
He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Stay Tuned: Listening to the Network Era, with the following results:
When you get to page 99, you will find a discussion of the sitcom’s laugh track and how it differs from other empathetic sound, i.e., non-diegetic music. Both music and the laugh track help us judge the emotional register of a scene—a sort of priming or cueing—but the laugh track goes beyond merely prompting us to an intended response. The laugh track grounds an assessment of the show—what the book takes as an aesthetic judgment—into its very soundtrack, so our response to the laugh track is not simply to emotional priming but also to aesthetic assessment, a sort of “do I or do I not find this moment of the sitcom funny.” And as the 99th page’s chapter title, “Laughter’s Labor,” suggests, what is interesting about the laugh track is not whether you agree with the laugh track or that it worked but rather that it raises the work of aesthetic assessment in the first place.Learn more about Stay Tuned at the Rutgers University Press website.
While page 99 would not give the browser the book’s investment in formally reading television sounds nor the production histories surrounding the sounds, it does give them a sense of the intellectual stakes: the commitment to treating aesthetic theory as important to television studies and vice versa. This page works towards understanding how laugh tracks trouble aesthetic judgments, the mental process of experiencing the world through our senses, reflecting on that experience, and assigning a value to it. Other chapters address different aspects of aesthetic experience through different sound—Hanna-Barbera cartoon sound effects and comprehension as well as noises and contemplation. This troubling is not to suggest that these sounds of television aesthetically fail nor that aesthetic theory fails to help us grasp them. Rather, the book uses the tension, which in popular discourse often gets expressed in terms of value, between them to stage a recalibration of aesthetic theory and a reevaluation of the work the sounds of network-era television perform. While the particularities of aesthetic judgment, contemplation, and comprehension are worked out in detail through the chapters, the broader frame of the tension between aesthetic theory, evaluation of television sounds, and formal analysis are covered in the introduction, “The Trouble with Television Sound.” Finally, while I am biased and love every page in its own right, I recommend the browser turn to page 71.
--Marshal Zeringue









