The Media Studies Commission is proud to announce the research paper How Music Shapes the News: A Postcolonial Look at Polygoon Newsreels, 1930-87 by Emily Hansell Clark from the University of Amsterdam, is now available to download and read.

In her research, Clark has investigated the use of background music in transnational audiovisual news reports qualified as colonial, which are part of the archival collections of the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision. She has made use of digital tools from data science and music information retrieval to isolate music and non-linguistic sound as an object of study. Her research allows for a deeper understanding of the multisensory ways in which public narratives of historical events were created and consumed, opening these up to ‘polyvocal’ interpretations.