This book explores the relationship between words and music in contemporary texts, asking how new technologies are changing the literature-music relationship. Its interdisciplinary structure draws from semiotics, musicology, psychoanalysis, music cognition, emotion and affect, cosmopolitanism, globalization, ethnicity, and biraciality. It ranges from critical analyses of the representation of music in contemporary novels, to examination of the forms and cultural meanings of contemporary intermedia and multimedia works. Smith also theorizes cross-culturality in the word and music relationship. This book will be of interest to the fields of Literature, Music, New Media, and Performance.

Hazel Smith is a Research Professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. She is author of The Writing Experiment: strategies for innovative creative writing, Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara: difference, homosexuality, topography and other academic books. Hazel is also a poet, performer and new media artist. Her website is at www.australysis.com

Introduction: The Literature-Music Relationship: Past, Present and Future 1. Musical Imaginaries, Disability and the Real in Vikram Seth's An Equal Music 2. Glocal Imaginaries and Musical Displacements in Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing 3. Voice, Improvisation, Cross-culturality 4. The Rhythm of Living: Kurt Elling's songtalk 5. The Voice in Computer Music and its Relationship to Place, Identity and Community 6. New Media Miscegenations: Sound and Screen Synergies in New Media Writing Coda