Aural Appearances

Chapter one sets up the industrial contexts in which executive producers, music supervisors, game designers, and tech/wireless executives labored to create the aural appearances of television series, games, and portable devices. In chapter two, I turn my attention to the ways that the executive producers and music supervisors on the Showtime series Queer as Folk and The L Word used popular music to represent queer sexualities and queer communities in American pay cable television. In chapter three, I move from pay cable series to more mainstream texts. I argue that music supervisors in the television and gaming industries worked with executive producers, game publishers, and game developers to construct surgical aesthetics in prime time medical dramas and to construct an embodied aesthetics of game play. In chapter four, I examine how music supervisors and executive producers and wireless/tech firms used the aural appearances of popular music in order to construct the settings of television drama and the places in which portable technologies were used.