Great Expectations? The Changing Role of Audiovisual Incongruence in Contemporary Multimedia

Film-music combinations that have been labeled as inappropriate, misfitting, or incongruent are often also described as unexpected audiovisual pairings. Various strands of academic research observe a prevalence of such constructions in contemporary multimedia, which arguably implies that such pairings are less surprising or unexpected than they once might have been. This article identifies three types of audiovisual incongruence from recent multimedia, and discusses these in relation to psychological theories of expectation and ideas from semiotics, which facilitate consideration of any potential disjunction between authorial intent and perceiver reception of a work.