Sync

Details the profound historical appeal of films, video, and digital works emphasizing synchronized musicality and gesture

“James Tobias’s groundbreaking book offers erudite and thoughtful conversations on sound theory, music computation, and theories of spectatorship. Sync cobbles together a discontinuous history of musicality in the hands of cinematic practitioners from Sergei Eisenstein’s rhythmic montage, through Steina Vasulka’s feminist eco-ethics, to John Cameron Mitchell’s performative aesthetics. What emerges is a sonic genealogy building on fragments of counter-traditions. A deeply passionate work, Sync is an outstanding contribution to the fields of cinema studies and sound theory”—Bhaskar Sarkar, Associate Professor, Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition, "Sync offers a much needed and thoroughly radical revision of debates around synchronization, opening up a range of different audiovisual modalities to political analysis, and breaking the stranglehold that existing forms of political discourse have had on discussions of sound–image relations. The author's key move has been to employ the notion of synch (sic) to address not only the relationships between sound and image in audiovisual media but also those between text and audience, focusing primarily on the experience of reception....[T]he approach adopted by Tobias is highly original.... [T]here is much to recommend this book which, in providing new perspectives on the political dimensions of audiovisuality, repays the close attention it demands." —Screen

James Tobias is Associate Professor of Cinema and Digital Media Studies in the English Department of the University of California, Riverside.