What you see is what you hear: creativity and communication in audiovisual texts

Abstract

What You See Is What You Hear develops a unique model of analysis that helps students and advanced scholars alike to look at audiovisual texts from a fresh perspective. Adopting an engaging writing style, the author draws an accessible picture of the field, offering several analytical tools, historical background, and numerous case studies. Divided into five main sections, the monograph covers problems of definitions, history, and most of all analysis. The first part raises the main problems related to audiovisuality, including taxonomical and historical questions. The second part provides the bases for the understanding of audiovisual creative communication as a whole, introducing a novel theoretical model for its analysis. The next three part focus elaborate on the model in all its constituents and with plenty of case studies taken from the field of cinema, TV, music videos, advertising and other forms of audiovisuality. Methodologically, the book is informed by different paradigms of film and media studies, multimodality studies, structuralism, narratology, “auteur theory” in the broad sense, communication studies, semiotics, and the so-called “Numanities.” What You See Is What You Hear enables readers to better understand how to analyze the structure and content of diverse audiovisual texts, to discuss their different idioms, and to approach them with curiosity and critical spirit.