This book offers an approach to film music in which music and visuals are seen as equal players in the game. Meyer's musicology, this study treats music as a cinematic element and offers scholars and students of both music and film a set of tools to help them analyse the wide ranging impact that music has in films.

1. Introduction: Who Is Entitled To Study Film Music?.- 2. PART I: Pars Destruens - Chapter 2. The Not-So-Fantastical Gap between Music Studies and Film Studies.- 3. Recent Attempts to Bridge the Gap and Overcome a Separatism Conception.- 4. PART II: Pars Construens - Chapter 4. The Neoformalist Proposal.- 5. Film/Music Analysis I: Music, Gestalt, and Audiovisual Isomorphism.- 6. Film/Music Analysis II: Functions and Motivations of Music.- 7. PART III: Pars Demonstrans - Chapter 7. Five Illustrations of Film/Music Analysis.- 8. Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. The Extraterrestrial. The Bonding Power of Music.- 9. Recapitulation and Final Thoughts.

“Thirty years ago, Claudia Gorbman pioneered placing film music within regular film theory. Now it once again seems necessary to apply a theoretical frame which allows music to be treated as a cinematic device and not as autonomous music. Here Emilio Audissino couples neoformalism and Meyer’s musicology into an analytical tool that highlights the interplay between film and music. This book is indispensable for every scholar who wants to analyze and understand film music.” (Ann-Kristin Wallengren, Professor in Film Studies, Lund University, Sweden, and co-editor (with K.J. Donnelly) of Today’s Sounds for Yesterday’s Films: Making Music for Silent Cinema, 2016)