Stay Tuned - by Patrick Sullivan (Paperback)

About the Book

In Stay Tuned, Patrick Sullivan treats network-era television sound as a formative texture of aesthetic life in postwar America. He analyzes television's iconic sounds, such as the laugh track and Hanna-Barbera Productions' sound effects, as formal interventions, which redefine what aesthetics is when form is mass-produced, commercial, and built for syndication.

Book Synopsis

Since the 1950s, television flooded the American soundscape with not just pictures but sounds, a constant aural stream infiltrating domestic life. In Stay Tuned, Patrick Sullivan treats network-era television sound not as background noise or auxiliary signal but as a formative texture of aesthetic life in postwar America. He theorizes how television's sonic forms--asynchronous audiovisuals, noises, affective rhythms, what he collectively terms "network aurality"--trouble traditional aesthetic theory. Stay Tuned takes up critiques of television sound and repurposes them as evidence of a deeper philosophical discomfort: Namely, that television sound does something to aesthetic categories that they weren't built to handle. From the laugh track to the cartoon "boinks," from noises to the jingle, Sullivan reads television sounds not as cultural detritus but as formal interventions--forcing a redefinition of what aesthetics means when form is mass-produced, commercial, and built for syndication. What emerges is not just a new theory and history of television sound but a reimagined account of aesthetic experience itself--expanded, recalibrated, and a little wacky.

Review Quotes

"Stay Tuned may promise to study sound seriously but I recommend you also read it to study Sullivan's writing. He is a scholarly writer that entertains--his writing is evocative, jazz-influenced, enticing. Come for the sound, stay for the style."

"With a catholic sensibility, deep knowledge of technology, and encyclopedic realm of reference, he traces television's penetration into our shared sonic lifeworlds and shows us how we have been affected, moved, swayed, and calibrated. This book will stimulate the next generation of research into TV sound."

About the Author

PATRICK SULLIVAN is an assistant professor of performance and visual studies at Texas A&M University.