Sound: Video, Noise and Music
Seán Cubitt · 1993
Media theory, it is no longer a novelty to say, has a problem with sound. Film and television theorists have, until recently, rarely set themselves the task of understanding the soundtrack, and even more rarely the does the problem of articulating sound and image come up. This is less a product of intellectual laziness than a reflection or refraction of the mind/body distinction we have begun to isolate as a major cultural phenomenon. Sight has become the dominant sense, the medium of surveillance, the measure of truth (for example, ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’; ‘Seeing is believing’; ‘Eye-witness Reports’). Sound and music have been relegated to a lower status, and increasingly, especially in dance music, associated with the ‘lower’ bodily functions.