Audio Introductions

Audio introductions provide additional auditory information to audio-visual media texts and can be listened to before watching a film or performance. Audio introductions have been around since the 1980s. They were first trialed in the US but have also been established in Europe since the early 1990s (see Di Giovanni 2014: 1). In the beginning, they were mainly used in the performing arts, i.e. for opera, ballet and theatre performances (cf. Orero/Matamala 2007: 7 f., York 2007, Weaver 2010, Fryer/Romero-Fresco 2014: 11). Following the initiative of Fryer and Romero-Fresco in 2013 (cf. Romero-Fresco/Fryer 2013, Di Giovanni 2014, Hammer et al. 2015), audio introductions are now also for being created films and documentaries.