Papers by Allison Whitney
Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 2008
Routledge eBooks, Jul 4, 2022
Music, Sound, and The Moving Image, Dec 1, 2008
While sound studies scholarship continues to expand its disciplinary reach, it remains that in th... more While sound studies scholarship continues to expand its disciplinary reach, it remains that in the humanities classroom, most of us continue to prioritise the study of images and written language. To remedy the ongoing marginalisation of sound, we can look to the field of composition studies, where scholars such as Michelle Comstock and Mary E. Hocks (2006) are exploring the concept of 'sonic literacy', which they define as 'the ability to identify, define, situate, construct, manipulate, and communicate our personal and cultural soundscapes'. One cultivates sonic literacy by both learning about the historical, technological and ideological foundations of sound media, and also by creating aural compositions - a process that generates sensitivity to everything from microphone quality to vocal performance. I believe that one way to ensure the future of sound studies is to make sonic literacy a priority in post-secondary education. In this essay I will explain how I have used principles of sonic literacy in the film studies classroom, and offer examples of how I integrated sound-based assignments into the curriculum. While my focus is on film studies, we can apply these principles in any discipline, particularly given the relative ease with which students can now access equipment and software for sound manipulation. The pedagogical potential of audio assignments coupled with the growing body of scholarship focused on sound makes sonic literacy an attainable goal in the humanities classroom.If I may generalise about film studies curricula, sound is usually treated as a discrete topic and is rarely a central or recurring focus except in dedicated sound studies courses. One of the reasons for this is historical, for if we arrange a course chronologically, we often begin in the era before synchronised sound. Of course, silent cinema was rarely silent, but our attempts to convey the intricacies of early sound accompaniment can tend toward abstraction, assuming we don't have ready access to a Benshi or a cinema organist. Thus, we start with the image and proceed, eventually, and briefly, to sound. Furthermore, film history courses tend to focus on sound films of the late 1920s and early 30s, when synchronisation was being established. While these films are extremely important, critical attention to sound tends to fall away as the course proceeds, in spite of the many achievements in audio technology and artistry in the subsequent eighty years.Further, we may attribute some of the marginalisation of sound to the richness of film's visual qualities, which make the task of teaching visual literacy both complex and time-consuming. In order for students to become truly observant viewers, they must learn about filmmakers' uses of composition, shot scale, camera movement, temporal manipulation, editing, lighting, color, and technological factors such as frame rate, aspect ratio, film stock, projectors and exhibition space. Teaching visual analysis alone is a challenge for the instructor, who often stands in front of a room full of students who assume that the movie 'just happened that way' and accuse us of 'reading too much into things'. It is no surprise, therefore, that sound becomes something of an afterthought.Given these challenges, how do we bring sound studies to the foreground? While teaching as a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology, I taught a course entitled 'Science Fiction: Image, Sound, Text' where I constructed the curriculum around principles of sonic literacy. I drew upon the growing body of literature on film sound, and chose as a primary textbook William Whittington's Sound Design & Science Fiction. The first text we examined was Orson Welles' infamous 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds;1 thus, from the beginning students were called upon to listen actively, and to contemplate their assumptions about how sounds can be constructed and manipulated.This contemplation was put into action in the first assignment, entitled 'One Minute of Metropolis', where students were offered a choice of five oneminute clips from Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and asked to create their own sound tracks. …
The book series Transmedia: Participatory Culture and Media Convergence provides a platform for c... more The book series Transmedia: Participatory Culture and Media Convergence provides a platform for cutting-edge research in the field of media studies, with a strong focus on the impact of digitization, globalization, and fan culture. The series is dedicated to publishing the highest-quality monographs (and exceptional edited collections) on the developing social, cultural, and economic practices surrounding media convergence and audience participation. The term 'media convergence' relates to the complex ways in which the production, distribution, and consumption of contemporary media are affected by digitization, while 'participatory culture' refers to the changing relationship between media producers and their audiences. HJ: In some ways, I see it as a crucial turning point for the kind of mediacentered fans, the mostly female fans that I wrote about in Textual Poachers. Up until that point, most of fandom had been organized around Star Trek, which had been a defining text for a generation of fans. Suddenly, you were seeing forms of fan expression that were taking shape around Star Trek expanded to incorporate new texts, including Star Wars. We can see this as a move from a fandom centered around individual stories to a multi-media fandom, which would continue to expand across genres, across franchises, to the present day. So if we think about the texts that defined fandom over time, Star Trek is certainly one of those, Star Wars is another, Harry Potter is another, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is another, maybe Xena-these are the fandoms that represent a profound shift in the way fandom operates. It's easy to understand, then, why some Star Trek fans saw Star Wars as a threat or competition. Star Trek was seen as true science fiction-science fiction about ideas, about the future, about utopian and dystopian alternatives. Star Wars was seen as space opera, fantasy, bound up with spectacular special effects. But I never understood why you had to pick one over the other. Different tastes, different moments in our lives, but both representing exciting contributions to the larger development of science fiction. DHF: Unlike most previous fantastic storyworlds, Star Wars was, in many ways, a transmedia experience from the very start: the comic books, the novelizations, the arcade games, the action figures, the soundtrack albums, foreWord: "i Have a Bad feeling aBouT THiS"
University of Florida Press eBooks, Jun 13, 2023
When teaching horror films, where the primary texts are created to frighten and disturb their aud... more When teaching horror films, where the primary texts are created to frighten and disturb their audiences, instructors often find it challenging to find pedagogical strategies that are at once effective and responsible. For students not accustomed to horror, the shocking nature of the texts can sometimes be difficult to handle, while even the horror fans in one’s classroom, once provoked by new critical approaches and theories, may find themselves newly unsettled even by well-known texts. Since many students have been trained to regard emotional engagement and rational thought as mutually exclusive, particularly in the context of formal education, they often perceive the emotional impact of horror as an impediment to critical analysis. In this essay I will offer practical strategies for helping students to identify, codify, and contemplate their emotional relationships to horror films, and to use those insights in aid of critical, historical, and thematic analysis, both in their wri...
THE SUBSTANTIAL BODY OF SCHOLARSHIP concerning King Victor's Stella Dallas (1937) attests to ... more THE SUBSTANTIAL BODY OF SCHOLARSHIP concerning King Victor's Stella Dallas (1937) attests to the richness of the film and to its capacity to illuminate the complex representations of motherhood in American culture. Stella Dallas tells the story of a working-class woman who aspires that her daughter Laurel might gain acceptance in her father's upper-class milieu, only to discover that her own lack of pedigree threatens her child's social future. Stella chooses, therefore, to sever her relationship with her child so that Laurel might live as a member of the upper class-a decision that raises questions about the nature of class hierarchies and the possibilities of class mobility in American society. Scholarly analyses of Stella Dallas struggle with these questions, particularly when it comes to Stella's capacity to make choices and follow her own desire, for while Stella demonstrates that she can behave in an upper-class manner when she must, she apparently chooses not ...
The Acoustics of the Social on Page and Screen
Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling
The Cinema of Christopher Nolan, 2015
Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling, Dec 31, 2018
Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling, 2017
The book series Transmedia: Participatory Culture and Media Convergence provides a platform for c... more The book series Transmedia: Participatory Culture and Media Convergence provides a platform for cutting-edge research in the field of media studies, with a strong focus on the impact of digitization, globalization, and fan culture. The series is dedicated to publishing the highest-quality monographs (and exceptional edited collections) on the developing social, cultural, and economic practices surrounding media convergence and audience participation. The term 'media convergence' relates to the complex ways in which the production, distribution, and consumption of contemporary media are affected by digitization, while 'participatory culture' refers to the changing relationship between media producers and their audiences.
The Cinema of Christopher Nolan: Imagining the Impossible, 2015
Smart Chicks on Screen: Representing Women’s Intellect in Film and Television,, 2014
Mapping Generations of Traumatic Memory in American Narratives, 2014
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Papers by Allison Whitney