Ubiquitous Musics offers a multidisciplinary approach to the pervasive presence of music in everyday life. The essays address a variety of situations in which music is present alongside other activities and does not demand focused attention from (sometimes involuntary) listeners. The contributors present different theoretical perspectives on the increasing ubiquity of music and its implications for the experience of listening. The collection consists of nine essays divided into three sections: Histories, Technologies, and Spaces. The first section addresses the historical origins of functional music and the debates on how reproduced music, including a wide range of styles and genres, spread so quickly across so many environments. The second section focuses on more contemporary sound technologies, including mobile phones in India, the role of visible playback technology in film, and listening to portable digital players. The final section reflects on settings such as malls, stores, gyms, offices and cars in which ubiquitous musics are often present, but rarely thought about. This last section - and ultimately the whole collection - seeks to foster a wider understanding of listening practices by lending a fresh, critical ear.

Ubiquitous Musics offers a multidisciplinary approach to the pervasive presence of music in everyday life. The essays address a variety of situations in which music is present alongside other activities and does not demand focused attention from (sometimes involuntary) listeners. The contributors present different theoretical perspectives on the increasing ubiquity of music and its implications for the experience of listening. The collection consists of nine essays divided into three sections: Histories, Technologies, and Spaces. The first section addresses the historical origins of functional music and the debates on how reproduced music, including a wide range of styles and genres, spread so quickly across so many environments. The second section focuses on more contemporary sound technologies, including mobile phones in India, the role of visible playback technology in film, and listening to portable digital players. The final section reflects on settings such as malls, stores, gyms, offices and cars in which ubiquitous musics are often present, but rarely thought about. This last section - and ultimately the whole collection - seeks to foster a wider understanding of listening practices by lending a fresh, critical ear.

Music is central to any film, creating a tone for the movie that is just as vital as the visual and narrative components. In recent years, racial and gender diversity in film has exploded, and the making of musical scores has changed drastically.
"Hearing Film" offers the first critical examination of music in the films of the 1980s and 1990s and looks at the burgeoning role of compiled scores in the shaping of a film . In the first section, "A Woman Scored," Kassabian analyzes desire and agency in the music of such films as "Dangerous" "Liaisons, Desert Hearts, Bagdad Cafe, Dirty Dancing" and "Thelma and Louise." In "At the Twilight's Last Scoring," she looks at gender, race, sexuality and assimilation in the music of "The Hunt for Red October, Lethal Weapon 2" and "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom." And finally, in "Opening Scores," she considers how films such as "Dangerous Minds, The Substitute, Mississippi Masala" and "Corrina, Corrina" bring together several different entry points of identification through their scores.
Kassabian ensures that modern film criticism has a new chapter written through this book. Her important and long-overdue analysis is not to be ignored. Also includes 11 musical examples.

Hearing Film offers the first criticla examination of musci in the films of the 1980s (including Dirty Dancing and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) and 1990s (including Thelma and Louise and The Hunt for Red October) and looks at the burgeoning role of compiled scores in the shaping of a film.

How does the constant presence of music in modern life - on iPods, in shops and elevators, on television - affect the way we listen? With so much of this sound, whether imposed or chosen, only partially present to us, is the act of listening degraded by such passive listening? In "Ubiquitous Listening", Anahid Kassabian investigates the many sounds that surround us and argues that this ubiquity has led to different kinds of listening. Kassabian argues for a new examination of the music we do not normally hear (and by implication, that we do), one that examines the way it is used as a marketing tool and a mood modulator, and exploring the ways we engage with this music.

The study of music is ancient, but the disciplined study of music dates back only some two centuries, and began by adapting discourse from pre-existing methods of science and the values of the arts. In the course of the 20th-century, such fields as musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory and composition have become separate disciplines, each taught and perpetuated by their own professional societies. Music has thus followed the common tendency of Western culture to divide its experience into branches of thought, but is has not yet become saturated with the self-critical historical scholarship that now dominates other disciplines. This diverse collection of essays argues for and demonstrates the effort to redefine the methods, goals and scope of musical scholarship. It gives voice to new directions in music studies, including traditional and ""new"" musicology, music and psychoanalysis, music and film, popular music studies, and gay and lesbian studies. Influenced by ongoing debates about disciplinarity, it explores the emerging and receding paradigms in the field as it accounts for the status of music disciplines in the early 1990s and points ahead to the course of musical scholarship in the coming decades. These essays speak to music study from within its own languages and enter into important conversations already taking place across disciplinary boundaries throughout the academy.

How does the constant presence of music in modern life - on iPods, in shops and elevators, on television - affect the way we listen? With so much of this sound, whether imposed or chosen, only partially present to us, is the act of listening degraded by such passive listening? In "Ubiquitous Listening", Anahid Kassabian investigates the many sounds that surround us and argues that this ubiquity has led to different kinds of listening. Kassabian argues for a new examination of the music we do not normally hear (and by implication, that we do), one that examines the way it is used as a marketing tool and a mood modulator, and exploring the ways we engage with this music.

As the first collection of new work on sound and cinema in over a decade, Lowering the Boom addresses the expanding field of film sound theory and its significance in rethinking historical models of film analysis. The contributors consider the ways in which musical expression, scoring, voice-over narration, and ambient noise affect identity formation and subjectivity. Lowering the Boom also analyzes how shifting modulation of the spoken word in cinema results in variations in audience interpretation. Introducing new methods of thinking about the interaction of sound and music in films, this volume also details avant-garde film sound, which is characterized by a distinct break from the narratively based sound practices of mainstream cinema. This interdisciplinary, global approach to the theory and history of film sound opens the eyes and ears of film scholars, practitioners, and students to film's true audio-visual nature.