Audio-Vision

In Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, French critic and composer Michel Chion reassesses audiovisual media since the revolutionary 1927 debut of recorded sound in cinema, shedding crucial light on the mutual relationship between sound and image in audiovisual perception.

Chion argues that sound film qualitatively produces a new form of perception: we don't see images and hear sounds as separate channels, we audio-view a trans-sensory whole. Expanding on arguments made in his influential books The Voice in Cinema and Sound in Cinema, Chion provides lapidary insight into the functions and aesthetics of sound in film and television. He considers the effects of such evolving technologies as widescreen, multitrack, and Dolby; the influences of sound on the perception of space and time; and the impact of such contemporary forms of audio-vision as music videos, video art, and commercial television. Chion concludes with an original and useful model for the audiovisual analysis of film.

Columbia University Press

n Audio-Vision, the French composer-filmmaker-critic Michel Chion presents a reassessment of the audiovisual media since sound's revolutionary debut in 1927 and sheds light on the mutual influences of sound and image in audiovisual perception.

Chion expands on the arguments from his influential trilogy on sound in cinema-- Las Voix au cinema, Le Son au cinema, and La Toile trouee--while providing an overview of the functions and aesthetics of sound in film and television. He considers the effects of evolving audiovisual technologies such as widescreen, multi-track sound, and Dolby stereo on audio-vision, influences of sound on the perception of space and time, and contemporary forms of audio-vision embodied in music videos, video art, and commercial television. His final chapter presents a model for audiovisual analysis of film.

Alan Williams

Chion is the leading French cinema scholar to study the sound track. I know of no writer in any language to have published as much in this area, and of such uniformly high quality as he.

Michel Chion is a composer of musique concrète, a filmmaker, an associate professor at the Université de Paris, and a prolific writer on film, sound, and music. His other books with Columbia University Press are Film, A Sound Art and The Voice in Cinema.

Claudia Gorbman is a film studies professor at the University of Washington, Tacoma. She is the author of Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (1987), the editor of several books, and the author of many articles on film sound and film music. She is also the translator of Michel Chion's Film, A Sound Art, The Voice in Cinema, and 2001: Kubrick's Cinema Odyssey.

Walter Murch has been repeatedly honored by both the British and American Motion Picture Academies for his sound design and picture editing. He has received special recognition for his work in The Godfather, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, and The English Patient.