Media products of all sorts form a complex web of different relationships. Media products involve transformations, integrations and combinations as well as transmedial aspects. When we look at media combinations in this chapter, all these different aspects are brought into play. Media combinations of different basic media types are always, literally, intermedial combinations that involve intermedial relations between different forms of communication.

This chapter deals with different kinds of combinations of technical, basic and qualified media types in comics, films, radio drama, songs/singing and music videos. Some of them are more obvious in this aspect. The music video, for instance, integrates sound, words and (moving) images. The pages of comics display text and image, and these two basic media types communicate differently in the semiotic modality. In radio dramas or songs, the combination aspect is not as visually apparent. Still, the soundwaves of a song or a radio drama firmly integrate several auditory media types.

With specific examples, we discuss how to understand the different intermedial aspects at play whenever different media types are brought together in a particular media product. Different perspectives are possible. Should one focus on the combination of different forms of meaning-making, or instead stress how deeply integrated these different media types are? Should one approach a song as the combination of different qualified media (poetry and music), or focus on the close integration of different auditory media types (words and organized sound)? When we approach media combinations with the four modalities, we can focus on both. When words, (moving) images, and organized sounds are brought together in media products, such as comics, songs and music videos, they form an integrated whole. We can focus on how different basic media types in the material and sensorial modality are firmly integrated. We can then explore how these integrations on pages, in soundwaves, on stages or in the studio enable an intricate combination of different forms of meaning-making that support and interact with each other in the spatiotemporal and semiotic modality.

First, we will take a look at how words and images on pages convey a graphic narrative in comics. Then we will highlight the importance of sound effects in the complex combination of moving images and auditory media types in film. We then explore how different auditory basic and qualified media types together create a complex auditory narrative in radio drama, using the specific example of The Unforgiven (2018). We will also discuss how word and music combine on different levels in art and pop songs. The chapter will end with a few reflections on the audiovisual combinations of basic and qualified media types at work in music videos.