Background to Images and Sounds
Still from Images and Sounds video annotation: Scanning Scenes by Carol Lorac
The advent of the information society has triggered profound structural changes that affect all aspects of society from industrial activity to culture and quality of life. The need to understand and profit from this technological change poses formidable challenges to the UK, Europe and the rest of the world. Analysts now point out that this technological change is “driving up the value of all forms of intangible assets – brands and reputations, intellectual property, software, media content, and talent.
Investment in human talent and their mastery of communication, in many forms, has become a key factor in the eventual creation of a knowledge-based society. Purely textual material is increasingly found to be inadequate for communicating, locally or globally, information that requires showing as well as telling. Rapid authoring and communication of richer content – multimedia material, which includes sound, moving and still pictures, as well as text, is now both possible and essential.
This requires the development of knowledge pertaining to audiovisual and multimedia composing and appropriate delivery systems for authoring and distributing audiovisual and multimedia communications. This research and development project is defining how a universal use of audiovisual and multimedia composing can be understood and exploited; and how innovative delivery systems can be utilized.
