Haunted Soundtracks: Audiovisual Cultures of Memory, Landscape, and Sound

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The turn of the millennium has heralded an outgrowth of culture that demonstrates an awareness of the ephemeral nature of history and the complexity underpinning the relationship between location and the past. This has been especially apparent in the shifting relationship between landscape, memory and sound in film, television and other media. The result is growing interest in soundtracks, as part of audiovisual culture, as well as an interest in the spectral aspects of culture more generally. This collection of essays focuses on audiovisual forms that foreground landscape, sound and memory. The scope of inquiry emphasises the ghostly qualities of a certain body of soundtracks, extending beyond merely the idea of 'scary films' or 'haunted houses.' Rather, the notion of sonic haunting is tied to ideas of trauma, anxiety or nostalgia associated with spatial and temporal dislocation in contemporary society. Touchstones for the approach are the concepts of psychogeography and hauntology, pervasive and established critical strategies that are interrogated and refined in relation to the reification of the spectral within the soundtracks under consideration here.

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Located at the crossroads linking cultural geography, acoustic ecology, trauma studies and media history, Haunted Soundtracks explores cinematic representations of landscape from across the globe and across time. The books 13 chapters feature incisive analyses attentive both to the formal and hermeneutic dimensions of audiovisual storytelling. More importantly, its contributors renew our perceptions of this imagery its sights and sounds through their fresh takes on questions of authorship, genre and national cinema. Following in the footsteps of pioneers, like R. Murray Schafer, Haunted Soundtracks offers both a snapshot of the state of the field and a strong indication of what the future of sound studies in academia could be. * Jeff Smith, Professor of Film, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA *

Author Bio

K.J. Donnelly is Professor of Film and Film Music at the University of Southampton, UK. He is author of The Shining (2018), Magical Musical Tour: Rock and Pop in Film Soundtracks (2015), Occult Aesthetics: Sound and Image Synchronization (2013), British Film Music and Film Musicals (2007), The Spectre of Sound (2005) and Pop Music in British Cinema (2001); and editor of Film Music: Critical Approaches (2001), co-editor (with Phil Hayward) of Music in Science Fiction Television: Tuning to the Future (2012), co-editor (with Will Gibbons and Neil Lerner) of Music in Video Games: Studying Play (2014), co-edited with Ann-Kristin Wallengren, Todays Sounds for Yesterdays Films: Making Music for Silent Cinema (2016), co-edited with Steve Rawle, Hitchcock and Herrmann: Partners in Suspense (2017) and co-edited with Beth Carroll, Contemporary Musical Films (2018). He is series editor for the 'Music and the Moving Image' and 'Palgrave Studies in Audio-Visual Culture' and is on the editorial boards of seven journals. Aimee Mollaghan is subject lead for Film at Queens University, Belfast, UK. Prior to this she was a Senior Lecturer at Edge Hill University, UK. She is the author of The Visual Music Film (Palgrave, 2015). Her current research is centred on psychogeography, landscape and soundscape in contemporary cinema and artists film.