Editorial: Electroacoustic audiovisual composition and intermediality: Reconceptualising media relationships

Abstract

This editorial introduces the thematic issue on electroacoustic audiovisual composition and intermediality. It explores how intermediality, the dynamic integration of distinct media into an indissoluble bond of reciprocal meaning-making, reshapes the creation, perception and theorisation of audiovisual works. The editorial situates the call within Organised Sound ’s earlier engagement with sonic imagery and media pairing and distinguishes the intermedial space, a neutral perceptual domain where media features interact and may produce interference, from the compositional assumption that media are equal, a premise that contributors both take for granted and test. One contribution’s challenge to the intermedial framework raises a doubt the editorial leaves unresolved: not whether audiovisual composition needs intermediality to exist, but whether its practitioners are fully aware of the creative and critical potential intermedial thinking offers in practice, real fusion rather than the coexistence of separate media. The contributions cohere around four threads: the conceptual foundations of intermediality; the systems and technologies that couple media; the perceptual and embodied experience of audiovisual fusion; and questions of agency, ethics and memory.