Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, French critic and composer Michel Chion reassesses audiovisual media since the revolutionary 1927 debut of recorded sound in cinema, shedding crucial light on the mutual relationship between sound and image in audiovisual perception.

Chion argues that sound film qualitatively produces a new form of perception: we don't see images and hear sounds as separate channels, we audio-view a trans-sensory whole. Expanding on arguments made in his influential books The Voice in Cinema and Sound in Cinema, Chion provides lapidary insight into the functions and aesthetics of sound in film and television. He considers the effects of such evolving technologies as widescreen, multitrack, and Dolby; the influences of sound on the perception of space and time; and the impact of such contemporary forms of audio-vision as music videos, video art, and commercial television. Chion concludes with an original and useful model for the audiovisual analysis of film.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• The Audiovisual Contract Projections of Sound on Image
• The Three Listening Modes Beyond Sounds and Images Lines and Points: Horizontal and Vertical Perspectives on Audiovisual Relations
• The Audiovisual Scene
• The Real and the Rendered Phantom Audio-Vision Sound Film--Worthy of the Name Television, Video Art, Music Video
• Toward an Audiologovisual Poetics
• Introduction to Audiovisual Analysis

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

French composer, filmmaker, and theoretician Chion gives a detailed theoretical position on sound in motion pictures. He categorizes all possible sounds in a motion picture, giving many examples from major directors--Bergman, Fellini, Ford, Godard, Kurosawa, Scott, Tati, and many others--to keep his reader alert and satisfied. He points out the differences in perception of the audio and the visual: the audio usually being more temporal, related to the here and now; the visual often lending itself more to our imagination. His extensive categorization of sound and of how we listen seems to be accurate, though it requires careful reading. His cogent comments on the differences between film and video seem to call for the writing of another book. His other three books on film sound may be translated at some future time. Not for the fan, the freshman, or the general reader, this book may be the only extensive and contemporary analysis of film sound available to the discerning reader. It should be available in any library with more than a survey of critical literature on motion pictures. Upper-division undergraduate and above.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Michel Chion is a composer of musique concrète, a filmmaker, an associate professor at the Université de Paris, and a prolific writer on film, sound, and music. His other books with Columbia University Press are Film, A Sound Art and The Voice in Cinema .

Claudia Gorbman is a film studies professor at the University of Washington, Tacoma. She is the author of Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (1987), the editor of several books, and the author of many articles on film sound and film music. She is also the translator of Michel Chion's Film, A Sound Art , The Voice in Cinema , and 2001: Kubrick's Cinema Odyssey .

Walter Murch has been repeatedly honored by both the British and American Motion Picture Academies for his sound design and picture editing. He has received special recognition for his work in The Godfather , The Conversation , Apocalypse Now , and The English Patient .