Moving Image, Moving Target

For many of us, the inauguration of a new journal devoted to Music, Sound, and the Moving Image provides substantial cause for celebration. As recently as a decade ago, studies devoted to media sound were rare indeed. The past few years have brought a welcome explosion of sound-related events: international conferences on several continents, multiple major monographs, several important edited collections, special issues of periodicals, and now the launching of new journals dedicated to sound and music in films and other media. Why this new level of interest in media sound? Who is responsible for this trend? And what difference does it make how we reached this particular point in history?

I suggest that we can learn important lessons – and perhaps avoid some pitfalls – by attending to the process whereby music and sound have finally become acceptable objects of study in the realm of moving image scholarship. As is commonly the case in the constitution of a new field, the study of media sound has over the last quarter-century grown out of dissatisfaction with existing fields. By far the majority of those who have contributed to the growth of media sound study have been film scholars, frustrated by the inability of the film studies field to attend seriously to the film soundtrack. In addition, a few fellow travellers have emerged from related fields: music, where film and television sound were long neglected as insufficiently serious to merit scholarly attention, and media studies, where sound has been systematically shortchanged in spite of the field's radio-related origins.

Like most revolutionaries, we have thrived by critiquing the short-comings of the very systems that nurtured us. Incessantly repeating a now familiar chant, we have branded our fields as deaf and thus unable adequately to hear, describe, and explain the phenomena that constitute our chosen object of study. This approach has borne substantial fruit, allowing us to discover many hidden truths and much unexplored terrain in cinema, music, and the media. In many ways, this would appear to be a liberating scenario, offering relief from the tyranny of academic fields intent on protecting and prolonging the limitations that preclude the active study of media sound. But more is going on here than a simple protest movement.

By concentrating on the novelty of our approach and the inadequacy of past approaches, we have failed to recognize the extent to which our assumptions, expectations, and goals are borrowed from the very fields that we have spent our time criticizing. Take my own original field of film studies, for example. When some of us began to realize, a quarter-century ago, that film sound was being shortchanged in favour of the image, narrative construction, and narrational devices, we set out to correct this oversight. How did we do that? By simply adapting image-oriented, narrative, and narrational concerns to questions of sound and music. All the while retaining a corpus defined by the field of film studies, using theoretical concepts developed within or previously borrowed by the field of film studies, and adopting analytical and historical discourse characteristic of the field of film studies, we readily convinced ourselves that our attention to sound and music constituted something radically new. Well, it was and it wasn't. To the extent that we succeeded in concentrating attention on questions of sound and music, we were certainly changing the field's range of interests and objects of study. But to the extent that we allowed our methods and goals to be dictated by the very field we were critiquing, we were actually stuck in the same old rut.

I want to draw particular attention to one aspect of our Trojan-horse heritage. Whether our original field was film studies, music, media studies, or something else, we all bring to the table a series of unspoken assumptions about the range of texts, systems, and events that constitute our legitimate corpus. This corpus is strongly reinforced by the conventions and expectations of our field(s), as expressed through such avenues as appropriate course titles and content, the range of articles published by key journals, and acceptable topics for...