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James Buhler, David Neumeyer, and Rob Deemer. 2010. Hearing the Movies: Music and Sound in Film History. New York: Oxford University Press. 470 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-532779-3In
recent years, film music has become a burgeoning area of interest in the academic community, both in teaching and in research.1 Hearing the Movies, a new textbook by James Buhler, David Neumayer, and Rob Deemer, is one of the latest contributions to the literature that will surely have wide appeal. The authors' approach to film music derives much from Michel Chion's well-known Audio-Vision (1994) in that it considers the subject not simply in relation to the image and narrative, but in the context of the larger soundtrack, which also includes the dialogue and sound effects. Consequently, discussions attempt to explain the expressive effects of merging not just music, but sounds of all kinds, with image and narrative. In addition, several of Chion's terms such as added value, anempathetic music, and masking feature prominently in the text. Claudia Gorbman's seminal Unheard Melodies (1987) also provides a good deal of support throughout and even acts as bookends to the text with prominent quotations in both the introduction and afterword. One particularly attractive feature of the text is that it has a companion website (www.hearingthemovies.net) that contains several teaching resources such as sample course syllabi, ideas for assignments and quizzes, and a blog by the authors, all of which continue to be regularly updated, keeping the material fresh.2
The book falls into three parts, part 1 developing listening and viewing skills, part 2 focusing on typical uses of music in film, and part 3 providing a technologically driven history of music and sound in film. Part 1 introduces a substantial vocabulary of terms (which are conveniently summarized in a glossary) that pertain mostly to film sound in general, so that even familiar musical terms like monophonic are recontextualized to include sounds other than musical ones: "In terms of sound, a monologue-even a dialogue-can be considered monophonic' if it occurs with no sound effects" (48). Conversely, sound-oriented terms used to describe transitions in films such as sound advance, sound lag, and sound match are broadened to include music as well. Thus, the authors' adherence to the discussion of film music in the...