that music video has changed the other forms, it would perhaps have made more sense to begin with the work on music video – the crux of her argument – before moving on to post-classical cinema, the most large-scale and intricate of her chosen genres.

Having said this, Unruly Media flows with an exhilarating speed and the post-classical cinema section (chapters 1–6) gets the reader hooked straight away. This new film form is audiovisually fascinating. As traditional narrative shapes have flexed, surface gesture has risen to the fore: this change manifests itself through heightened, eclectic musical scores fused tightly not only with sound-effects and dialogue, but also with a newly enhanced visual style that emphasizes colour, texture, speed, and mood over traditional forms of character development. Vernallis compares such heightened moments – whereby any element of the film can assume primacy at any juncture – to music video as it ‘resist[s] memory’: the images ‘blur in our memories, obscuring the film's form’ (39). Moreover, these heightened sequences, often formed during post-production, enable ‘musical structures [to] overlay or supersede narrative ones’ (22). This musical turn is not surprising as many post-classical directors were, or still are, music video directors (think of Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, and David Fincher).

For Vernallis, MTV's early onslaught and accelerated aesthetics are directly responsible for the ‘intensified audiovisual aesthetics’ (94) that drive the new cinematic style (although she does concede that some film examples have also influenced this style): she goes so far as to suggest that it was, in fact, only within the music video production aesthetic (with its audiovisual synthesis and editing, close-up shots, and free-ranging camera work) that such a style could arise. The result is a visual approach to music video and post-classical cinema that mirrors musical flow, song structure, harmony, and timbre to form a new stylistic configuration and a heightened form of audiovisuality. Her theory is demonstrated through convincing analyses of Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge!, two films awash with moments that resemble both music video and ‘YouTubelicious moments’ (146). The brief concluding chapter in this section, however, sits a little awkwardly within the coherently developing argument, as the comparison of post-classical cinema with Bollywood seems to diversify into a whole new area of research, which there isn't room to fully explore.

But this is soon forgotten, as the next section starts with a bang and moves us quickly back onto track with the most innovative of the book's three parts: YouTube, ‘the new digital cinema's shadowy twin’ (134). YouTube streams 1.2 billion videos a day and is now viewed more than television; yet it continues to evade description or definition, in part due to its overwhelming diversity, but also due to the difficulties of researching such an unwieldy and un-curated platform where clips continually converse with and push at each other. Vernallis's work represents one of the first audiovisual forays into this area and is thus extremely significant. Again, her thesis is simple yet effective: music video, post-classical film, and commercials have all started to either resemble, or to refer to, the DIY aesthetic of YouTube. As she writes in the book's Introduction: ‘Today's genres converse with one another, but YouTube often feels like the driver’ (15). Despite this, however, the increasing difficulty of identifying discrete genres in the technological age remains the driving force of the section, as Vernallis points out that YouTube's most viewed content is professional music videos; in addition, many other clips resemble music promos (although here music typically comes after the image) and film trailers ‘often become full-fledged music videos toward the end’ (145).

Some of her most insightful observations are tantalizingly brief, however, and signal a clear and productive direction for subsequent work. For instance, she compares the prevalence of everyday activities such as typing to the overwhelming success of online clips which foreground repetition; elsewhere, she suggests that after experiencing the dazzling speed of YouTube clips, we may feel recharged on returning to our lives, which may not, by comparison, feel quite so frantic; and, along similar lines, that in this era of remixing and multitasking, we tend to seek a more fleeting form of audiovisuality that can satiate the affective overload of contemporary life.

Vernallis is clearly most at home in her writing on music video, the subject of her influential first book.Footnote ² Here, her previous thinking takes on an interesting slant. Unlike post-classical film, which has experienced a fundamental shift in all areas, the underlying form of the music video – the pop song – has remained relatively unchanged structurally, leading to a rupture in which sound has remained consistent, while image has undergone significant transformation. Sticking primarily to the pop industry (the reasoning behind this would have been useful to know, especially if you're not the biggest fan of Beyoncé, Unruly Media's principal protagonist), the discussion is predicated on her insightful, Bergsonian understanding of ‘musicality’ as a process that can engender many temporal zones at once: ‘To be aware of everything happening in the moment, the heterogeneous slide from top to bottom, is also a condition of music and music video’ (6). This heterogeneous slide is explored through numerous sumptuous analyses, including close readings of Beyoncé's ‘Video Phone’, Lady Gaga's ‘Telephone’ (which Vernallis asserts ‘feels like a feature with all of its boring bits cut out’ (219)), and music video's role in the 2008 US election campaign.

Most productive, however, is the use of videos by Lady Gaga and new wave popsters A Flock of Seagulls (Chapter 10: ‘Music Video's Second Aesthetic’) to attempt a history, or redefinition, of music video's technologies, culture, and audiovisual aesthetics over the last thirty years. While a definition of the music video as a promo for a pop song used to be relatively straightforward, today such a clear understanding is almost impossible. The form is at once collapsing and expanding: maybe it now ‘resides elsewhere – in the film trailer, the mashup, the wedding video’, she suggests (181). As in other places in the book, Vernallis makes it clear that she does not seek hard and fast definitions or answers, but rather is enthralled by the process of investigation itself and hopes simply to make a ‘first foray’ (182) towards an understanding of new music video not as a coherent object of study, but rather as a transitory, yet deeply significant cultural phenomenon that is interconnected with a wide variety of other forms of screen media.

The accelerated development of the media forms discussed by Vernallis has encouraged a correspondingly rapid form of historicization – even mythologization. Unruly Media, the first book to capture these technological changes and their audiovisual importance, is not a history, but a real-time commentary on a continually shifting mediascape. Vernallis's ability to respond to events, almost as they are happening, is the best thing about this book. Although the scholarship is rigorous, the writing is colloquial, witty, and engaging. From the opening sentence (‘I love the media swirl’) to the highly personal interjections that lace the text (at one stage she imagines Oliver Stone high on mushrooms watching music video!), it is clear that Vernallis is delighted by her subject matter and her enthusiasm is contagious. But better still is that her breathless style and sectional layout, which, while making for a pleasurable read, also enacts a form of performative scholarship by operating as a written version of the fleeting and heightened audiovisual surface style of post-classical cinema. Full of flair, unexpected twists and non-linear asides, Unruly Media resembles the unique flow of new audiovisual media, inviting the reader to assemble the parts herself and become part of this post-classical scholarship.

Perhaps due to the nature of the writing, there are some unfortunate errors and typos in the book (even the first sentence includes an errant full stop). Most strange are a number of exact repetitions of the text; these range from isolated sentences to entire paragraphs (this is particularly apparent between the Introduction and Chapter 1). But these issues are quickly forgotten. If all the fast-paced writing gets confusing, useful summaries round off most of the main segments and bring everything to clarity (these summaries also make this book a useful teaching tool). It is in these concluding, yet forward-looking, paragraphs that the real importance of this book, not only as a snapshot of the current audiovisual climate, but also as a clear signal for new directions in audiovisual scholarship, can most plainly be seen.

In many ways, Richardson's book covers ground very similar to that of Unruly Media: he too considers the implications of new digital technologies for the audiovisual landscape, refers to contemporary media from the turn of the millennium onwards, and focuses on the influence of popular music on these new forms. But the resemblance ends there. While Vernallis jumps straight in, Richardson treads carefully. An Eye for Music is an articulate, dense, theoretically driven text saturated with references to musicology, art, film, and cultural criticism that opens with a meticulous justification of his chosen theoretical direction. The book then provides a detailed explanation of surrealism and neo-surrealism before taking the reader through seven case-study led chapters, beginning with an identification of the neo-surrealist tendencies in recent films and metamusicals (Chapters 3 and 4), before expanding away from pure screen media to explore the convergence of film and theatre (Chapter 5), the virtual worlds of Gorillaz (Chapter 6), and acoustic-digital performance (Chapter 7) before ending, as every work on surrealism surely must, with some thoughts on Lady Gaga.

Although at first such an exhaustive theoretical positioning seems to delay discussion of anything either surreal or audiovisual, it is useful to be able to return to Richardson's initial thoughts as the book progresses, in order to clarify some of his later points. Like Vernallis, Richardson has a strong and convincing central thesis. Citing Vernallis's earlier work, he agrees that music video aesthetics have exerted a strong influence on contemporary audiovisual culture and, as the book unfolds, his argument reverts back to music video several times (mainly during the codas to the main chapters). Yet this book is not so much concerned with the dialogue between music video and other audiovisual forms, but more with what such influence has led to; and for Richardson, a coherent understanding of our current media climate is possible only by enlarging the sphere of reference to include earlier and more avant-garde practices, namely historical surrealism (a form that has itself exerted a great deal of influence on the music video). However, An Eye for Music does not simply trace a line of influence from historical surrealism to what Richardson calls the neosurreal, ‘a cluster of loosely related practices rather than a single determining “code”’ (4) whose aesthetics overlap with those of the neo-avant-garde, postmodernism, and the post-avant-garde. Rather, after an exhaustive discussion of surrealism, he points out that the neo-surreal offers only a passing resemblance to its historical counterpart and its theoretical documents: ‘Surrealism for me is at most a productive analogy’ (4).

Focusing on oneiric film and pop music artists and groups that articulate a refreshed relationship to previous musical traditions, the book slowly reveals that the similarities between the two movements are in fact greater than at first suggested. It is true that the eclectic nature of both movements repels attempts to locate a coherent lineage running from one to the other, but a legacy is certainly clear to see in the ways in which new media can subvert expectation through remediation to encourage an audience to look, listen, and think anew; and (perhaps most original in terms of audiovisual scholarship), the shared surrealist and neo-surrealist preoccupation with found objects. Here, Richardson's argument is compelling: while the early surrealists, and indeed many other twentieth-century artists (think of Warhol, for instance) delighted in the reuse and re-imagination of found objects, so too does the recent neo-surreal favour the remediation of musical and/or audiovisual objects. The recycling of material in the digital age, Richardson informs us, is often based on audiovisual moments from formative periods in a performer's musical education or ‘stylistic self-invention’ (290). KT Tunstall and Gorillaz are used to demonstrate the ways in which earlier styles are re-appropriated in order to provide a form of commentary on contemporary culture, re-investing earlier practices with contemporized significance when understood within the new economic, technological, and cultural milieu. This in turn offers a refreshed understanding of that treacherous concept ‘intermediality’, which arises, according to Richardson's interesting appropriation of the term, when musical objects are transformed in such a way that they move ‘toward the domain of neosurrealist aesthetics’ (8).

Richardson's insistence that surrealism provides at most a loose framework with which to think about the eclectic ‘neo-surrealist’ turn in film and (expanded) music performance is sometimes strange, however. While technological and economic factors are clearly integral to a coherent understanding of the new digital climate, the lineage is clear to see in many of his examples and the historical positioning of recent directors and artists often demonstrates a clear affinity with the theoretical slants of the earlier group. Despite this, however, the wider implications of An Eye for Music are exciting, particularly those ideas that lurk between the lines of Richardson's writing. We are encouraged constantly to rethink our relationship to media in light of new modes of engagement and participatory culture in particular; and the ability to sound our everyday environments with carefully chosen soundtracks on mobile media suggests a ubiquitous form of audiovisuality that necessitates a re-engagement with earlier forms of media (as Vernallis says, watching older films from the other side of the new audiovisual aesthetic can be like consuming a completely new product).

Richardson's examples are more wide-ranging than those chosen by Vernallis. While Unruly Media sticks to pop music in the strictest sense of the word, Richardson successfully picks examples from a broad swath of mainstream culture, ranging between alternative rock, electronic and psychedelic prog, live mediated performance, oneiric feature films, and internet mashups. His eclectic choice operates, he explains, ‘like a surrealist collage, a cadaver exquis [exquisite corpse] drawing, or the elements of a montage sequence by Eisenstein or Buñuel’ (4). The collage kicks off with independent films that lurk at the margins of the mainstream and which, he points out, often display a penchant for neo-surrealist aesthetics. Close readings of Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind – a film that can be considered akin to a music video that is ‘stretched, elaborated, unpacked or unfolded’ (58) – and self-reflexive metamusicals Yes (Sally Potter) and The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-Liang) demonstrate the slippage between surrealism and its re-imagined version, with characters whose ability to slide ‘in and out of interior experience’ (139) can be fuelled by an obsession with early technologies (the VHS in the case of Be Kind) and the remediation of film heritage. Whereas Vernallis locates the audiovisual micro-rhythms and fragmented style of the new feature film style within a music video lineage, Richardson finds a kindred aesthetic in surrealism. Films from the earlier school often refuted the escapist tendencies of pure fantasy and instead drew attention to the materiality of their work through shocking camera angles (amply demonstrated in Entr'acte, for instance) and nonsensical dramatic flow (Un Chien Andalou is the most well-known example of this). Richardson explains further: ‘In this mode of address, an allegorical function can easily replace the established narrative forms and identificatory mechanisms of classic cinematic naturalism’ (35).

Chapter 5 is the book's most successful. Here, Richardson returns to his old stomping ground (his first book was on Philip Glass) to offer a compelling reading of Glass's audio reworking of La Belle et la Bête (1994) that enjoys a fluid and open writing tone.Footnote ³ Silencing the original soundtrack, Glass's new score superimposed – and only loosely synchronized – live operatic voices against the filmed images to produce a mixture of cinema and theatre that indulged occasional audiovisual slippage to expose ‘the disruptive force of ventriloquist's dummies that have minds of their own’ (187). His reading of the work includes some welcome score-based analysis, something that many film music scholars shy away from for fear of alienating their colleagues in film departments. Here, the combination between score analysis and reception works well and provides a useful segue into a discussion of Dark Side of Oz (the combination of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon played against a silenced Wizard of Oz to produce an unusually synchronous soundtrack): both examples, concludes Richardson, show how ‘the technological apparatus through which performances are articulated becomes the primary mechanism of artistic transformations’ (200). This sentiment lies at the heart of his investigation into the audiovisual combination of the real and the virtual in live performances by Gorillaz (Chapter 6) and the technologically mediated acoustic performances by KT Tunstall (Chapter 7).

Like Unruly Media, An Eye for Music includes a few small issues. As with many film music texts, the music, or audiovisuality, can be left to one side for pages at a time leaving the reader feeling a little impatient for the thesis to be picked up again. And, like Vernallis's text, there are also a number of typos, some of them rather entertaining – reference is made to Terry Gilliam's lesser-known film Fear and Loathing in Los Angeles, for instance, and we learn about a film entitled Wallace and Grummet. But again, these things don't really matter. This is a book full of questions, and the rejection of ‘clean-cut or definitive interpretations’ (31) is indicative of the ways in which answers themselves have become unstable in the shifting terrain of digital culture. Innovative forms of research methodology are developing in response to these significant shifts.

Unruly Media and An Eye for Music signal an exciting beginning for the study of new media forms from an audiovisual perspective. These pioneering books are very different from one another, and yet, when taken together, they provide a productive counterpoint that opens up a hermeneutic gap that new audiovisual scholarship can begin to fill. Embodying different approaches and methodologies, Vernallis and Richardson's work suggests that scholarship in this area will likely be as eclectic, fast-moving, and exciting as its subject matter.