Exchange Talk: TV Sound Design is the New Score: Fresh Approaches to Audiovisual Analysis

This exchange talk showcases recent scholarship by Professors Steve Halfyard and Nicholas Reyland, expanding on their 2024 Palgrave Handbook of Music and Sound in Peak TV. Their talks argue that in contemporary television, sound design often functions as dynamically as a traditional musical score, shaping narrative, character, and audience perception. Together, the talks demonstrate how close listening to television’s sonic environments reveals new dimensions of storytelling and redefines the role of music and sound in the Peak TV era.

Climate Change, Control, Denial, Catastrophe – and The Wire 

Nicholas Reyland focuses on The Wire (2002–2008), highlighting how its subtle sonic “climates” deepen the show’s ethnographic portrait of Baltimore. Beyond dialogue and plot, shifting ambient textures mark power dynamics and character agency: some figures manipulate their acoustic surroundings, while others are overwhelmed by them, experiencing “climate change” or “climate catastrophe.” Reyland links this to the series’ emphasis on surveillance, urging a “reduced listening” that attends to sound in screen drama and characterization.

Severance through Convergence: The In(nie)s and Out(ie)s of Music, Sound, and a Fantastic Diegesis 

Steve Halfyard turns to Severance (2022–), tracing how small, seemingly natural sounds—most notably a glitch accompanying the title card and the elevator’s distinctive “ding”—interweave with the main musical theme. These motifs blur boundaries between music and sound effect, symbolizing the psychological split between employees’ “Innie” and “Outie” identities and their search for self-knowledge.

Bio

Prof. Steve Halfyard is Head of BMus programmes at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow. Their research is mainly focused on music in horror/supernatural and superhero films and TV, and publications include Danny Elfman’s Batman: A Film Score Guide (2004), Sounds of Fear and Wonder: Music in Cult TV (2016) and the edited collections Music, Sound and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2010), Music in Fantasy Cinema (2012), and The Palgrave Handbook to Music and Sound in Peak TV (2024). Other essays have appeared in journals and edited collections including The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire, and the forthcoming volumes The Routledge Companion to the Superhero and

The Oxford Handbook of Television Music. Steve is co-editor of the Palgrave Studies in TV Music and Sound.

Professor Nicholas Reyland is Head of Undergraduate Programmes at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. A musicologist with research expertise in screen scoring and music since 1900, his publications include Zbigniew Preisner’s “Three Colors” Trilogy: A Film Score Guide, Music and Narrative since 1900, Lutosławski’s Worlds, Music, Analysis, and the Body, a special issue of Music Analysis dedicated to film, and The Palgrave Handbook of Music and Sound in Peak TV. His work has appeared in Music Analysis, Music & Letters, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, Twentieth-Century Music, The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media, and The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound. He is a co-editor of the Palgrave Studies in TV Music and Sound and the journal Music, Sound, and the Moving Image.