ABSTRACT
As the editors noted in their introduction to this volume, there is a dearth of academic writing that addresses the subject of sound in television, and virtually nothing that speaks to sound in genre television. Given this state of affairs, I trust I can be forgiven for opening with a quotation from film sound theorist Michel Chion, who once claimed of film that, “there is no soundtrack.” 1 Here, Chion is making a (somewhat polemical) statement about the relative importance of images and sound in film. By emphasizing the fact that an isolated soundtrack cannot tell a complete story in and of itself, Chion points to the importance of the constitutive relationship between image and sound in film. He refers to this moment of meeting as synchresis, a “spontaneous and irresistible weld produced between a particular auditory phenomenon and visual phenomenon when they occur at the same time.” 2 Whether they choose to view this vertical relationship as interdependence or subservience—because cinema frequently has been presumed to be a visual medium, sound has been described as “serving” the image—film scholars generally appreciate that sound has a critical function in making heterogeneous film narratives believable, in stitching together the myriad pieces, generally filling in the semantic blanks. Notwithstanding the many differences between television and film, scholarship on this cinematic pairing of sound and image does raise questions that are paramount to both: Can sound change how an image “appears”? What perceptual effects might arise at the moment that the two meet?
