The Soundtrack Album: Listening to Media

Book Description:

The Soundtrack Album: Listening to Media offers the first sustained exploration of the soundtrack album as a distinctive form of media.

Soundtrack albums have been part of our media and musical landscape for decades, enduring across formats from vinyl and 8-tracks to streaming playlists. This book makes the case that soundtrack albums are more than promotional tools for films, television shows, or video games― they are complex media texts that reward a detailed analysis. The collection's contributors explore a diverse range of soundtrack albums, from Super Fly to Stranger Things, revealing how these albums change our understanding of the music and film industries and the audio-visual relationships that drive them.

An excellent resource for students of Music, Media Studies, and Film/Screen Media courses, The Soundtrack Album offers interdisciplinary perspectives and opens new areas for exploration in music and media studies.

Author Bio:

Paul N. Reinsch is a media historian whose pedagogy and scholarly work often address sound and argues for the intersection of history and theory in accounting for this neglected component of media. Paul earned two degrees in Literature before earning and Masters and Ph.D. in media studies. Paul has taught courses on adaptation, media sound, theatre history, film history (US and international), film theory, theatre theory, research methods, genre (the musical, the western), and specific film directors such as Kathryn Bigelow and Brian De Palma. Paul is the author of A Critical Bibliography of Shirley Jackson, an editor of The Soundtrack Album: Listening to Media, and Python beyond Python: Critical Engagement with Culture. His work has also appeared in journals such as Music and the Moving Image, Spectrum: A Journal on Black Men, Quarterly Review of Film and Video and Flow and edited collections such as Kedi: A Docalogue, The Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening, and From Madea to Media Mogul: Critical Perspectives on Tyler Perry. He has also worked as a film reviewer, movie theater popcorn peddler, and researcher for American Movie Classics.