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The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics. Edited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. (Oxford Handbooks Series.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. [x, 735 p. ISBN 9780199733866. $150.] Illustrations, multimedia companion Web site, bibliographic references, index.
A wide variety of perspectives and interests tend to huddle together beneath the academic umbrella of the audiovisual. For this reason, The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics collects essays that appeal to a wide readership interested in the relationship between sight and sound. Even so, there is only so much ground one can cover in one volume. Editors John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis take Part I of the book to introduce the varied scenes set by the term audiovisual, most notably by inclusion of "nonor extracinematic forms" (p. 4), even as they acknowledge the debt that so many audiovisual media owe cinema (pp. 5-6). The introduction contains some unnecessary meandering, especially given the page count, but they strike a rich vein when they list fifteen points of consideration that face the broader field of audiovisual studies:
1. Audiovisual interrelations (how sound and vision interact)
2. Beyond audiovisuality (how other senses are, or might be, incorporated into the experience)
3. Narrativity, semiotics, and stylistic conventions (diegesis, interpretation, coded meanings)
4. Intertextuality (the relations of given audiovisual performances to other texts)
5. Intermediality (mode of performance as influenced by other media)
6. Technology (how it is used/what is being said about it through its use)
7. Space and place (onscreen/offscreen, diegetic/nondiegetic, natural/imaginary)
8. Temporality and synchronization (time's relation to audiovisual elements, content, and experience)
9. Aestheticism and affect as resistance (affect of tone and mood through visual/aural experience)
10. Economic factors (what economic conditions liberate/constrain content and media of dissemination)
11. Interactivity and immersion (receiver participation in and suspension of disbelief in audiovisual experience)
12. The voice (use of human voice, how it manipulates and is manipulated to affect experience)
13. Soundtrack elements (interaction of music, Foley, dialogue, and environmental noises)
14. Audiovisual ecology (nature of sound in audiovisual performances and its relation to its surroundings)
15. Cultural identity, affiliation, and spectatorship (the biases of the intended audio-viewer)
Most of these issues are addressed (to varying degrees) over the course of the volume, with some...