Wednesday 5th July 2023

Speakers

Jacob Browne

The “Caligari Imperative:” Weimar Silent Film and the Uncanny Voices of Text

Though we may be accustomed to treating text merely as a vehicle for information, this paper recalls the potential for an embodied and sensual response to text, effectively as a kind of latent sound, introjected silently into the reader’s consciousness. Alongside other counter-intuitive avenues for conveying the auditory (what my research calls ‘phantacusis’), silent cinema often exploited the potential of text as sonic event, both within and outside of intertitles. In many cases, this is not simply to make up for technological shortcomings, as often assumed, but as a vital and effective component of an aesthetic programme.

Individuals and industries worldwide experimented with the phantacoustic potential of text, but these efforts took a distinctive form in Weimar Germany. Most famously, in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (and its proto-viral marketing campaign), the written command ‘you must become Caligari!’ appears onscreen before a character, who is overwhelmed by the experience. While some have suggested voice-over would effectively replace this text in a later (sound) film, this view fails to account for the uncanniness and ambiguity of the moment and the specificity of the act of reading that it features, in which writing emerges somewhere between materialised sound, externalised thought, hallucinatory projection, and a powerful, delusion-inducing imperative.

This presentation puts this moment from Caligari into conversation with a number of others like it from the silent era of Weimar cinema. Even beyond the Expressionism it is famous for, Weimar cinema resounds with the strange power of text. Writing echoes throughout the modern urban, political and cultural environment depicted on the Weimar screen, and through the visual and print culture that surrounds it. Noting the imperative form it often takes in these films, this talk will assert and contextualise the agency of the written word as sonic event.

Jasmine Croll

Hostile Silences, Power, and Liminality

Australian director Kitty Green’s The Assistant (2019) arouses deafening silence in scenes involving power. Protagonist Jane attempts to voice her suspicions that her boss is sexually exploiting and abusing young women who aspire to succeed in the film world. The Assistant sheds light on vulnerable women in the film industry (reminiscent of the Harvey Weinstein scandal) yet powerfully speaks to microaggressions within wider workplaces. In tense, crux-like moments, the use of sound and silence plays out slowly yet with palpable resonance. Such rhythms elucidate hostilities including passive aggression and gaslighting. In this seminar I wish to explore layers of voice/voicelessness and sound/silence within cinematic moments involving power.

This is part of my broader PhD which deals with the slow cinema of contemporary female directors, involving silence, the body, and liminal spaces. My research draws on Amanda Kernell’s Sami Blood (SE 2018) and Chloe Zhao’s The Rider (USA 2017). Here too, silence is used as a form of power yet can also provide relief. I am particularly interested in degrees of silence and quietude and the ways interspersed sounds cut through and heighten atmospheres in varied ways.

Angela English

Voices and Silence: audience engagement with silent fragmented archive film

Fragmented archive film may have no provenance, no synchronized sound and no corpus of contextual information available. Shand (2014) notes that 'assessing the significance of films in regional film collections is made difficult by the lack of synchronized sound in many films. These are now effectively silent films even if accompanying soundtrack once existed'. (p.197)

This paper explores audience engagement with and response to silent fragmented archive film. I explore this through audience engagement studies I have undertaken using creative  interventions into practice with archive film. These studies involved screening local archive film to community audiences in outer London. As part of this analysis, I will screen rare archive footage used in the audience studies.

Hallam (2010) suggests that local film is a 'distinct category of film culture '. The spatial imaginary of this film can develop a new chapter in film historiography. In this paper I will demonstrate the important role that audience voices can play in developing this historiography.

Júlia Durand and Toby Huelin

“Another Conspiracy About a Royalty-Free Song”: Library Music in Contemporary Political Discourse 

In Autumn 2022, two high-profile politicians faced public scrutiny over the background music used in official videos promoting their political agenda. Both former US President Donald Trump and current UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak were the subject of press articles (and inevitable tweets) claiming that so-called “soundalikes” had been used in their videos, and questioning whether this choice was a public endorsement of problematic individuals or groups connected with these soundalikes: namely, convicted rock singer Gary Glitter, and conspiracy-theory movement QAnon. 

As is the case in many other political adverts, these videos used library music (also known as “stock” or “production” music). In this paper, we examine how library music is used strategically in these examples, highlighting the urgency of paying closer attention to its fundamental role in the construction and dissemination of political messages in media today, with moral and ethical implications that remain underresearched. In addition, we depart from these cases to explore broader questions relating to library music as a once unseen musical practice that is now coming to the foreground. In particular, we inquire into how it is gaining unprecedented visibility (even finding its way into sensationalist press articles) due in part to its use in politically-motivated videos. This allows us to rethink longstanding notions of library music as something that lacks a “public existence” (Godsall 2018), and to focus instead on what happens when it gains media coverage – prompting misunderstandings that reveal just how unfamiliar the wider public is with the workings of this industry. 

Carolin Geyer

Understanding the use of music in the context of social media short videos

Today users participate in social media communities by producing and/or viewing creative user-generated content in the form of social media short videos, whereby the main audio medium used in such videos is music. This growing range of audio-visual media content is leading to a variety of new solutions for receiving, producing, and distributing music in diverse and creative ways. This transformation in music consumption and distribution can be described as ‘digital media morphosis’(Blaukopf, 1989, pp 5-6, Smudits 2013, 2007, 2002), which refers to the transformation of music through new information and communication technologies. This study is seeking to understand how users’ appropriate popular music through audio-visual short videos in social media, considering digital media morphosis. To investigate the daily interaction of users, the study utilizes qualitative video analysis and interviews with TikTok and Reels-producers and -recipients. The integrated image-text-sound analysis (Jost & Klug, 2009) of 50 videos gives a better understanding of the structure of TikToks, the practices of engaging and producing of such audio-visual media artefacts and their relation to other audio-visual media. The study identifies how users’ appropriate popular music and how this shapes discourses of music and authenticity in the context of social media. Further tentative findings show that TikToks involve acting the song lyrics through facial expressions and gestures connected to performances from the ‘communication of origin’ such as performances of the musicians from official music videos. This leads to specific audio-visual aesthetics in a highly circulatory culture of viral user generated content. The interviews disclose that the production of short videos is mostly oriented towards the musical message of the musicians. Overall, the study indicates that short videos on TikTok reveal new media practices and styles of the appropriation of music and offers an insight in how popular music is mediated in online music cultures.

Inka-Maria Nyman

Opera on extra stage: Consuming opera on Instagram

This paper focuses on the global negotiation of cultural meaning for opera on the social media service Instagram. Today, various social media platforms are central arenas for consuming and discussing culture. However, a common thought among digitalization researchers is that the increase in opportunities has led to the old gatekeepers losing their role in the process in which cultural expressions, including opera, are assigned meaning in social actions and relationships. In parallel with these developments, the visual has become a more important part of communication, both between consumers (C2C) and between institutions and customers (B2C). Furthermore, current cultural-political trends encourage audience engagement through new audio-visual media. How are opera institutions responding to these changes, and how do they create meaning for opera on Instagram? Departing from the understanding of activity on Instagram as consumption, in a Baudrillardian sense, the paper presents an analysis of three opera institutions’ activity on Instagram. The analysis shows how contemporary opera institutions struggle between responding, on the one hand, to globally set quality criteria regarding the professionalism of the sound and image content on screen, and on the other hand, showing parts of the business that consumers have not previously had access to. To conclude, the paper thus argues that the ‘screenified’ consumption of opera on Instagram reveals a paradox between opera as consumer culture and opera as high culture, shaping old discourses of the cultural value of opera.

Keynote Speaker: Nick Reyland

Ostentatious TV Scoring 

From the late 1990s, a new wave of scripted TV drama radically revised the parameters of small screen storytelling. As part of that shift, ostentatious musical moments – deployments of music that are impossible not to hear and consider – became more regular and even, by the 2020s, expected. Today, heard music is everywhere in mainstream TV fiction and ostentatious scoring has become a defining trait of ‘peak TV’. Its heardness therefore challenges us to reconsider some of screen music theory’s founding tenets – up to a point – while theorizing music’s vital roles in some of the early 21st-century’s most significant cultural texts.

Peter Adams

“You’re a Man of Few Words, Aren’t You?”: Silent Modalities and the (Absent) Voice in Contemporary Video Games

This paper builds on research I presented at the previous Sound on Screen conference, which focused on the concept of the “neo-silent” aesthetic, i.e. the selective omission of diegetic sound and dialogue, and the foregrounding of non-diegetic music, in a manner that adopts (and adapts) the muted qualities of silent cinema. 

Where the previous paper focused on television, this proposal considers a medium in which diegetic absences are far more prevalent – gaming. Despite this prevalence, the relationship between silence and gaming remains surprisingly overlooked in the existing scholarly literature, partially due to the relative recency of the medium, and partially because the aesthetics and practicalities of game sound are much less standardised than film and TV. Indeed, gaming’s sonic approaches can vary significantly depending on budget, genre, technological constraints, etc, and it is precisely this variety that invites further investigation. 

This paper will therefore explore the sonic lineage that links the development of game sound to the affordances and limitations of silent cinema, and the continued engagement with this lineage by contemporary practitioners. It will also consider the specificities of paring back diegetic sound (particularly the voice) in a gaming context, and the varying degrees of muteness that are adopted by practitioners, from the near-total diegetic suppression of games like Undertale and Fez, to the non-verbal soundscapes of Limbo and Journey, to the phenomenon of the silent protagonist (whose muteness exists, often inexplicably, in an otherwise “realistic” diegetic environment).

Drawing from the existing literature on media silence, I will consider the prevalence, impact, and modalities of diegetic absence in gaming, linking this self-constraining impulse to wider debates about meaningful absence, media obsolescence, and nostalgia. I will also engage with the conference’s theme of interplay between music and sound, examining music’s role in supplementing the paralinguistic communicative strategies of wordless media.

James McGlynn

The Growing Potential of Videographic Criticism in Film Music Studies, Ludomusicology and Beyond 

In March 2020, scholars were suddenly forced to adapt to virtual approximations of every facet of  academic life: as educators, as researchers and, of course, as conference delegates and presenters.  One notable way in which certain scholars adapted to remote conferencing was via the so-called  “video essay,” or videographic criticism: a modality that was far less ubiquitous in academic  contexts up to that point. Researchers regularly experimented within the limitations of remote conference formats to create stylised, pre-edited videographic worksin place of more conventional papers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one subdiscipline that proved to be especially fertile ground for this approach was the scholarly study of music and sound in screen media, with music scholars such as Nicholas Kmet, James Buhler and Sureshkumar P. Sekar counting among the early adopters of the format (Kmet 2020; Buhler 2021; Sekar 2022). 

In this paper, I will account for the new-found foothold that the video essay garnered as a mode of scholarly presentation in screen music studies in the early-2020s, as well as documenting my own experience of communicating screen music research in this way. I will first provide an  overview of nascent debates on the video essay as a media object and an increasingly common mode of scholarly expression (Keathley and Mittell 2019; Garwood 2020; Galibert-Laîné 2021). Thereafter, I will adopt a more autoethnographic approach: with reference to the considerable portfolio of videographic conference papers I amassed during the COVID-19 pandemic, I will  

highlight the autodidacticism that typically characterises scholarship within this burgeoning  tradition, taking special care to emphasise the format’s seemingly heightened applicability in  screen music studies. Ultimately, I hope to stimulate discussion on videographic criticism’s rich  potential as a vibrant and legitimate mode of scholarly expression in screen music studies, as well  as exemplifying the potential of videographic criticism as research (see Greene 2020).

Sophia Wetzel

Musical Mind Games: Genre as Mental Illness in the Psychonauts Series

The cult-classic video game Psychonauts (2005) and its acclaimed sequel Psychonauts 2 (2021) are known for their depiction of mental illness and trauma. However, the depictions in each  game reinforce different disability narratives: the first a “cure” narrative and the second an  “accommodation” narrative (Mitchell & Snyder 2000; Howe 2016). Each level, or mindscape, occurs within the mind of a different character, allowing the player to interact with manifestations  of the character’s mental illness, such as fighting enemies called “Panic Attacks” or sorting their  “Emotional Baggage.” The scoring for each level reflects the respective character by drawing from  existing musical genres to mark them with a unique sonic profile. The genres heard include examples of popular music genres, like psychedelic rock, but they also include references to styles  from popular culture, such as mid-century television theme songs. These allusions function as “genre-topic[s]” (Lavengood, 2019), evoking extramusical associations that incline the player  towards either a positive or negative perception of each character.  

In this paper, I trace the genre references in two levels— “Gloria’s Theater” from  Psychonauts and “PSI King’s Sensorium” from Psychonauts 2— and their accompanying cues as  case studies of the characterization of mental illness and trauma in each game. For each cue, I identify and outline the sonic markers of each cue’s genre-topic(s) and examine how the generic  allusions may impact the player’s perception of the character. My examination also outlines how  the level’s visuals and scoring reinforce the two disability narratives presented by the games. As  part of the larger accommodation narrative, for example, the sensory associations of psychedelic  rock are used to illustrate the acceptance process of a character desensitized by trauma. By  comparing these levels, I show that the depiction of mentally ill characters shifts between games from condescending to an empathetic view encouraging acceptance.