The idea for this book has been a long time in gestation. We found ourselves conducting doctoral research at the same time, in the same institution (University of Ulster, Coleraine), and discovered a common interest in the totality of the soundtrack, although working in the separate disciplines of film music (Kulezic-Wilson) and film sound design (Greene). We shared many conversations exploring this terrain in some depth, which over time evolved into the idea of producing a co-edited book on sound design and music. This anthology expanded beyond our initial plans in terms of its length and the range of material under investigation to include a broader conceptualization of sound and music in screen media. This resulted in addressing areas of research that lay outside one or other of our areas of expertise, which we found to be both an advantage and a challenge. One of the clear advantages of having our previous training in different camps is that each of us was able to harness knowledge from our own area of research while posing questions about the others. The challenge was that we sometimes found we had different understandings of the same terms, or used and applied terminology differently. This nevertheless led to many fruitful conversations which allowed us to tease out the specific (inter) disciplinary issues of this volume which, we believe, is to its benefit.

This anthology does not attempt to offer a foundational theory for film sound or film music since the groundwork for both disciplines has been firmly laid already. One of the first significant publications to alert the field of film studies to the relevance of film sound and film music came in 1980 with a special edition of Yale French Studies on ‘Cinema Sound’ edited by Rick Altman. Since the mid-1980s when two seminal books appeared within two years—Film Sound: Theory and Practice ¹ edited by Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (1985) and Claudia Gorbman’s Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (1987)—both disciplines have flourished remarkably, opening up numerous questions about the creation, function and perception of sound and music in film and setting out directions for further research in many significant monographs and edited collections, too numerous to be all listed here. The intention of this volume is rather to move the discussion forward by bringing these two fields together through the idea of an integrated soundtrack. The necessity to consider and communicate the functional interdependence of all elements of the soundtrack and the result of their joint accomplishment has already been addressed by some scholars in journal articles, historical volumes and monographs, including Michel Chion’s highly influential Audio-Vision (1994); David Sonnenschein’s practice-based exploration of music, voice and sound effects in Sound Design (2001); the meticulously exhaustive study of music and sound in film history Hearing the Movies by James Buhler, David Neumeyer and Rob Deemer (2010); and the most recent historical account of soundtrack development in Sound: Dialogue, Music, and Effects edited by Kathryn Kalinak (2015). In terms of advancing an interdisciplinary discussion that concerns various aspects of and a range of approaches to audiovisual media, notable steps were taken recently in two remarkable handbooks published by Oxford University Press—New Audiovisual Aesthetics (Richardson, Gorbman and Vernallis, 2013) and Sound and Image in Digital Media (Vernallis, Herzog and Richardson, 2013). A number of specialized journals that appeared in recent years established their inclusive reputation by encouraging submissions in areas pertaining to all elements of film soundtrack, including Music, Sound and the Moving Image (2007–), The Soundtrack (2008–), Music and the Moving Image (2008–), The New Soundtrack (2010–), Screen Sound Journal (2010–) and SoundEffects (2011–).

A boundary-breaking ethos is also at the heart of this volume which has been conceived with the specific intention of bridging the existing gap between film sound and film music scholarship by bringing together distinguished scholars from both disciplines who are challenging the constraints of their subject areas by thinking about the soundtrack in its totality. This is also emphasized by the title of this anthology which, in comparison to other recent publications that address both sound and music, takes sound design and music as the subjects of its investigation. Francis Ford Coppola first used the term sound design in cinema to offer a screen credit for the creative work of Walter Murch on Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), reflecting Murch’s multifaceted involvement in the post-production of the film. Sound design evokes the idea of a ‘holistic’ approach to film and soundtrack and is considered here in that broadest sense from pre-production through production and into post-production, in contrast to narrower definitions which emerged later, referring mostly to the production of sound effects in post-production. The subtitle ‘integrated soundtrack’, on the other hand, refers for our purposes to practices, theories and histories, that consciously combine sound design and music into the overall concept and design of screen media. And while in some chapters the primary focus of investigation leans more towards either sound design or score for the purpose of in-depth discussion, each recognizes the functional interdependence of all sonic elements and that an effective soundtrack is the result of their joint achievement.

Another objective of this book is to look beyond the director as auteur and investigate the critical production of the screen media soundtrack with attention to sound and music personnel considering issues at stake below and above the line, exploring the whole process of producing an integrated soundtrack and outlining the distinct procedures involved in its creation. The collaborative media of filmmaking, animation, game design and television production are addressed not only in scholarly chapters but also through interviews with key practitioners that include sound recordists, sound designers, composers, orchestrators and music supervisors who honed their skills on films, TV programmes, video games, commercials and music videos.

On the other hand, the topics investigated in this anthology reflect accurately the concerns and interests of contemporary scholarship and not only that which deals with music and sound. The concepts of presence and immersion have been for some time on the list of ‘hot’ topics in film theory, posing questions about the relationship between corporeal and cognitive types of perception and response to cinema (see Elsaesser and Hagener, 2010), but also between different aesthetic and philosophical approaches to the ideas of cinematic form and storytelling (Jaffe, 2014). The enduring fascination with the dichotomy of body and mind—or the emphasis of one over the other—is apparent in this volume as well, epitomized in distinct sections discussing corporeal and affective aspects of cinema perception and representation on the one hand and more elusive issues of time and memory on the other. Amidst concerns about the nature of audiovisual spectatorship and representations of consciousness and time, history and memory, body, affect and violence, another theme looms large in this volume, that of boundary- and convention-breaking, inspiring innovative scholarship about the most current and relevant developments in both theory and practice. And while some chapters emphasize the historical or artistic and aesthetic contexts that enabled new practices to flourish, others focus on the unavoidable issue of technology. An ingredient of modern life which permeates every aspect of our existence and almost all our activities, technology is considered here not only as a catalyst of change and innovation but also as a mirror held up to humanity.

The content of this anthology could have been structured in a number of ways as there are many topical overlaps among the chapters. Its division into seven parts is to facilitate easier navigation, but the section headings—Boundaries and their Disintegration; Presence, Immersion, Space; Listening: Affect and Body; Time and Memory; Breaking Conventions; The Sound of Machines and Non-Humans; and The Musicality of Soundtrack—should by no means be perceived as boundaries and we certainly expect that they will not lessen the communication between chapters.

Boundaries and their disintegration is one of the running themes of this book and although only the title of Part I cites this topic directly, it is pertinent to many chapters, permeating the discussions about industry, labour, technology, aesthetics and audiovisual spectatorship. In Chapter 2, Liz Greene addresses the conceptual demarcations between noise, sound, sound effects, music and silence, commenting on the ambiguities in their definitions and the way their use in the audiovisual context emphasizes their shared qualities. Using primarily examples from Alan Splet’s work on David Lynch’s films, Greene demonstrates how the sounds—or noises—that ‘we have learned to ignore’, whether because they are perceived as silence or as a ‘lack of sound’, can have not only meaningful but also a highly effective role in sound design. Her point about the emotional impact of sound design that ‘sounds like noise but acts like music’ resonates with arguments from a number of other chapters and the increasing scholarly interest in dissipating boundaries between soundtrack elements and their functions. Greene’s argument is complemented by her interview with Ann Kroeber in Chapter 3, which considers the collaborative roles of sound recording and sound design in screen media industries. Kroeber worked alongside her partner Alan Splet until his death in 1994 and has continued to work in film and video game sound. She discusses her work as a woman in a male-dominated field and stresses the positive developments in recent years in the film and game industries. The owner and curator of Sound Mountain, a sound effects library, Kroeber is also a specialist in animal recordings. In this interview, she talks about her approach to animal vocalization on Duma (Carroll Ballard, 2005), the musicality of animal sound and how through her sound design she was able to place the animal voices alongside the music track. She also discusses the production sound and music in Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986), her work on games and her collaborative approach to pedagogy.

The demarcations that Greene addresses in her chapter were in many ways defined by the organization of departmentalized labour in the Hollywood industry which affected the division between music and sound departments. As Gianluca Sergi reveals in Chapter 4, this division has its roots in the era when the introduction of synchronized sound started to threaten the jobs of musicians employed by the industry for live screen performances. The fierce fight to protect these jobs and the propaganda battle led by the American Federation of Musicians during their Music Defense League campaign, Sergi argues, eventually ‘slammed the door on closer integration of music and sound in the cinema right at the very moment when sound departments were being established’, with familiar consequences. The gradual disintegration of these boundaries many decades later and various forms of collaboration between sound and music departments can be attributed to several factors, including advancemen...