This article aims to describe the state of the art regarding the status of music in cinematographic and audiovisual theory. We investigate the space that theory has given to music in its theoretical apparatus from a synchronous point of view. A survey of the general state of the discipline is made, describing the two paradigms of the image-music relationship detected in the bibliography and also referring to some of the theoretical paradoxes that arise in the image-music link. Finally, we propose an original definition of the status of music in the audiovisual that we concretise in a three status model of music in relation to image: structural-ontological, narrative-functional and poetic-autonomous.