Film Music—What’s in a Name?

encouraged within the academic community, the study of film music has become a burgeoning multidisciplinary if not transdisciplinary endeavor. Today writers utilize not only the concepts and technical vocabularies of music and film making, but variously terms and concepts from musicology, film theory, media and communication studies, cultural studies, comparative literature, literary criticism, critical theory, philosophy, semiotics, psychology, cognitive science, sociology, feminist theory, gender studies, and marketing research— and that is probably not an exhaustive list of all the disciplines and areas represented. With the resulting profusion of technical language there is the potential for a veritable Babel. Like different languages, two disciplines may, for instance, have different terms for the same thing, and writers may