Let me be frank: I am an outsider! Before I opened this book, my knowledge of Buffy was limited to watching a couple of episodes and I wasn't aware of the existing body of academic work under the title Buffy Studies. Reading my way through Music, Sound and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer I have been properly introduced to key characters, the overall narrative structures, some of the many plots and, last but by no means least, I have been given substantial insight into the series’ use of music. With its intensive use of diegetic and non-diegetic music, inter-musical and inter-textual references, various popular music genres and due to its committed fan base and their activities, Buffy is indeed, as this anthology shows, a rich and wonderful analytical object for the study of the use of music in contemporary television series.

The book consists of three parts: I. Constructing sound: music, noise, and silence; II. Owning music: bands, fans and pop culture; and III. Making music: Buffy, the musical (six, four and three articles respectively) – accumulating a range of analytical scope on the subject matter which is related to broader research issues like modern mediations of race and gender, the inescapable use of irony and parody in popular culture, and the relation between socio-cultural context and musical genre in the production of meaning(s). These audiovisual analyses represent both media and musicological perspectives, and the strong focus on the show as an audiovisual text results in interesting and nuanced analysis of how music is integrated into the dramatic plot, how it is used to nuance the fictional characters and their mental state, and how music and genres function as recognisable cultural or social codes.

In its consideration on silence the volume presents its most intriguing contribution to the understanding of the relationship between television and sound. For Georg Bloustein (Chapter 6) silence is when the ‘noise of distraction stops’, and as he differentiates between four modes of silence (mini-silence, wordless silence, empty silence and reflexive silence) he insists that silence is to be understood as negative presence. Another reading of two of the episodes Bloustein describes can be found in Chapter 5. Locating television's defining feature in its reliance on the human voice, Katy Stevens explores how Buffy challenges the ‘vococentristic’ sonic code of television by silencing the spoken word. In the first case the voices are ‘stolen’ and silenced as part of the dramatic action, at the same time elevating the non-diegetic musical scoring and making room for Buffy recovering her scream as a scream of mastery, emphasising the female heroine. In the second case Stevens shows how the relation between voice, body and diegetic sound is reworked in order to construct an intensified sensation of presence. In both cases the effect is to strengthen the affective potential of the soundscape and Stevens convincingly embraces this effect in her writing.

This isn't always the case, which leads me to my two main objections to the volume as such. First, although the contributions are generally imbued with detailed and passionate knowledge of Buffy, the book does not really succeed in conveying an understanding of the intriguing audiovisual universe of the show. Instead there is a tendency to neglect the fact that Buffy is more than a construct, a total of structures and intellectualised intertextual references – an analytical object – but (also) a sensual and embodied audiovisual experience. As Keith Negus states in his Foreword, the contributors to this collection ‘cross the lines, occasionally play with the codes that have obliged scholars to separate themselves from the fans’ (p. xviii), but sadly this relation between analyst and object of analysis is not reflected upon. Instead, the more non-representational knowledge is kept in the shadow. This is underlined by – but cannot be reduced to – the lack of illustrations and audiovisual examples (a practice which despite copyright concerns and financial limitations should be prohibited!) and expresses the need for further refining of a non-musicological language to embed the sensory and perceptional aspects of the audiovisual experience in writing.

Second, the overall framing of the book puzzles me. In the Introduction the referential encoding–decoding paradigm is presented at the outset for studying audiovisual television music. However, simultaneously an emphasis is made on the multiple meanings that music may produce, as well as on in-depth analysis of ‘the audience reaction to music, sound and its absence’ (p. 11). Nevertheless, the practices of the lively fan communities mentioned are not really taken into account. An interesting step in this direction is taken by Rob Dowe's analysis of fan-produced music videos (Chapter 8), investigating the transformation of meaning in the remix of the Buffy text in amateur music videos, but still the object of analysis is the audiovisual text rather than the remix as social or aesthetic practice. Disappointingly, the chapter ends by concluding that ‘what this highlights, if nothing else, is the importance of audio in both the program and the fan artwork in the production and transforming of meaning’ (p. 148) – and I wonder if anyone would disagree? This reflects an overall urge to stress ‘how important music is in our understanding of and engagement with television series’ (p. 12), showing that music is important rather than how. As indicated by an increased number of journals and books published on various aspects of the relationship between music and television, the difficulties of crossing the boundaries between the study of music and the moving image are – luckily – not as many as they might have been 10 years ago at the time of the inaugural idea for this volume.

On the other hand, taken in its own right, each contribution illuminates interesting research topics and analytical variations, and within the narrower scope of the use of music in television series this volume is a ‘must read’.