Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
This book explores what speech, music and other sounds have in common. It gives a detailed description of the way perspective, rhythm, textual quality and other aspects of sound are used to communicate emotion and meaning. It draws on a wealth of examples from radio (disk jockey and newsreading speech, radio plays, advertising jingles, news signature tunes), film soundtracks (The Piano, The X-files, Disney animation films), music ranging from medieval plain chant to drum 'n' bass and everyday soundscapes.
Synopsis
Speech, Music, Sound presents an entirely original approach to the theory of sound. Drawing on a wide range of phonetic, linguistic, pragmatic, semiotic, and musicological sources, it concentrates on the communicative roles of aural perspective, rhythm, melody, and timbre in music as well as speech, everyday soundscapes, and film and television soundtracks. It applies linguistic concepts such as turntaking to music, and musical concepts such as harmony to speech. And it also contains a chapter on aural realism, again in relation to music, speech, and contemporary sound design.