Static in the System - Noise and the Soundscape of American Cinema Culture

1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-0-520-29947-4
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 1, 256 Seiten, Cloth Over Boards, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 1000 g

Reihe: California Studies in Music, Sound, and Media

In this rich study of noise in American film-going culture, Meredith C. Ward shows how aurality can reveal important fissures in American motion picture history, enabling certain types of listening cultures to form across time. Connecting this history of noise in the cinema to a greater sonic culture, Static in the System shows how cinema sound was networked into a broader constellation of factors that affected social power, gender, sexuality, class, the built environment, and industry, and how these factors in turn came to fruition in cinema's soundscape. Focusing on theories of power as they manifest in noise, the history of noise in electro-acoustics with the coming of film sound, architectural acoustics as they were manipulated in cinema theaters, and the role of the urban environment in affecting mobile listening and the avoidance of noise, Ward analyzes the powerful relationship between aural cultural history and cinema's sound theory, proving that noise can become a powerful historiographic tool for the film historian.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ward, Meredith C.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Filmgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Filmproduktion, Filmtechnik
• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Musikwissenschaft Allgemein Musikalische Akustik, Tontechnik, Musikaufnahme

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Noise and the Concept of
the Cinema Soundscape
1. Songs of the Sonic Body: Noise and the Sounds of
Early Motion Picture Audiences
2. The Film Industry Lays the Golden Egg: Noise,
Electro-Acoustics, and the Academy’s Adjustment
to Film Sound
3. “Machines for Listening”: Cinema Auditoriums as
Vehicles for Aural Absorption
4. Cinema Theaters as Antiquated as “Edison and His
Wax Cylinders”: Mobile Technologies and
the Negotiation of Public Noise

Conclusion: Noises We Will Be Hearing Soon

Appendix
Notes
References
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Meredith C. Ward is Director of the Film and Media Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University. She is also affiliated faculty for the Center for Advanced Media Studies at Johns Hopkins. She is the author of articles on sound and media for Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film; Music, Sound, and the Moving Image; and the upcoming Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening and the recipient of the 2016 Dissertation Award for outstanding contribution to the field of media studies from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS).