Field Of Sound Studies Research Articles

Television Sound: Why the Silence?

The field of sound studies has shown enormous growth over the past fifteen years. Excellent work has recently appeared on many aspects of sound in media, with particularly rapid development in the fields of radio, film, popular music, and the historical development of sound recording and listening cultures. Film sound, in particular, enjoys a depth of analysis that has been building up since the 1980s. Video game sound is beginning to receive the attention it deserves. Yet the one area still strangely silent comprises the dominant medium of our times since the 1940s: broadcast television. Why does television sound remain neglected in academic study, despite a long history of professional and industrial development? I will argue here that this omission is due to two primary aspects of television: its roots in radio and subsequent basis in an aesthetic of what I will call streaming seriality, and its fundamental differences from film as a subject of scholarship.Television's radio roots mandate an emphasis on sound over the visual, as many have noted (see Ellis 1982, and Altman 1986); create an historical legacy of enormous textual variation derived from a dominantly aural originating context (as opposed to film's dominantly visual context);1 and engender a 'live' streaming transmission aesthetic, fundamentally imbricated in television's characteristic seriality. Broadcast television can be, at times, streamed completely live (viewed in the moment an event is transmitted), recorded and transmitted (shot on film or video but then subjected to 'live' streaming), or (most often) a mixture of both, and of course all forms can now be recorded post-stream on tape, disc, or as a digital file and re-presented in a number of ways. Yet broadcast television, even when recorded, retains at all times markers of its basic streaming structure, which in turn has a determining effect on the medium's variety and complexity of textual strategies and techniques.2This leads to a complicated analytical situation, and ironically it could be that scholars' efforts to understand sound in the much more 'closed', formalised, and visual situation of film have actually worked against an understanding of the special circumstances and opportunities of televisual sound overall. The term 'film' typically denotes a dominant textual form (the narrative feature film), as well as a consistent medium (the materiality of film itself), and a central, though changing, technology of production, with modes of distribution and exhibition that can vary widely. The same might be said of the music video, when considered on its own and divorced from its televisual context, as it often is. The term 'television', on the other hand, denotes a unified (until recently) mode of distribution and exhibition, but specifically not a unified textual form, material medium, nor technology of production. Thus, conflating 'film' and 'television' as separate but equivalent media forms may have helped to produce the scholarly silence, a particularly unfortunate one since sound's heightened importance in television makes its analysis all the more necessary if we are to arrive at a better understanding of the medium and its central expressive modes: subject to present-time interruptions; permeated with markers of the streamed transmission context; never static but constantly flowing past and renewing itself in the present; derived from fundamentally aural origins.Attempts to examine TV sound to date have focused either on fictional texts treated as filmic (despite difficulties which are usually simply glossed over) or on the short, self-contained form of the music video, framed by the conventions of popular music (see Donnelly 2005; and Beebe and Middleton 2007). Other theorists, like Chion, pounce arbitrarily upon one limited type of televisual text - in his case, sport - and leave the rest implicit (1994: 61). 'Television' has no ur-text, no one dominant form like the narrative feature film, and it is much more strongly tied than film to the representation and transmission of real-life events, 'live' as they occur. …

Filling in Holes : Television Music as a Recuperation of Popular Music on Television

When it comes to the scholarly study of popular music, television, in its various global, historical, and industrial manifestations, has a bad reputation. For example, in a 2002 Popular Music article, Simon Frith, after documenting rock music's debt to British television for spreading and popularizing it, determines that 'TV, for all its influence on rock performance, was never really part of its culture.' (Frith 2002, p. 288) That academic critics and journalists believe this to be true is indicated by the scant amount of engaging and potentially productive work about the combination of the two media and their industries.1 This critical lacuna may just speak to the newness of the discipline of popular music studies, although I fear that it emanates from the effect of the ideology of authenticity that, like it or not, continues to inform scholarship in the field.The study of popular music on television now faces challenges from another front, as what media historian Michele Hilmes describes as the 'always emerging, never emerged' field of sound studies may have finally surfaced (Hilmes 2005). Sound studies conferences, interest groups within larger scholarly organizations, and anthologies proliferate. This is a welcome development. Of concern is the possible submergence of the specificity and materiality of popular music under the more abstract notion of 'sound', and the potential development of a scholarly hierarchy in which film sound will once again trump television sound. In this scenario, it is possible if not likely that the study of popular music and television runs the risk of further marginalization. More optimistically, the institutionalization of sound studies could open the door for greater legitimization of popular music as an object of study within and through fields that study visual culture in all of its incarnations, including television, film, and new media. It could also, as will be discussed toward the conclusion, solidify popular music's status as media.The nature of audience engagement with both television and music is changing, as both are at the same time more portable and bigger than ever. Television viewing is no longer an 'event' that requires participation and attention at a particular time in a particular place. Digital technology makes television programming mobile and frees it more than ever from synchronous time. As television hardware and transmission technology advances, so does its sound quality. Devices such as the iPod miniaturize video programming as well as music, and store them both on the same piece of hardware that governs their use and access with the same metaphors (e.g. playlists). Concurrently, television is more an event than ever, and sound is very much invited to the party. High-definition television technology spawns high-definition sound technology, and both meet at the 50 LCD or plasma screen connected to a state of the art surroundsound system, all in the comfort of one's home. New media, which I interpret to mean digital or digitally-enhanced technologies, therefore threaten to render the boundary between popular music and television meaningless. The time is right to approach the study of music and television with fresh ideas and without ideological baggage. Changing the terms of analysis is a move in the right direction.For example, much qualitative research about the intersection of popular music and television focuses upon music video or music television, or uses them as reference points. Often this leads to work that is the scholarly equivalent of comparing apples to oranges by de-historicizing both popular music and television in the service of making them conform to a current model of their relationship.2 Music video usually refers to what are essentially commercials for new radio-friendly releases by bands signed to major labels. Music television refers to the cable television networks that (used to) air these commercials, but the two terms are often used interchangeably. …