Rethinking singing on screen: the case for contemporary American ‘screensong’ across the film musical, music television and the music video

Abstract

The last 20 years have seen extensive scholarship on changing audiovisual aesthetics and the blurring boundaries between all screen media. This article draws on this scholarship and engages with critical debates around the musical genre to examine contemporary song-based screen media. While song and singing have a long history across film, television and video, the digital convergence era has engendered new types of song performance and song-based screen formats. To understand the complex connections and exchanges between different forms of singing on screen, this article develops a new evaluative and conceptual framework. I propose the term screensong to refer to audiovisual representations of singing performance across screen-based media. This article understands screensong as both a broad category of song-based screen texts, genres and formats and as a particular type of song-driven, highly commodified, audiovisual and narrative unit – the screensong – prevalent in contemporary American popular screen media.

Features of Singing in Chinese Pop and Traditional Music: the Influence of the Music Genre on Vocal Music

“…This promotes the use of shouting, openness of sounds, and the extension of syllables during performance. The special intonation of traditional compositions contributes to the molding of falsetto sounds, grace notes, and the expressiveness of individual phrases (MACROSSAN, 2021). Pop songs also display a national style, which is evident in the songs' folk manner (CHEN and YAN, 2019).…”