Dario Martinelli – författare

What You See Is What You Hear develops a unique model of analysis that helps students and advanced scholars alike to look at audiovisual texts from a fresh perspective. Adopting an engaging writing style, the author draws an accessible picture of the field, offering several analytical tools, historical background, and numerous case studies.

Divided into five main sections, the monograph covers problems of definitions, history, and most of all analysis. The first part raises the main problems related to audiovisuality, including taxonomical and historical questions. The second part provides the bases for the understanding of audiovisual creative communication as a whole, introducing a novel theoretical model for its analysis. The next three part focus elaborate on the model in all its constituents and with plenty of case studies taken from the field of cinema, TV, music videos, advertising and other forms of audiovisuality.

Methodologically, the book is informed by different paradigms of film and media studies, multimodality studies, structuralism, narratology, “auteur theory” in the broad sense, communication studies, semiotics, and the so-called “Numanities.”

What You See Is What You Hear enables readers to better understand how to analyze the structure and content of diverse audiovisual texts, to discuss their different idioms, and to approach them with curiosity and critical spirit.

This book is a thorough analysis of Alfred Hitchcock''s Rope (1948) and of its multiple connections with the Leopold and Loeb murder case and the adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s eponymous play. 

As an all-encompassing portrait of the movie, the book discusses its aesthetics, style, role within cinema history, challenges in  production, innovations introduced and of course Hitchcock’s signature features. However, as the analysis unfolds, the film reveals itself as an actual journey through the nightmares and the hopes that characterized the 20th century. Nazism and anti-Nazism, antisemitism, homophobia, democracy and totalitarianism, capital punishment and second chances, human rights, World War II, misogyny, tolerance and discrimination, Supermanism and humanism, artistic freedom and censorship. Subtly, often between the lines, and with Hitchcock''s usual dark humor, Rope is nevertheless a much stronger social and political statementthan it was ever given credit for. 

The Intertextual Knot is aimed at a varied readership, including film scholars, historians, philosophers and film enthusiasts.

The Beatles and the Beatlesque address a paradox emanating from The Beatles’ music through a cross-disciplinary hybrid of reflections, drawing from both, musical practice itself and academic research. Indeed, despite their extreme stylistic variety, The Beatles’ songs seem to always bear a distinctive identity that emerges even more in similar works by other artists, whether they are merely inspired, derivative or explicitly paying homage.  The authors, a musicologist and music producer, emphasize the importance of record production in The Beatles'' music in a way that does justice not only to the final artifacts (the released songs) but also to the creative process itself (i.e., the songs "in the making").

The book is the first annotated reader to focus specifically on the discipline of zoosemiotics. Zoosemiotics can be defined today as the study of signification, communication and representation within and across animal species. The name for the field was proposed in 1963 by the American semiotician Thomas A. Sebeok. He also established the framework for the paradigm by finding and tightening connections to predecessors, describing terminology, developing methodology and setting directions for possible future studies.The volume includes a wide selection of original texts accompanied by editorial introductions. An extensive opening introduction discusses the place of zoosemiotics among other sciences as well as its inner dimensions; the understanding of the concept of communication in zoosemiotics, the heritage of biologist Jakob v. Uexküll; contemporary developments in zoosemiotics and other issues. Chapter introductions discuss the background of the authors and selected texts, as well as other relevant texts.The selected texts cover a wide range of topics, such as semiotic constitution of nature, cognitive capabilities of animals, typology of animal expression and many other issues. The roots of zoosemiotics can be traced back to the works of David Hume and John Locke. Great emphasis is placed on the heritage of Thomas A. Sebeok, and a total of four of his essays are included. The Reader also includes influential studies in animal communication (honey bee dance language, vervet monkey alarm calls) as well as theory elaborations by Gregory Bateson and others. The reader concludes with a section dedicated to contemporary research. Readings in Zoosemiotics is intended as a primary source of information about zoosemiotics, and also provides additional readings for students of cognitive ethology and animal communication studies.

The book aims to introduce a research concept called "Numanities", as one possible attempt to overcome the current scientific, social and institutional crisis of the humanities.

Such crisis involves their impact on, and role within, society; their popularity among students and scholars; and their identity as producers and promoters of knowledge. The modern western world and its economic policies have been identified as the strongest cause of such a crisis. Creating the conditions for, but in fact encouraging it.

However, a self-critical assessment of the situation is called for. Our primary fault as humanists was that of stubbornly thinking that the world’s changes could never really affect us, as – we felt – our identity was sacred.

Therefore, more than a theoretical program, Numanities intend to pursue a mission, and that is summarized in a seven-point manifesto.

In the light of these premises and reflections, the book then proceeds to identify the areas of inquiry that Numanities, in their functions and comprehensive approach, seek to cover. The following list should also be understood as a statement of purposes for this entire book series. These, in other words, will be the topics/areas we intend to represent.

In the first case-study the author discussed the most typical result (or perhaps cause?) of the technophobic attitude that was addressed in the first part of the book: the issue of “authenticity”, as applied, in the author''s particular study, to popular music. In the second case-study, he analyzes two different forms of comparative analysis between human and non-human cognition: like in the former case, this study, too, is aimed at a critical commentary on (what the author considers) redundant biases in current humanistic research – anthropocentrism and speciesism.

This monograph offers a unique analysis of social protest in popular music. It presents theoretical descriptions, methodological tools, and an approach that encompasses various fields of musicology, cultural studies, semiotics, discourse analysis, media studies, and political and social sciences. 

The author argues that protest songs should be taken as a musical genre on their own. He points out that the general approach, when discussing these songs, has been so far that of either analyzing the lyrics or the social context. For some reason, the music itself has been often overlooked.

This book attempts to fill this gap. Its central thesis is that a complete overview of these repertoires demands a thorough interaction among contextual, lyrical, and musical elements together. To accomplish this, the author develops a novel model that systemizes and investigates musical repertoires. The model is then applied to four case studies, those, too, chosen among topicsthat are little (or not at all) frequented by scholars.