Johan Malmstedt

Audiovisual Aesthetics in Formation

Comparative and Computational Analysis of Transatlantic Television Style, 1970–1989

How did the aesthetics of television come to define the way we perceive audiovisual media today? The project examines the history of crossmodal alignment, the interplay between sound and image, across Swedish and American television between 1970 and 1989.

It explores how sound and image together shaped stylistic conventions in genres such as documentary, children’s programming and drama. Combining variational autoencoders and signal analysis with historical interpretation, it traces how cultural, institutional and technological factors influenced the form of television in two contrasting broadcasting environments.

The project is carried out in collaboration with the American Archive of Public Broadcasting and the Swedish National Archives.

Lägg ut! Lägg ut!

Terrorismens audiovisuella mediering i svensk television 1968–1987

An iconic moment in Swedish television history is the 1975 broadcast from the West German embassy siege in Stockholm. As a bomb explosion rocked the embassy, news reporter Bo Holmström exclaimed “Go live! Go live!” (“Lägg ut! Lägg ut!”).

The project analyses how terrorism was mediated as a national concern in Swedish public service television, from the first broadcasts of Palestinian plane hijackings in 1968 to the end of the television monopoly in 1987. It asks how Swedish television represented, imagined and aesthetically encoded terrorism as an emergent issue in relation to Swedish society.

The work is organised in three branches, Framing, Aestheticising and Minding Terrorism. It combines close readings of key programmes with distant viewing of the digitised television archive at the National Library of Sweden, using speech recognition, image analysis and audio signal processing.

Arboretum Stories

Mapping Knowledge Ecology in the Arnold Arboretum

The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, a 281 acre living museum founded in 1872 in Boston, is understood here as a hybrid site where scientific inquiry, environmental stewardship and interspecies encounters meet.

Working from digitised accession ledgers, planting maps and curator notes, the project combines more than a century of curatorial records with computational methods, geospatial mapping and information design. It traces the intertwined histories of plants and the people who cared for them, treating the arboretum as both a living collection and a historical record.

The result, Living Library of Trees, is an interactive map with different entry points for staff, researchers and the public.

Signal archaeology

Media history read from the recorded signal

Signal archaeology is the approach developed in the dissertation Sound out of Time. It reads media history from the recorded signal itself, through silence, loudness, spectra and rhythm, in the Swedish broadcast archives.

The approach has been used to study the stylistic development of Swedish public service radio between 1980 and 1999, and, in The Noise of the News, to trace the sonic profile of early Swedish television news through spectral visualisation of broadcasts from 1958 to 1978.

The work continues in current research on television sound and in teaching, including the open teaching resource Soundscape Data, a critical introduction to the analysis and curation of field recordings.

Formatfrågor

Format Inquiries

Format Inquiries is a research group on methodological approaches to format studies, led together with Zakayo Kjellström.

Its work is collected in the anthology Formatfrågor, published by Mediehistoriskt arkiv and Kriterium in autumn 2026. The anthology invites scholars to explore the role of format within their specific fields. Throughout the project, the group has engaged in workshops and public lectures highlighting the potential of format perspectives in different academic contexts. During the publishing process, the project has experimented with different printing formats.

Soundscapes of Warning

The Past, Present, and Futures of Viktigt Meddelande till Allmänheten (VMA)

How are sounds of warning embedded in social life and in Swedish society? VMA was first launched in 1931 and has since shaped the soundtrack of urban modernity, through radio and television broadcasts and the outdoor sirens popularly known as Hesa Fredrik.

The project traces the intellectual, political, material and cultural development of the Swedish public warning system, with explicit comparisons to surrounding countries and to Denmark in particular.

Together with C2DH at the University of Luxembourg, the project has developed an experimental application for exploring how sirens and civil alert signals vary across national and historical contexts.