1st Edition
Silence, Sounds, Music Acoustic Dimensions of Immersion
This book examines the intersections of silence with immersive arts and experiences. Silence and immersion may seem antithetical: while immersion is supposedly induced by acoustic and other stimuli, silence is commonly understood as the absence or opposite of sound. Since the eighteenth century, however, silence has been established as a multifarious and polyvalent cultural concept. Immersion, in turn, though often used as a simple "all-inclusive" term, has old and complex ontological and epistemological roots.
Organized into three parts, this book brings critical, historical, and theoretical debates on silence into dialogue with different notions of immersion. The 16 theoretical articles and case studies engage in discovering and questioning the continued prominence of both concepts in aesthetics, culture, and media. Covering music, film, digital, visual and performance art, theater, video games, and theme parks, the chapters discuss both highly canonical and rarely examined artifacts. Written by scholars from Germany, Austria, France, and Switzerland, the interdisciplinary collection includes perspectives from musicology, film studies, cultural and media studies, gender studies, art history, and philosophy.
Silence, Sounds, Music addresses both an academic and a wider audience. It will be of interest to anyone interested in music, sound, immersive experiences, the so-called experience economy, and contemporary art and culture.
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: On the Aesthetics, Politics, and Intersections of Silence, Sound, and Immersion
Florian Freitag, Laura Katharina Mücke, and Peter Niedermüller
Part I: Producing Silence
Dominic Zerhoch
1. Beyond Words: Auditive and Discursive Non-Normativity in Films of Urszula Antoniak
Tullio Richter-Hansen
2. Musical Immersion and Its Place of Silence
Fabian Kurze
3. Digital Movieloops
Anita Hafner
4. The Paradox of Musical Silence
Ioana Geanta
5. Silence as a Performative Means in Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present
Karolina Zgraja
6. The Residence Within: Silence, Immersion, and Contemplative Play in Videogames
Damien Schlarb
Part II: On the Cusp between Sound and Silence
Helena Rapp and Elisabeth Sommerlad
7. The Shock of Silence: An Apporach to Philosophical Immersion in Media
Sebastian R. Richter
8. Moments of Silence in Life is Strange: Flow, Immersion, and Involvement as as Result of Lack of Gameplay
Michael Mosel
9. In the Eye of the Hurricane: How Silent Moments in The Big Short (2015) and Money Monster (2016) Configure Empathetic and Immersive Processes of Film Reception
Dieter Merlin
10. Broken Times of Silence: Choreographing Time in Once Upon a Time in the West
Saori Kanemaki
11. The Birth of the Talkies out of the Spirit of Silence: Alan Crossland’s The Jazz Singer (1927)
Heinz Hiebler
Part III: Reception, Context, Space
Helena Rapp and Elisabeth Sommerlad
12. The Politics of Silence in Theater and Cinema
Laura Katharina Mücke and Patric Blaser
13. The Delightful Paradox: Towards an Aesthetics of Silence in Early Sound Films
Daniel Wiegand
14. Empty Times: Melodic Hardcore Punk and the Problem of Immersion
Clemens Spahr
15. The Depth of the Sea, the Depth of Listening, and the Figure of Isolde as Avatar
Gabriela Lendle
16. The Sounds of Magic: Silence, Sounds, and Immersion in Theme Parks
Florian Freitag
Biography
Florian Freitag has been a professor of American Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany) since 2019. He received his PhD in American Studies from the University of Konstanz (Germany) in 2011 and worked as an assistant professor of American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Germany) from 2011 to 2019. Freitag’s publications on theme parks include articles in The Journal of Popular Culture and Continuum; book chapters in A Reader in Themed and Immersive Spaces (ed. Scott Lukas; 2016), and Popular New Orleans: The Crescent City in Periodicals, Theme Parks, and Opera, 1875-2015 (Freitag 2021), as well as the edited collections Time and Temporality in Theme Parks (2017) and Key Concepts in Theme Park Studies (2023).
Laura Katharina Mücke is a research assistant in the area “Everyday Media and Digital Cultures” at the Department for Film, Theater, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Mainz. Her PhD project, based in Mainz, Vienna, and Groningen, focuses on the discursivity of seemingly omnipotent concepts of media experience. From 2019 to 2022, she was an assistant for “Theory of Film” at the University of Vienna. She is co-editor of the journal Montage AV and co-founder of the junior research group “ID*A (Initiative Doktorand*innen-Austausch).” Recent publications are the journal issue on “Messy Images” (together with Chris Tedjasukmana and Olga Moskatova, 2022) and the translation from French of “Kommunikationsräume: Einführung in die Semiopragmatik” by Roger Odin (with Guido Kirsten, Magali Trautmann, and Philipp Blum, 2019) as well as the article “Towards a Term of Political Immersion as Co-Immersion” (together with Tom Poljanšek) in: Jacopo Bodini, Alessandro De Cesaris: Immersivity: Philosophical Perspectives on Technologically Mediated Experience (2002).
Peter Niedermüller has been an interim professor at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Germany) and at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Mannheim (Germany). He was also a visiting fellow at the German Historical Institute in Rome (Italy). Currently Niedermüller is a senior lecturer for musicology at JGU Mainz, in 2019 he was also appointed as a professor there. His research interests include the history of concert life and musical interpretation as well as film music. Since 2002, he has been a consultant editor of Ad Parnassum: A Journal of Eigteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Instrumental Music. Since 2016, he has also co-edited Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung. Among his latest publications are Klangkunst und musikalische Interpretation (2018) and two chapters in Geschichte der musikalischen Interpretation im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (2020).
