ABSTRACT
The reasons for this lacuna are complex. A recurrent argument proposes that, in comparison to cinema which requires sustained and intense concentration, broadcast television is regulated by the limited attention span of the viewer. In the now classic work, Visible Fictions (1992), John ellis explains that, when watching television, the spectator ‘glances rather than gazes at the screen; attention is sporadic rather than sustained’.3 He also outlines how broadcast TV ‘offers a small image of low definition, to which sound is crucial in holding the spectator’s attention’.4 One could speculate that ellis’s perception of low-definition and smaller TV images will
be transformed in an era where widescreen TV and high definition broadcasting are becoming more prevalent, but his concept of sound as fundamental to the impact of television suggests its importance as a point of study. A similar idea is posited by kevin Donnelly who observes that music in television is the ‘prevailing agent of control’,5 and, because audiences often do something else while the television is on, ‘[w]e listen to television sometimes more than we watch it’.6
