sound and television

This assignment asks you to summarize, analyze and compare ONE of the readings 

from Week 7 – Sound & Television with ONE OTHER SCHOLARLY SOURCE you 

will find on your own. The summaries should encapsulate the author’s main 

arguments and illustrative examples, the analysis should provide a cogent 

assessment of these arguments, and most importantly the comparison should 

examine how their ideas or arguments of the two readings relate to and connect 

with each other in light of class discussions.

The reading of your choice should be directly relevant to the week’s topic and 

should illuminate one of the key points you are making about the summarized and 

analyzed course readings. This source MUST be a scholarly journal article sourced 

from the University of Toronto’s E-Resource collection. Therefore, sources that are 

NOT acceptable include articles from news magazines, trade journals, chapters 

from popular books, or articles sourced from academic web databases such as 

Researchgate or academia.edu. Please note that the appropriateness, quality and 

relevance of your chosen source will be a factor in the grading of this assignment.

Television Sound: Why the Silence?

Michele Hilmes

Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, Volume 2, Issue 2, Autumn
2008, pp. 153-161 (Article)

Published by Liverpool University Press

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by Wilfrid Laurier University at 08/10/10 1:50PM GMT

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/msm/summary/v002/2.2.hilmes.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/msm/summary/v002/2.2.hilmes.html

The field of sound studies has shown enormous growth over the past
fifteen years. Excellent work has recently appeared on many aspects of
sound in media, with particularly rapid development in the fields of
radio, film, popular music, and the historical development of sound
recording and listening cultures. Film sound, in particular, enjoys a
depth of analysis that has been building up since the 1980s. Video game
sound is beginning to receive the attention it deserves. Yet the one area
still strangely silent comprises the dominant medium of our times since
the 1940s: broadcast television. Why does television sound remain
neglected in academic study, despite a long history of professional and
industrial development? I will argue here that this omission is due to two
primary aspects of television: its roots in radio and subsequent basis in an
aesthetic of what I will call streaming seriality, and its fundamental differ-
ences from film as a subject of scholarship.

Television’s radio roots mandate an emphasis on sound over the
visual, as many have noted (see Ellis 1982, and Altman 1986); create an
historical legacy of enormous textual variation derived from a domi-
nantly aural originating context (as opposed to film’s dominantly visual
context);1 and engender a ‘live’ streaming transmission aesthetic, funda-
mentally imbricated in television’s characteristic seriality. Broadcast tele-
vision can be, at times, streamed completely live (viewed in the moment
an event is transmitted), recorded and transmitted (shot on film or video
but then subjected to ‘live’ streaming), or (most often) a mixture of both,
and of course all forms can now be recorded post-stream on tape, disc,
or as a digital file and re-presented in a number of ways. Yet broadcast
television, even when recorded, retains at all times markers of its basic
streaming structure, which in turn has a determining effect on the
medium’s variety and complexity of textual strategies and techniques.2

This leads to a complicated analytical situation, and ironically it could
be that scholars’ efforts to understand sound in the much more ‘closed’,
formalised, and visual situation of film have actually worked against an
understanding of the special circumstances and opportunities of televisual

MSMI 2:2 Autumn 08 153

1 Michel Chion recog-
nises this when he refers
to cinema as ‘a place of
images, plus sounds’,
with sound being ‘that
which seeks its place’ in
distinction to television
(Chion 1994: 68). In fact
he titles one section
‘Television’s Optional
Image’ and notes, ‘The
properly televisual is the
image as something
extra’ (ibid.: 159),
though without noting
television’s heritage from
radio.

2 Both John Ellis (1982)
and Raymond Williams
(1975), along with many
subsequent scholars,
note this ‘segmentation’
and ‘flow’ characteristic
of broadcast television,
though both, I believe,
go too far in attempting
to essentialise them as
an intrinsic, rather than
historically and cultur-
ally contingent, aspect
of ‘television’. Neither
notes the roots of tele-
vision’s narrative and
aesthetic structures in
the historical particu-
larities of radio broad-
casting, and both dismiss
the textual integrity of
television forms that,
despite their varied
diegetic levels (as I will
argue below), still retain
an integrity that is well
known both to viewers
and to those who
produce television’s
episodic series.

Television Sound:
Why the Silence?

MICHELE HILMES

sound overall. The term ‘film’ typically denotes a dominant textual form
(the narrative feature film), as well as a consistent medium (the materi-
ality of film itself), and a central, though changing, technology of produc-
tion, with modes of distribution and exhibition that can vary widely. The
same might be said of the music video, when considered on its own and
divorced from its televisual context, as it often is. The term ‘television’,
on the other hand, denotes a unified (until recently) mode of distribution
and exhibition, but specifically not a unified textual form, material
medium, nor technology of production. Thus, conflating ‘film’ and ‘tele-
vision’ as separate but equivalent media forms may have helped to
produce the scholarly silence, a particularly unfortunate one since
sound’s heightened importance in television makes its analysis all the
more necessary if we are to arrive at a better understanding of the
medium and its central expressive modes: subject to present-time inter-
ruptions; permeated with markers of the streamed transmission context;
never static but constantly flowing past and renewing itself in the present;
derived from fundamentally aural origins.

Attempts to examine TV sound to date have focused either on fictional
texts treated as filmic (despite difficulties which are usually simply
glossed over) or on the short, self-contained form of the music video,
framed by the conventions of popular music (see Donnelly 2005; and
Beebe and Middleton 2007). Other theorists, like Chion, pounce arbi-
trarily upon one limited type of televisual text – in his case, sport – and
leave the rest implicit (1994: 61). ‘Television’ has no ur-text, no one
dominant form like the narrative feature film, and it is much more
strongly tied than film to the representation and transmission of real-life
events, ‘live’ as they occur. These characteristics of broadcasting cannot
simply be chalked up to technology but must be understood as part of
television’s cultural role; during the days of early radio the transmission
of recorded sound was actively discouraged, for political and social
reasons, and the transmission of any and all ‘live’ programming actively
rewarded by regulatory benefits. This did not begin to change in radio
until the late 1930s. Early TV, as well, had its reasons for retaining a live
serial streaming aesthetic – competition between networks and defense
against possible dominance by Hollywood studios, in the US; expense
and resistance to cultural intrusion in many other countries – though
filmed programmes always made up a certain amount of televisual fare,
becoming prevalent in the US by the early 1960s.

Thanks to such historical conditions, broadcast forms span a wide
variety of uses, genres, aesthetics, and modes of address, drawn from a
broad scope of events and performances either created or adapted for
the medium, all central to the multiple textuality of television and impos-

154 2:2 Autumn 08 MSMI

Michele Hilmes ♦ Television Sound: Why the Silence?

sible to marginalise. This contrasts with our rather homogeneous under-
standing of ‘film’ which certainly has been and still is (as a material
medium) used for recording sporting events, preserving news actualities,
shooting televised dramas, comedies, documentaries and quiz shows –
indeed, most television until very recently was actually produced on film.
Now both are moving to digital, and the differences between the two can
be more clearly seen to rest in historically contingent and shifting
practices (both industrial and scholarly) rather than essential qualities.
The study of sound in video games, proceeding apace, also helps to bring
attention to TV sound since it too breaks open some of the arbitrary
conventions upon which our understandings of film sound are based.

So how can we dig ourselves out of this hole and bring some produc-
tive attention to TV sound – attention which I believe will be useful for
understanding other forms of media as well as they develop in the
‘streaming’ digital age, including film? First, we must begin to define our
object of study more clearly, making distinctions between the various
types of television text rather than attempting to generalise and essen-
tialise as we have permitted ourselves to do with ‘film’. Second, we must
recognise the very different and complex role that sound plays in televi-
sion, as distinct from that in film. Especially important to consider is the
prominence and importance of metadiegetic and extradiegetic sound
(nondiegetic narration, particularly) in television’s varied levels of textu-
ality – episodic text, series text, and supertext3 – that grew out of the
broadcast environment as institutionalised in the days of radio.

The Non-reductiveness of Television

To address the first point: distinctions between the various types of tele-
vision texts must take the specific historical evolution of television into
account, along with a nuanced understanding of their conditions of
production and reception. Thus, just to begin a complicated process, we
must distinguish fictional/dramatic forms, such as the drama series,
sitcom, mini-series, made-for-TV movie, etc., from the non-fictional
forms that make up so much of television’s output. Television’s fictional
forms, of course, owe much to the aesthetics of film, and film-based
theories can take us a large part of the way through our analysis. But they
also derive from the aesthetics and textual forms of radio, complicating
film-based analytical categories, as will be discussed below.

However, non-fictional forms make up a majority of the material
created for and distributed through television – news and documentary,
sports, reality programmes, game shows and contests, broadcasts of live

MSMI 2:2 Autumn 08 155

Michele Hilmes ♦ Television Sound: Why the Silence?

3 My use of the term
‘supertext’ owes some –
thing to Nick Browne’s
definition: those parts
of the ‘television text-
as-viewed’ that fall
outside the diegesis of
the episodic text and
mark the larger context
within which television
is produced, distributed,
and experienced (1984).
Here I am less concern –
ed with the concrete
aspects of the institu-
tional and economic
structure of television,
as Browne is, than with
the ways in which tele-
vision texts use sound
to bridge the different
textual levels and mark
them within the diegesis.

events of all descriptions, advertising, talk and discussion programmes –
and while these share some of the same aesthetic characteristics of their
fictional counterparts (and of their more extensively analysed counter-
parts in cinema, such as the documentary film), they must also be under-
stood as differing fundamentally in their use of sound.

For example, one of the key distinctions in film sound theory is
between the diegetic and nondiegetic use of sound.4 Diegetic sound, posi-
tioned as emanating from a source within the narrative world of the film,
fundamentally comprises dialogue and environmental sound/sound
effects, with diegetic music the relatively rare exception (for most film
genres). Though some excellent work has explored the cinematic work
of dialogue and narration,5 it is rare; most film sound studies have
focused on music – not surprising, perhaps, considering that the study of
music is itself an established discipline that gives its analysts a well
developed vocabulary to use and certain cultural parameters within
which to work. And it is non-diegetic music, the film score, that has
received the most attention, as the most ‘creative’ and distinctly sonic
part of the filmic audio/visual text. Certainly television employs musical
scoring practices similar to film (and many film composers developed
their skills in radio and also worked in television – radio’s influence on
the early film score and vice versa is an almost completely unexamined
field). However, with the majority of television programming flouting
almost all the textual assumptions made in this body of work, we must
clearly branch out.

Let us consider, for instance, the problems that a sports broadcast, say
a major league football game, presents to the analyst of television sound.
What is the diegesis here? Can we talk in terms of the ‘storyworld’ of the
football game? Clearly the diegetic/nondiegetic distinction does not work
well, but we would still want to mark some fundamental differences
between the sounds picked up from the event going on in the stadium –
which would include the noises made by the players, the crowd, the
stadium music, the stadium announcer6 – from the commentary
provided by the sports reporters and analysts, both those present on or
near the field and those back in the studio nowhere near the live event
though also an intrinsic part of the televisual one. Such participants
appear and disappear visually but remain consistently present aurally
and in fact interact with each other and with players in the diegetic
world, as Chion notes; in this they cross over between the classic
(nondiegetic) voice-over narrator and the (metadiegetic) in-text narra-
tives of participant narrators, yet they retain a strong diegetic function as
‘characters’ in the ‘game (episode) text’ as well.

Such elements differ again from the supertextual ‘interruptions’ of the

156 2:2 Autumn 08 MSMI

Michele Hilmes ♦ Television Sound: Why the Silence?

4 Though these terms of
analysis were developed
specifically for fictional
narrative films, they
have obvious relevance
to documentary and
non-fiction forms as well,
since all narratives,
whether fictional or
nonfictional, are
constructed and
organised as a narrative.

5 In particular see Sarah
Kozloff ’s two ground-
breaking works, Invisible
Storytellers (1988) and
Overhearing Film Dialogue
(2000).

6 The last three of these
categories represent
forms of television’s
ubiquitous ‘internal
audience’ identified by
Altman (1986: 57–60).

game text such as commercials, network and NFL promos, news updates,
scrolls containing scores of other sporting events taking place during the
game, and such materials. They also differ from the frequent irruptions
of the ‘NFL theme’, the ‘Fox Sports’ intros and bumpers, and the
recorded sequences from past games that form part of the ‘sports serial
text’ as a whole, not to mention the animated figure jumping up and
down intermittently in the corner of the screen. It seems that in a non-
fictional text, especially one in which ‘liveness’ is a crucial part of the
aesthetic, accepted categories must give way to first-order, second-order,
and perhaps even third-order diegetic elements, relating more to the
dimensions of the event as mutually understood by producers and
viewers than to anything intrinsic to ‘the-text-as-viewed’. Old unities do
not stand. Clearly, to borrow a term from Chion, this makes the ‘audio-
visual contract’ developed between television producers and their
viewers very complex indeed.

Or, for another example with perhaps more weighty implications than
the one above, take the case of a news broadcast. What are the diegetic
layers that exist in a typical broadcast, consisting of either filmed or live
action taking place on location with a reporter providing commentary
from that location, interviewing participants in the event (and in the case
of those speaking a different language, with someone unseen providing
a translation of that sound bite, perhaps with the actual voice of the inter-
viewee played underneath), and the narrative that surrounds it delivered
by news anchors at a desk thousands of miles away? Not to mention the
nondiegetic music now so much a part of the news experience along with
any number of nondiegetic visual/verbal elements such as scrolling text,
pop-up network IDs, etc. Documentary filmmakers have long struggled
with nondiegetic sound as somehow less authentic, as detracting from the
real, since the days of Flaherty and Grierson; this distinction is main-
tained in news programmes where ‘nondiegetic’ music may intrude over
network logos and anchors’ introductions, but is kept strictly out of the
news reports themselves: imagine 60 Minutes running an ominous
musical score beneath an interview with Fidel Castro, or Anderson
Cooper developing a distinctive leitmotif to introduce the appearance
and accompany the comments of each of his regular guests. So we do
maintain quite central and rigorously observed distinctions in non-
fictional television sound that relate in some way to the diegetic/non-
diegetic distinction, but so far we have developed a very poor vocabulary
for talking about it – when we talk about it at all.

Even in the more film-like arena of fictional programmes, the condi-
tions and practices of television complicate standard categories of
analysis. For instance, the laugh track has been a standard part of the

MSMI 2:2 Autumn 08 157

Michele Hilmes ♦ Television Sound: Why the Silence?

soundtrack for US comedy programmes, particularly for the sitcom, for
at least fifty years. What is the narrative status of this sound? Many
sitcoms are in fact shot before a live studio audience, a practice developed
during the days of radio comedy/variety programmes when performers
used to the vaudeville stage found themselves unable to perform well
without the immediate feedback of an amused crowd. Later, as recording
technologies developed, it became possible simply to dub in various kinds
of supplementary laughter in the post-production process, eliminating
unwelcome variables in audience response. We might think of the laugh
track as a form of metadiegetic sound – sound that seems to come both
from inside and outside the narrative world of the text (expressing a
character’s feelings, for instance) while possibly gesturing to the presence
of viewers and the constructedness of the text – yet the laugh track
gestures to the presence of a laughing audience completely distinct from
the one presently viewing the programme, unknown either to textual
actors or to the viewer: a third universe (distinct from the on-screen
‘internal audience’ of talk shows or sports events). It is clearly not part of
the sitcom storyworld even though actors might adjust their timing to
take account of prolonged laughter, yet it is an intrinsic part of the text-
as-viewed. It therefore blurs the boundaries of the diegetic, nondiegetic,
and metadiegetic – and if, while we laugh aloud in our living room at
such a moment, a computer-generated image of The Closer’s7 Deputy
Chief Brenda Johnson (Kyra Sedgwick) leaps up in the corner of our
screen, shines a flashlight around, and disappears, we have just experi-
enced a completely extratextual visual element as well, a category sure to
give film scholars apoplexy. What a medium!

Television’s Fundamental Seriality

As with video games, we require terms of analysis for television sound
(and narrative as well, I would argue) that take into account broad-
casting’s fundamental streaming seriality: present-time transmission
combined with episodic, often open-ended, structure. These two linked
attributes8 mandate a far higher presence of a far wider range of
extradiegetic narrative information, across all textual types and genres,
than is typical in film, with sound as a central element. Broadcast televi-
sion’s streaming transmission engenders the frequent use of a type of
sound I would define as supratextual, relating less to the specific
programme text being viewed than to the supertext understood as the
television viewing experience as a whole – the voice of the network
announcer touting upcoming shows, the ebullient narrator of commer-

158 2:2 Autumn 08 MSMI

Michele Hilmes ♦ Television Sound: Why the Silence?

7 Turner Network
Television series, 2005–
.

8 No one, as far as I
know, has explained the
historical link between
broadcasting’s streaming
transmission and the
structure of daily/
weekly/season seriality
that emerged early in
the 1920s. It was resisted
by the BBC, who stead-
fastly preferred a ‘special
events’ schedule to what
they called ‘fixed-point
scheduling’ until the
late 1930s. In the US,
the concept of the
regular daily or weekly
programme was in
place as early as 1923
on some stations.

cials, news bulletin interruptions, etc. These are all a part of television’s
live/streaming aesthetic inherited from radio. They make unusually
explicit and frequent use of direct address narration – speaking to ‘you’
the viewer – compared to cinema where such direct address is rare.

Besides these supratextual manifestations, also central to television’s
characteristic seriality is the use of metadiegetic sound to address the
viewer outside the storyworld of the specific episodic text foregrounded on
the screen at any given time, while remaining within the series text under-
stood as the entire narrative arc of the serial (usually broke up into
‘seasons’). The most notable example of this on television is the title song
and/or sequence, along with the ‘intros’ and ‘bumpers’ also derived from
radio practice. Like film opening title and closing credit sequences –
which have been little theorised – such uses of music and sound are
clearly nondiegetic, gesturing towards recognition of the supertext,9 yet
in television they frequently provide key information about the
programme’s basic narrative situation, characters, and plot elements that
are necessary for an intelligible reading of the episodic text.

This can become particularly important for long-running and narra-
tively complex serialised dramas. Take, for instance, the opening of the
Fox show Alias (2001–6). Over a montage of various action scenes
featuring lead actress Jennifer Garner, a voice (that we soon understand
as hers) breathlessly intones:

My name is Sidney Bristow. Seven years ago I was recruited by a secret
branch of the CIA called SD-6. I was sworn to secrecy, but I couldn’t keep
it from my fiancé. And when the head of SD-6 found out, he had him killed.
That’s when I learned the truth: SD-6 is not part of the CIA. I’ve been
working for the very people I thought I was fighting against. So, I went to
the only place that could help me take them down. Now I’m a double agent
for the CIA, where my handler is a man named Michael Vaughn. Only one
other person knows the truth about what I do, another double agent inside
SD-6. Someone I hardly know – my father.

This enigmatic and tantalising recap contains key information without
which the viewer would have serious difficulty following the narrative. It
lays out the basic storyworld of the series, occurring every week at the
very beginning of each episode broadcast, sometimes followed by an
immediate immersion into the episodic text, sometimes by rapidly cut-
together scenes from past episodes that provide further reminders of the
ever-unrolling series text. Then, very likely, we cut to commercial,
preceded by a ‘bumper’ with the ubiquitous announcer’s voice intoning,
‘Alias … brought to you by …’ and a bit later we are back, first to the
series textual level, with the show’s title music invoking mood over the

MSMI 2:2 Autumn 08 159

Michele Hilmes ♦ Television Sound: Why the Silence?

9 Rick Altman gestures
towards the notion of a
cinematic ‘supertext’ in
his essay ‘Film Sound –
All of It’, in which he
includes not only the
sound emanating from
the film itself but also the
sounds of projection, of
the theatre audience,
and even of the promo-
tional materials screened
before the feature, as
part of a film’s sonic
totality (1999).

unrolling credits, then finally to the diegetic world of the episodic text.
This kind of rapid alternation between levels of textuality, much of it
dependent on the soundtrack for cohesion, is unique to television and
traces its roots to techniques developed in radio in the 1930s and 40s.10

Some of these, but far from all of them, will be dropped (and replaced
with menu sequences, a new diegetic form dominated by sound) when
the series is released on DVD.

In many recent television dramas, a selected popular recording fills
the function of both theme song and a type of narrative/emotional
situation recap, such as the Rembrandts’ ‘I’ll Be There for You’ on
Friends, or The OC’s use of the song ‘California’ by the Phantom Planets.
Work is just emerging on the dramatically increasing use of popular song
tracks in television narratives, from Miami Vice to Nip/Tuck, drawing on
Jeff Smith’s key work on the role of popular music in film. His study
provides a model for consideration of the various linkages between the
popular music industry and the increasing use of songs in film, and gives
television scholars a good jumping-off point.

Conclusion

Yet, if this essay has driven home any single point, it is that television’s
complex and varied texts require a mode of analysis that draws on cate-
gories and concepts based on film study, but is not limited by them.
Sound is extremely important in television, but not for the ideological,
technological, or essentialised reasons that many scholars have imputed
to it. Once we understand that television owes its most basic narrative
structures, programme formats, genres, modes of address, and aesthetic
practices not to cinema but to radio – and once we begin to see television
not as a failed or lesser form of cinema but as a portfolio of inventive
narrative forms each with its own highly effective techniques, compre-
hensible to and highly valued by audiences around the world – we can
begin to appreciate the unique and complex narratives that television’s
sonically-oriented streamed seriality has made possible. Though
currently on the brink of change, as digital distribution replaces the
nearly 100-year history of over-the-air broadcast transmission, and
streaming is captured on DVD, digital downloads, TiVo menus, and
video-on-demand services, I believe it unlikely that audiences will be
willing to give up the dense, twisting, compelling, multi-layered and
aurally ingenious serial texts that are broadcast television’s cultural
legacy to whatever comes next. Cherchez le son.

160 2:2 Autumn 08 MSMI

Michele Hilmes ♦ Television Sound: Why the Silence?

10 I explored some
aspects of this multi-level
address in Chapter 4 of
Hollywood and Broad –
casting (1990), looking
at The Lux Radio Theatre.

References

Altman, Rick (1986) ‘Television/Sound’ in Tania Modleski (ed.) Studies in
Entertainment, Bloomington: Indiana University Press

— (1999) ‘Film Sound – All Of It’, iris: A Journal of Theory on Image and Sound
27, Spring, pp. 5–12

Beebe, Roger, and Middleton, Jason (eds.) (2007) Medium Cool: Music Videos from
Soundies to Cellphones, Durham, NC: Duke University Press

Browne, Nick (1984) ‘The Political Economy of the Television (Super) Text’,
Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 9:3, Summer, pp. 183–95

Chion, Michel (1994) Audio-Vision: Sound On Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia
Gorbman, New York: Columbia University Press

Donnelly, K. J. (2005) The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and Television, London:
BFI

Ellis, John (1982) Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video, London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul

Hilmes, Michele (1990) Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable, Urbana:
University of Illinois Press

Kozloff, Sarah (1988) Invisible Storytellers, Berkeley: University of California
Press

— (2000) Overhearing Film Dialogue, Berkeley: University of California Press

Smith, Jeff (1998) The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music, New
York: Columbia University Press

Williams, Raymond (1975) Television: Technology and Cultural Form, New York:
Schocken Books

MSMI 2:2 Autumn 08 161

Michele Hilmes ♦ Television Sound: Why the Silence?