Cultural practices, social identities, and lived experiences are replicated and represented in the interaction between music and screen media—including film, television, video games, and digital platforms. Beyond its traditional role as visual accompaniment, music is fundamental to (re)constructing meaning, negotiating identity, and mediating audience engagement.

By complementing methodological rigor with substantive engagement in issues of ethnicity, nationality, and cultural representation, we aim to encourage scholarship that is both analytical and socially meaningful, addressing the cultural politics, traditions, and embodied experiences that music mediates in screen media.

We approach ethnographic perspectives not merely as a research methodology, but as a framework for exploring how music shapes lived experience, traditions, and collective identities in screen media. This perspective underscores sensitivity to cultural politics: how sound and image construct belonging, otherness, and memory, and how such representations are created, circulated, and debated. 

Call for Papers deadline: 30 November 2025. Please click the link in the event title for the full call for papers.

MSMI’s editors, the RMA Sound on Screen Study Group, Liverpool University Press, and the Royal Northern College of Music are excited to invite you to Manchester from 15-17 July 2026 for 'Sound on Screen V' and the symposium 'Re/sounding Visions: Music, Sound, and the Moving Image at 20'. The two strands will be interwoven and delegates able to attend anything. You may submit proposals for either or both 'Re/sounding Visions' and 'Sound on Screen V'. In-person attendance is encouraged and there will also be a hybrid option (pre-recorded video presentations plus online attendance and, where possible, live Q&As).