This special issue explores the multifaceted roles of music and sound in audiovisual culture and examines how sonic and visual elements interact to shape meaning, narrative, affect, atmosphere, identity, and cultural experience. Moving beyond approaches that treat music primarily as accompaniment to the image, the issue considers sound and music as active structuring components of audiovisual media. It welcomes contributions addressing film, TV, animation, video games, music video, documentary, digital/social media, audiovisual art, installation, and emerging immersive and interactive forms.

We invite historical, theoretical, analytical, ethnographic, technological, and practice-based approaches to the relationships between sound, music, and moving images. Topics may include film and media music, sound design, audiovisual synchronization and disjunction, soundscapes, listening practices, voice and speech, musical storytelling, sound and affect, technology and production, popular and transnational music cultures, archival and found sound, and the changing materialities of audiovisual media. Particular attention may be given to the ways in which digital technologies and new forms of media production are transforming practices of composition, recording, editing, listening, and audiovisual creation.

The issue also encourages interdisciplinary perspectives that reconsider the traditionally image-centred frameworks of audiovisual studies and foreground the cultural, social, embodied, and sensory dimensions of listening. Contributions may further explore questions of memory, identity, place, gender, migration, politics, and representation, as well as the ethical implications of contemporary sound and audiovisual technologies. By bringing together diverse methodological and disciplinary perspectives, the special issue aims to highlight the expanding possibilities through which music and sound contribute to the creation, circulation, and experience of audiovisual culture.