Bücher der Reihe Oxford Music/Media Series

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.