Music, Moving Image, and the "Missing Majority": How Vernacular Media Competence Can Help Music Studies Move into the Digital Era

Abstract

Abstract Given that over half the music heard in the urban West accompanies the moving image, it’s strange that most institutions of music education and research still treat it as an extra. Part of the problem is that knowledge relevant to music’s production and structural denotation is separated from that relating to its perception, uses and meanings. Despite the obvious skill with which the population at large can musically distinguish in a split second between, say, detective chords, horse-riding rhythms, and Japanese or Parisian instrumentation, such musical competence is often trivialized or ignored in conventional music teaching and research. Drawing on experience from running Music and the Moving Image courses since 1993, this article suggests ways in which the vernacular competence of the "nonmuso majority" can not only help improve communication between musicians/composers and other professionals involved in audiovisual production but also contribute to a reform of musicology by introducing a perception-based vocabulary for aspects of musical expression (timbre, meter, acoustic staging, vocal persona etc.) that are often marginalized in conventional music theory.