Books in the Oxford Music/Media Series series

Saying It With Songs is a groundbreaking study of the ways in which Hollywood's conversion to synchronized-sound filmmaking in the late 1920s gave rise not only to enduring partnerships between the film and popular music industries, but also to a rich and exciting period of song use in American cinema.

Sound Design is the New Score explores the new trend of blurring the line between score and sound design which has transformed contemporary film soundscape by rejecting the conventions of classical scoring and challenging the modes of perception it shaped.

Author Jacqueline Avila looks at the ways that Mexican cinema and its music during the silent and early sound periods continuously reshaped the contested, fluctuating space of Mexican identity, functioning both as a sign and symptom of social and political change.

Theories of the Soundtrack presents a comprehensive account of speculative thinking about film music and sound from major classical and contemporary theorists. The basic theoretical framework of each approach is presented, taking into account the explicit and implicit claims about the soundtrack and its relation to other theories.

In French Musical Culture and the Coming of Sound Cinema, author Hannah Lewis argues that debates about sound film resonated deeply within French musical culture of the early 1930s, and conversely, that discourses surrounding French musical styles and genres shaped cinematic experiments during the transition to sound.

Hearing Haneke: The Sound Tracks of a Radical Auteur is the first book devoted to the sound tracks of Michael Haneke. Despite his notorious preoccupation with violence, this book shows how Haneke uses sound to reawaken our capacity for hearing the world with greater compassionate understanding.

Classical music is everywhere in video games. But what does it reveal about the cultural value we place on entertainment? Replay Value offers a new perspective on the possibilities and challenges of trying to distinguish between art and pop culture in contemporary society.

Through close attention to films like Back to the Future and popular music of artists like Michael Jackson, Back to the Fifties explores how Fifties nostalgia was shaped for a generation of teenagers trained by popular culture to rewind, record, recycle and replay.

Robert Altman's Soundtracks offers a compelling new look at this celebrated director's films through his innovative uses of music and sound. As author Gayle Sherwood-Magee illustrates, Altman's considerable and varied output speaks to the changing film industry over decades from Nashville (1975) to A Prairie Home Companion (2006).

Sounding American: Hollywood, Opera, and Jazz looks at the role played by 1920s musical shorts in crafting studio identity and establishing American film sound. It argues that the persistence of opera and jazz on the soundtrack during and after the conversion produces a fragmentary text and encourages an active spectator.

Video games open portals into fantastical worlds where imaginative play prevails. Sound Play explores the aesthetic, ethical, and sociopolitical stakes of people's engagements with audio phenomena in video games-from sonic violence to synthesized operas, from democratic musical performances to verbal sexual harassment.

Sound film captivated Sergey Prokofiev during the final two decades of his life: he considered composing for nearly two dozen pictures, eventually undertaking eight of them, all Soviet productions. Drawing on newly available sources, Composing for the Red Screen examines - for the first time - the full extent of this prodigious cinematic career.

We'll Meet Again illuminates music's central role in the design and reception of Stanley Kubrick's films. It brings together archival evidence and close analysis to trace the ways music serves as starting point and inspiration throughout Kubrick's working process.

Sounding the Gallery argues that early video art is an audiovisual genre. The new video technology not only enabled artists to sound their visual work and composers to visualise their music during the 1960s: it also initiated a spatial form of engagement that encouraged new relationships between art / music practices and their audiences.

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.

This book tells the history of sound machines through singers whose bodies and voices do not match. Jennifer Fleeger explores this phenomenon, moving from the fictional Trilby to the real-life Youtube star Susan Boyle, and demonstrating along the way that singers with voices that do not match their bodies are essential to the success of technologies for preserving and sharing music.

Occult Aesthetics: Synchronization in Sound Film opens up an often-overlooked aspect of audiovisual culture which is crucial to the medium's powerful illusions. Author Kevin Donnelly contends that a film soundtrack's musical qualities can unlock the occult psychology joining sound and image, an effect both esoteric and easily destroyed.

This book levels the critical playing field between film music and "serious music," reflecting upon gender-related ideas about music and modernism as much as about film. Author Peter Franklin broaches the possibility of a history of twentieth-century music that would include, rather than marginalize, film music.

Special Sound traces the fascinating creation and rich legacy of the BBC's electronic music studio, particularly in the context of other studios in Europe and America. From the ashes of highbrow BBC radio drama emerged an extremely influential kind of electronic music consisting of quirky tonal jingles, signature tunes, and incidental music for such popular programs as Doctor Who.

From Elvis to Madonna, Rock Star/Movie Star explores why rock stars have been useful for movies, and why movies have been useful for rock stars. This in-depth history traverses how rock stars' screen performances have served motion picture and recording industries as well as offered new potentialities for movie stardom.

Through the Looking Glass examines John Cage's interactions and collaborations with avant-garde filmmakers, and in turn seeks out the implications of the audiovisual experience on Cage's career. The examples chosen highlight moments of rupture within Cage's notions of the audiovisual experience and the medium-specific ontology of a work of art.

Playing Along shows how video games and social media are bridging virtual and visceral experience, transforming our understanding of musicality, creativity, play, and participation.