Lost in Sensation

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. This essay argues that sound processes, design practices, and technology have shaped the history and trajectory of digital media in significant and all-to-often unacknowledged ways. Specifically, sound design strategies have helped define the “hyperrealistic” approach that has come to define the style of digital media, establishing unprecedented image and sound unity. Sound has also taken the lead in establishing new forms of “spectacle” and “immersion” through the use of multichannel technologies, which have fostered new cinematic reading codes and considerations in regard to subjectivity. Within the digital “revolution,” the soundtrack offers a quiet revolution of its own, if we just listen.

Coming to Mind

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. Pornography aims to capture and mediate some of the intensity and immediacy of sex. This is particularly manifest in the framework of gay bareback pornography that both documents a sexual subculture and caters to a particular porn audience. Structured as a dialogue between a bareback porn producer and a media studies scholar, the essay combines practice-based insights with more conventional scholarly argumentation in a discussion on the modality of pornography, as well as on the transformations that digital media technologies have inflicted in its production and consumption. The chapter addresses the visceral force of pornography while paying particular attention on the centrality of sound in the mediation of intensity.

Lion and Lambs

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. With the advent of the Twilight Saga, the teen vampire subgenre has sunk its teeth into the blockbuster film franchise. Its migration into big-budget corporate cinema prompts a negotiation between the Hollywood film industry and the D-quadrant audience of young women and girls. The industry, for its part, has agreed to adopt a protective rather than predatory stance, offering young female viewers a PG-13 fantasy rather than exposing them to representations of sexual violence that “go too far,” are too threatening or age-inappropriate. At the same time, the industry not only acknowledges the existence of female desire, but represents its darker, uncanny dimensions. Newly composed musical scores play a major role in facilitating the experience of the uncanny for viewers without overshooting their tastes and sensibilities. The pop music in the films serves to initiate the audience into the adult music market.

Understanding the Pleasures of War’s Audiovision

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. This chapter seeks to explain the potency and appeal of music in contemporary war representations. Through the close analysis of war music videos—amateur productions, set to some form of popular music and posted online—the chapter addresses the ways in which music has become a generative, affective force in countless war depictions. In examining the ways in which such videos circulate, including how soldiers create, discuss, and use them, the chapter ultimately argues that these contemporary audiovisions are not about war as much as they are part of it.

Debating the Digital

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. This essay offers a close reading of Barry Levinson’s Wag the dog (New Line Cinema, 1997) in order to discuss a series of issues pertaining to the relation of cinema and reality in the digital era. Wag the Dog functions as an exemplary case study wherein the pro-filmic, the filmic, and the post-filmic events illustrate the complex interactions of the cinema/reality in this new phase of digital ontology. This essay follows the evolving nature of terms and concepts, such as analog and digital inscriptions, reference, indexicality, and fiction and nonfiction discourse while it traces the intricate interactions between film and reality in the current media-saturated social reality.

“Charm the Air to Give a Sound”

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. This essay examines the soundscape and architecture of Punchdrunk’s immersive theater installation Sleep No More (New York, 2011). Although many of its sonic references are drawn from well-known analog sources, their deployment marks a shift in the role of sound in theater and film. The installation’s sound environment establishes ambience and also guides and synchronizes the actions of the individual audience- and cast members who navigate the space during each performance. The use of sonic cues, in this context, draws directly from the logic of role-playing video games. Moreover, the use of rhythm and repetition in Sleep No More resonates on an even deeper register with similar architectures of meaning in some of the work’s key points of reference. A careful examination the work’s structure reveals a complex deployment of sonic patterning that activates new connections with historical texts and challenges our understanding of the experience of sound, touch, and performance in the digital era.

Doping the Voice

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. By examining a brief history of several sound production technologies that preceded Auto-Tune, this essay suggests that a “doping of the voice” occurred—an elusive phenomenon hidden by industry engineers, but amplified by artists who sought to make the voice as pliable and sounding as the instruments that often accompanied it. On the one hand, the dope dealt by the commercial sound industry resembled expensive designer drugs—technologies that promised to make one both sound as well as look better (e.g., early dubbing for film, double-tracking for music). On the other hand, a doping of the voice was practiced by experimental artists (Yoko Ono, Charlemagne Palestine, Hollis Frampton) in order to dirty the voice’s narrative context: grinding its phonemic elements, challenging its purity as signature of the body, and wresting it away from any kind of philosophical or psychological interiority.

Hugues Dufourt’s Cinematic Dynamism

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. This article analyzes French spectral composer Hugues Dufourt’s composition titled L’Afriqued’après and examines the influence of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s paintings on his works since 2005. It explains that Tiepolo’s fresco technique evoked for Dufourt the realism of American cinema and discusses how Dufourt has translated his visual perceptions of the fresco images and their three-dimensionality into musical terms. It also highlights the characteristics of Tiepolo’s art similar to the cinema. These are the effects of dramatic acceleration and the simultaneous coexistence of fragments from disparate realities.

The Absent Image in Electronic Music

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. This essay discusses the separation between image and sound inaugurated with the introduction of sound recording technology in the late nineteenth century. Two areas are explored in depth: the development of sound-based art maximally divorced from the image and postrecording technology art forms that recombine sound and image in new ways. The latter part of the essay focuses on artistic sound/image relationships inherent in digital media.

Virtual and Visceral Experience in Music-Oriented Video Games

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. This chapter investigates the digital games Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and DJ Hero, all of which aim to integrate kinesthetic engagement with audiovisual experience. Game designers have long understood that mutually reinforcing audio and visual stimuli set the stage for immersive gameplay. These music-oriented games go a step further by making physical engagement with the game controller meaningful and viscerally persuasive: whereas most games draw players into the on-screen gameworld, allowing them to master and forget the controller in their hands, these games draw attention to the controller as instrument and the living room as performance space. Through a comparative analysis of game reception, this essay shows how compelling gameplay experiences rely on prior musical and cultural knowledge.