Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

As the first collection of new work on sound and cinema in over a decade, Lowering the Boom addresses the expanding field of film sound theory and its significance in rethinking historical models of film analysis. The contributors consider the ways in which musical expression, scoring, voice-over narration, and ambient noise affect identity formation and subjectivity. Lowering the Boom also analyzes how shifting modulation of the spoken word in cinema results in variations in audience interpretation. Introducing new methods of thinking about the interaction of sound and music in films, this volume also details avant-garde film sound, which is characterized by a distinct break from the narratively based sound practices of mainstream cinema. This interdisciplinary, global approach to the theory and history of film sound opens the eyes and ears of film scholars, practitioners, and students to film's true audio-visual nature.

Contributors are Jay Beck, John Belton, Clark Farmer, Paul Grainge, Tony Grajeda, David T. Johnson, Anahid Kassabian, David Laderman, James Lastra, Arnt Maasø, Matthew Malsky, Barry Mauer, Robert Miklitsch, Nancy Newman, Melissa Ragona, Petr Szczepanik, Paul Théberge, and Debra White-Stanley.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgments (p. ix)
• Introduction: The Future of Film Sound Studies (p. 1)
• Part I Theorizing Sound
• 1 The Phenomenology of Film Sound: Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (p. 23)
• 2 The Proxemics of the Mediated Voice (p. 36)
• 3 Almost Silent: The Interplay of Sound and Silence in Contemporary Cinema and Television (p. 51)
• 4 The Sounds of "Silence": Dolby Stereo, Sound Design, and The Silence of the Lambs (p. 68)
• Part II Historicizing Sound
• 5 Sonic Imagination; or, Film Sound as a Discursive Construct in Czech Culture of the Transitional Period (p. 87)
• 6 Sounds of the City: Alfred Newman's "Street Scene" and Urban Modernity (p. 105)
• 7 Film and the Wagnerian Aspiration: Thoughts on Sound Design and the History of the Senses (p. 123)
• Part III Sound and Genre
• 8 Asynchronous Documentary: Bunuel's Land without Bread (p. 141)
• 9 "We'll Make a Paderewski of You Yet!": Acoustic Reflections in The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (p. 152)
• 10 Paul Sharits's Cinematics of Sound (p. 171)
• 11 "Every Beautiful Sound Also Creates an Equally Beautiful Picture": Color Music and Walt Disney's Fantasia (p. 183)
• Part IV Film Sound and Cultural Studies
• 12 "A Question of the Ear": Listening to Touch of Evil (p. 201)
• 13 "Sound Sacrifices": The Postmodern Melodramas of World War II (p. 218)
• 14 Real Fantasies: Connie Stevens, Silencio, and Other Sonic Phenomena in Mulholland Drive (p. 233)
• Part V Case Studies of Film Sound
• 15 Selling Spectacular Sound: Dolby and the Unheard History of Technical Trademarks (p. 251)
• 16 (S)lip-Sync: Punk Rock Narrative Film and Postmodern Musical Performance (p. 269)
• 17 Critical Hearing and the Lessons of Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up (p. 289)
• 18 Rethinking Point of Audition in The Cell (p. 299)
• Works Cited (p. 307)
• Contributors (p. 327)
• Index (p. 331)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Beck (media and film, DePaul Univ.) and Grajeda (English, Univ. of Central Florida) seek to open "the ears and eyes of film scholars, practitioners, and students to film's true audio-visual nature" and, beyond that, "to place sound [in film] on equal footing with the image." That agenda and their selection of 18 extremely various essays clustered around the idea (ideal) of film-sound studies (which they characterize as new theoretical territory) oblige the editors to take up the unenviable task of explaining how these essays relate to one another and add up to coherent theory. Like many essay anthologies conceived at academic conferences, this one displays too much diversity, range, and variability in quality and subject matter. It seldom displays its announced focus because individual authors follow their own scholarly predilections, sometimes into ambiguity or obscurity, and occasionally into genuine triviality. The goal of defining a unifying vision of film sound studies for the future is not achieved, except in the sense that all theories in this text are subsumed under one title and summarized in the same introductory essay. The most basic questions about sound in film--Is sound equal to image? Is that even the right question?--go unanswered. Summing Up: Optional. Comprehensive scholarly collections only. R. D. Sears Berea College