Berenguer, X.: Writing Interactive Programmes.

Interactive multimedia open new possibilities for audio-visual creation. We present in this article an introduction to the theme which contains the background, the scope of contents, and several elements on structure and form. Finally, we contemplate its application to narrative.

Bou, N.: The conversion of a tragedy by Cocteau into a cinema melodrama: a reading of Il Mistero di Oberwald.

The purpose of these pages is to note some reflections on the intersection of forms proposed by the film Il mistero di Oberwald, centering our interest on the mechanisms used by Antonioni in the handling of a work which in its theatre origins seesaws between tragedy and melodrama (as these are understood in the theatre world), and which in the Italian director's hands is configured as a cinema melodrama, a genre quite far -a priori- from Antonioni's own field.

Gifreu, J. i Saperas, E.: Television and the building of national spheres in Europe.

The articulation of Europe presupposes the negotiation and configuration both of a political model for union and of a model for preserving cultural identities. Television and the audio-visual industries could be a powerful agent for this road, but at the same time a difficult obstacle to overcome. The study of European television news bulletins allows us to examine the many complex relationships established in present-day Europe between basic ambits of reference and forms of identity. The research results show that the broadcast area is established in an area of intention which acts as a matrix of perception and of recognition of a particular communication space.

Font, D.: Education in the film corpus.

The entrance of cinema into the university is a relatively recent fact. It is related, on the one hand, to the boom of a multidisciplinary theory model which affected all fields of knowledge at the beginning of the 70's. And it also coincides with a social and symbolic devaluation of cinema itself, between the convulsive boom of European modernity and the increasingly pregnant audio-visual dogma. The pedagogy of the film corpus is based on these contradictory variables. A confluence between theory and history, both to be understood as social knowledge, which help to think cinema before its progressive break-up in human imagination.

Pericot, J.: Initial guides and thresholds of the visual game.

This text analyses the meaning of visual enunciates in regard to the relationship established between them and their users and, consequently, visual proposals are evaluated as acts in a game of language which, besides giving possibilities for consensual understanding of their use, also allows the generation and the comprehension of unpublished facts. In this sense, the study of conceptual relationships between the two planes of the visual enunciate, the plane of observance, referred because of its iconicity to the structures of the real world, and the plane of comprehension, referred to the symbolic object and with a communication access mediatised by the understanding of the visual manifestation on reality, allow us to define initial guides of acceptability in the use of visual language.

Ruiz Collantes, X.: Modulated semantic pregnance and image reading. How readers determine information transmitted by an image.

Modulated semantic pregnance lays the base for an explanatory model of the processes of image reading and thus of any kind of text. This model defines the result of the process of reading an image as a semantic macro-structure. The construction of this macro-structure is ruled by the principle of the search for a propositional gestalt which for the reader supposes the minimum quantity of information which the given conditions allow. Thus, in the process of reading, the calculation of the quantity of information determines the sense of said information. This general principle is modulated, in each specific reading process, by diverse kinds of clauses and exceptions which are signalled to the reader by different kinds of marks allotted/inscribed in the image/text.

Serra, X.: Current perspectives in the digital synthesis of musical sounds.

When a musical sound is generated electronically, it is important to have a good model with parameters allowing an intuitive manipulation of the sound. The musician-user must be able to develop a musical intuition which will allow experimenting with the synthesis technique used. In this article we present a general view of digital synthesis, concentrating on two lines of research which will surely allow us to shatter the limitations which exist in methods used till now and finally manage an answer to the promises which computer music made in the 60's.

Terribas, M.: Television, National Identity, and the public sphere, an ethnographic study applied to the investigation of two television debate programmes in Scotland and Catalonia.

This article sets forth some considerations on issues of national identity and the public sphere in two stateless nations, Scotland and Catalonia, based on the study of the television production processes of two debate programmes: "La Vida en un Xip" (TV3, 1989-92), and "Scottish Women" (STV Scottish Television 1987-92). The aim of this paper is to emphasise the support that this study gives to the ethnographic focus, less developed till now in the field of investigation of the products of mass communication media if we compare with other techniques such as reception analysis and text analysis. The support of ethnography in communication investigation seems essential to enrich research with data, information, and reflections which only the study of the means of the media themselves can provide, drawing the theme of the study closer to investigators and making them participants somehow in the communication process.