An Eye for Music

Popular Music and the Audiovisual Surreal

John Richardson author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc

Published:26th Jan '12

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An Eye for Music cover

The music we hear is always inhabited by voices of previous performances. Because listening is now so often accompanied by moving images, this process is more complex than ever. Music videos, television and film music, interactive video games, and social media are now part of the contemporary listening experience. In An Eye for Music, John Richardson navigates key areas of current thought - from music theory to film theory to cultural theory - to explore what it means that the experience of music is now cinematic, spatial, and visual as much as it is auditory. Richardson maps out the terrain of recent audiovisual production over a wide array of styles and practices, and sketches out a set of common structures that inform how we experience sound and vision. Whether examining Philip Glass or The Gorillaz, Richard Linklater's Waking Life or Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, Richardson's arguments are both fascinating and provocative.

This book unveils the 'audiovisual surreal,' a key emerging tendency in digital audiovisual culture. In zeroing in on his subject in ways both exacting and generous, John Richardson invites the reader to participate in the heady pleasures of theorizing with a bustling crowd that includes Sigmund Freud and Simon Frith, Michel Gondry and Tsai Ming-Liang, Susan Sontag and Georges Bataille, T.W. Adorno and Madonna. * Claudia Gorbman, author of Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music *
A breathtakingly interdisciplinary study of contemporary media-music forms. Using the lens of neo-surrealism, Richardson guides us through digital culture, music video, online mashups, and films that reroute traditional musical meaning, function and sense. Required reading for anyone interested in tapping the rich potential of contemporary audiovisual culture. * Caryl Flinn, author of Strains of Utopia and Brass Diva *
This book opens up an exciting area for audiovisual analysis. It abounds with original perspectives that will sustain the attention of scholars who have an eye for contemporary and popular forms of musical expression. * Stan Hawkins, author of Settling the Pop Score and The British Pop Dandy *

ISBN: 9780195367362

Dimensions: 236mm x 162mm x 26mm

Weight: 560g

336 pages