Audiovisual Literacy and the Anthropology of Music
Nick Poulakis
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece
Hellenic Open University, Greece
Zoi-Danai Tzamtzi
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece
Abstract
The paper presents three examples of ethnomusicological documentaries, all dealing with music cultures but deriving from diverse methodological viewpoints and techniques, to analyze how music, sound, and other aural dimensions of ethnographic films could enhance audiovisual literacy practices. The main focus of this review is on the cinematic representation of the nonrepresentational art of music to establish awareness of image-sound literacy and seek a balance between visual and audio channels in contemporary multimedia contexts. The purpose of this interpretation is to investigate how the visual matches with the aural aspects in these ethnographic documentaries and to inaugurate alternative approaches to handle the relationship between sonic and optical film narration. In this respect, our study attempts to critically expand the idea of “visual literacy” to a more comprehensive concept of “audiovisual literacy,” offering a more holistic approach to understand and communicate multimodal phenomena.
Keywords: audiovisual literacy, music anthropology, ethnomusicological film, ethnographic documentary