Abstracts

Recent years have seen a growing interest in Alfred Hitchcock’s use of sound and music (Sullivan 2006; Schroeder 2012). However, the director’s turn to silence as a key element of his films has yet to receive sustained attention. This paper explores the absence of sound in Hitchcock’s soundtracks from his earliest sound feature Blackmail (1929) to one of his last productions, Frenzy (1972). The paper argues that Hitchcock’s sound style derives, paradoxically, from his sophisticated use of silence.

The first part of the paper suggests that the introduction of synchronized sound technology in the late 1920s moved Hitchcock to an in-depth exploration of the possibilities of silence in the cinema. Although silent film was never completely silent, the technological possibilities of synchronized sound opened up new ways of framing and facilitating silence as a conscious artistic and narrative choice. Discussing two brief examples from Blackmail, the paper demonstrates how Hitchcock begins to use sound technology to make silence a central cinematic theme.

The second part of the paper explores the continued absence of sound throughout Hitchcock’s career with brief examples from Sabotage (1936), Rebecca (1940), Rear Window (1954), and The Birds (1963). The discussion puts forward a holistic view of Hitchcock’s sound style, drawing attention to silence as a core element of his filmmaking. To conclude, the paper will critically reflect on the implications of silence and address the impact of Hitchcock’s silence on filmmakers since the 1980s.

Giuseppe Becce, the Ennio Morricone of Germany’s Heimatfilm Genre (Maria Fuchs)

The Heimatfilm (sentimental film in idealised regional setting) as a specifically German- speaking film genre is today often associated with its most popular phase in the 1950s. After the success of the post-war color film Schwarzwaldmädel (1950), the Heimatfilm experienced its heyday until the end of the 1950s, as it nevertheless addressed the central concerns of cultural identity and social belonging in the ongoing national reconstruction process after World War II. At the same time, he spatially transported his audience to rural idylls largely undestroyed by the war (Alps, Black Forest, Heath), elicited their touristic quality, and portrayed regional peculiarities through dance and music interludes. The films thus made a significant contribution to the self-image of Austrian and German post-war society.

Little known today, it was the Italian composer Giuseppe Becce who significantly shaped the genre of Heimatfilm. Becce is one of the most famous film composers of German popular film productions of the silent and sound film era. For the talkies, he collaborated with the most prolific directors of German-speaking mountain film and Heimatfilms.

What Ennio Morricone is to the Italo-Western, Becce is to the classic mountain films and Heimatfilme. He composed the music for most of Luis Trenker's mountain films, as well as for the many film adaptations of the Ludwig Ganghofer novels of the 1950s, drawing mass audiences to the cinema. His specialization for sound film was indisputably in the musicalization of high mountain landscapes, transferring the entire tradition of musical descriptions of nature in symphonic poems from Beethoven to Franz Liszt to Richard Strauss to the modern medium of film.

This paper aims to show Becce’s compositional strategies for constructing a sense home in the Ganghofer film adaptations of the 1950s and show how the musical tradition of symphonic poems translates into the modern medium of film.

Reading Music in Screenplays: The Case of Walter Reisch (Claus Tieber)

The Screenplay is a place where music is seldom looked after. Musicologists are more interested in sheet music and film and screenplay scholars usually don’t think that interesting evidence can be found there. Contrary to the advice of many screenwriting manuals to not write down anything in screenplay that lies in the competence of someone else (director, DP, editor, composer), numerous and various forms of integrating music can be found in screenplays.

Using the case of the Austrian screenwriter Walter Reisch, I want to demonstrate how important musical ideas are at the screenwriting stage of a film production and which forms and functions suggestions, notes and the integration of musical numbers in screenplays and films can have.

These instructions include suggestions for existing music to be used at certain moments as well as discourses about music and intermedial links to musical works.

An overview of the various ways music finds its way into screenplays should start a discussion of value of the use of screenplays in film music research.

Thump: The Politics of Acousmatic Listening in Lucrecia Martel’s La Mujer Sin Cabeza (Andrea Avidad)

The great majority of the conceptual figures employed to analyze visual media, including the audio-visual medium of film, resonate with the order of the visible. The “mirror”, for example, has been widely used as an analytical tool by way of Jacques Lacan writings on psychoanalysis in media and film theory (consider spectatorship theory). The “frame” was critiqued by Martin Heidegger, for it enacted a perceptual (visual in particular) and cognitive enclosure of the world. The list continues. This presentation listens to sound in order to extract from it a conceptual vocabulary with the purpose of analyze film grammar and narrative. Simply put, I ask: how can sound help us think? I focus on Argentine auteur Lucrecia Martel’s feature La Mujer Sin Cabeza (The Headless Woman, 2008), a film whose narrative development is swiftly suspended by sudden, loud thumps: a woman, cocooned in her car, runs over a body (somebody?) (something?) – a body that is never clearly seen. But what isn’t seen is heard: we are confronted with thumping sounds that inscribe the anonymous body within the diegesis. If the cinematic image refuses to visualize the body, the thumps testify to its materiality, albeit ambiguously (Human body? Animal body? Both? None?). With the help of Franz Kafka’s novella, The Metamorphosis, I claim that the sonic structure of a thump brings in relation violence, mediation (or absorption) and dullness. These three terms “composing” the sonic event understood as a thump will be explored in

Martel’s film. For “violence”, I engage in theories of acousmatic listening by way of Brian Kane’s recent theory of acousmatic sound, arguing that the driver’s response (or lack of) to what might be considered an ethical call, testifies to an almost imperceptible, absorbed, assimilated violence that is nonetheless constitutive of the social relations in the highly stratified society of Salta, Argentina. I listen to “dullness” via theories of affect, and to “mediation” by way of ethics. My reading not only listens to the actual sounds employed in the soundtrack of the film –sounds of fundamental importance for the narrative– but “use” sound as a way for analyzing the politics of listening, considering listening not a passivity but rather a mode of political engagement: political responsibility begins with aural responsivity.

Keywords: acousmatic listening, sound theory, trauma, Lucrecia Martel

Queer Music and Queer Time in the Soundtrack of The Favourite (Naomi Orrell)

- Paper not presented -

In Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2018 film The Favourite, time is presented as an elastic concept. From the anachronistic design choices (denim dresses for servants) or the bold use of language (‘you smell like a 96-year-old French whore’s vajuju’), Lanthimos playfully decentres the story from its early 17th century context. This is reflected in the film’s soundtrack. While we do hear music contemporary to Queen Anne’s reign, we also hear music from the 19th-century German salon, the 20th-century French church, and the 21st-century string quartet; even Elton John makes an appearance in the closing credits. Indeed, much like Lanthimos’ other aesthetic choices, time in the soundtrack is not stable.

As a story concerned with two women vying for the affection of the ageing monarch Queen Anne, it begs us to consider how queer aesthetics are at play here. Queer theorists have long posited on time’s ability to be non-linear and fragmented, with the ability to ‘elongate and twist chronology’ (Freeman:2010). Not only does the soundtrack twist chronology as it travels across over 300 years of music, the music we hear is fragmented and broken up. Even within the musical choices contemporary to Queen Anne’s reign, the recording choices made pull the listener to-and-fro between “modern” interpretations and “historically informed" interpretations. Using close-study musical/film analysis combined with 18th century performance aesthetics and queer theory, this paper endevours to explore how the soundtrack's elasticity not only reflects Lanthimos' playful rejection of historical film conventions, but also allows the viewer to experience a queering of music and of musical time.

The Sound of the Monstrous: Music and Sound Design in Crimson Peak (Steve Halfyard)

Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak (2015) employs the classic gothic trope of the decadent (if dilapidated) domesticity of a castle and the dank and dangerous cellars beneath it in which lurk blood-soaked secrets. Other aspects of the film defy gothic conventions, however, in particular in the female characters, who possess far more agency than any of the men. The innocent heroine, Edith, ultimately rescues herself, both by unpicking the puzzle of the castle and its ghosts and by some handy defensive wielding of a large shovel; all of the ghosts are female and turn out to be helping rather than threatening Edith; and the true threat is revealed to be Edith’s piano-playing sister in law, Lucille. The music and sound design of the film also play against the grain of gothic horror, and present the listener with a serious of double bluffs by both employing and then subverting our culturally coded expectations of what the sounds of score and soundtrack signify.

This paper explores two aspects of sound and music in the film: the use of a child’s voice singing in the opening credits, a use which often operates as a symbol of innocence under threat in film scoring, but which here is eventually revealed as representative of the monstrous; and the contrast of orchestral film scoring for the world of the living and electronic sound design for the world of the monstrous dead; a binary which again, in conventional scoring, would normally construct the ghosts and the ‘unnatural’ sounds of electronica as a threat to the ‘natural’ (and tunefully scored) living world. Like Edith, we are tricked by the scoring strategy into assuming that the ghosts are the problem and, like her, we are gradually led to a better understanding that what is unfamiliar may not be dangerous, and that it is behind the attractive and conventionally beautiful music that the real monster lurks.

Sonic Showdowns: An Anatomy of a Fight Sequence: The Red Circle Nightclub fight in John Wicke (2014) (Lindsay Steenberg & Lisa Coulthard)

As part of a large-scale research project on the fight scene in cinema, this paper considers music and sound in the multiple and extended fight scenes of the John Wick franchise. Like many films focused on fighting, the Wick series parcels out types of fights across its texts, each with its own unique fight choreography, cinematic style, weapon orientation, character development, setting, mise en scene, and music. Foregrounded in the dialogue-sparse films, sound and music play a significant role in separating out each fight sequence as unique and uniquely worth watching. Tying music to violent action, the films highlight kineticism and spectacle: from the first fight in John Wick (2014), music is sutured to physicality and movement -- as John leaps into action, the rock soundtrack revs in synch with his movements. Throughout the three films, music is frequently yoked to Wick’s actions, even when the music is diegetically motivated: from the pulsing beats of dance music in the club to the contrastive scoring of Kaleida in the Red Circle bath area to the relative musical silence of the library fight, sound is crucial to the acoustic attractions of Wick's action-filled fighting. Considering these elements across the three films of the franchise (to date), this paper examines the fundamental musicality of Wick’s fights, analyzes the interplay of musical and fight “beats,” and frames these fights within a larger analysis of music in fights scenes in contemporary cinema.

Tick Tock: Engaging with Narratively Complex Television Through Music and Sound (David Brown)

Time loops, parallel universes, flashbacks and flashforwards, quantum entanglement. Narrative television has never been more complicated. Recent series like Westworld, Dark, and Russian Doll demand a tremendous amount of their viewers’ attention and memory just to keep track of plot and story. At the same time, these sorts of contemporary TV series are designed to encourage a mode of engagement that Jason Mittell calls ‘forensic fandom’, whereby dedicated viewers embrace these complexities, seeking to analyse the storytelling of a series, solve its mysteries, and make predictions of the narrative.

There are now many scholars interested in the style and aesthetics of these narratively complex series and how they are designed to engage viewers. Somewhat unsurprisingly though, this scholarship is dominated by the visual; comparatively little attention has been directed towards the role of music and sound (see Donaldson and Woods). This paper explores this gap, by analysing some of the sonic strategies of narratively complex television series. Building upon Leah Broad’s recent work, I suggest that music and sound in complex television can be analysed on (at least) three different levels. The first level considers how sound design and scoring work to support storytelling and narrative comprehension, assisting more casual viewers to keep track of these highly complex narratives. The second level considers the role of music and sound for those ‘forensic’ viewers and fans, offering intertextual allusions, clues to plot developments, and ‘Easter eggs’. The third level considers music and sound in relation to how we might critically appreciate contemporary television; here I suggest that sound has become integral to many television series and therefore ought to play a greater role in our appreciation. Overall, this paper aspires to lay some further groundwork for more analyses of sound in television, without merely exporting theories and ideas from film studies.

Music as Narrative Tool for Shifting Meanings in Television Format Adaptations (Edward Larkey)

This presentation will demonstrate how one particular music cue common to a scene in 10 different adapted versions of the Quebec sketch comedy series Un Gars, Une Fille (1997-2002) deploys the same music segment in each structurally similar yet different version to steer audience identification toward a different specific character in one specific shot. Subtle temporal shifts in the alignment of the music with the action in the shot support a surprisingly wide divergence of narrative paths inherent in each different adaptation within the discursive framework of depicting gender roles, family relationships, and conflict negotiations.

Annotation functions in computer software such as Adobe Premiere, along with graphing functions of Microsoft Excel and video editing software Final Cut Pro allow us to precisely uncover and visualize these shifts in meaning by delivering quantitative data on the duration and placement of the music in the shot segments. Compiling and visualizing multimodal data in this manner permits not only an exact correlation of the music to the absence or presence of particular characters in the shot and frame. The music functions, in addition, as deictic signposts for the emotional identification of the audience with a particular character. It therefore coincides with and constitutes the ideological framing of the shot within a more general positioning along a broad array of highly divergent and competing global discourses of gender, family, and conflict negotiation specific to each particular national adaptation.

This project is part of a larger digital humanities research effort in which quantitative data on the duration and length of narrative segments of this and other television format adaptations form a basis for multimodal cross-cultural comparative critical discourse analyses.

Keywords: Multimodal analysis; Television format adaptations; Computer annotation software; Visualization of data; Quantitative analysis; Digital Humanities

How Much Library Music? A Content Analysis of British Television Channels (Toby Huelin)

This paper takes a quantitative approach to the study of television music by examining how much music is used on the small screen. Although recent scholarship has explored the use of music in specific shows and genres (e.g. Wissner 2018; Broad 2020), little research has engaged with the use of music across the overall “flow” of television (Williams 1974; Altman 1986), and attempts to quantify musical content have often relied on vague estimates or antiquated technology. This study takes a different approach: using a large-scale sample of audience viewing figures from the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board, it focusses on the 150 most-watched UK programmes in a single week (across linear and on-demand viewing), encompassing a wide range of television genres and scheduling times. By collating the cue sheets for each of these shows from the Performing Rights Society, full details can be gathered concerning musical duration, type (original score, popular song, library music etc.) and function (title sequence, source music, underscore etc.). Close analysis of this data provides a detailed snapshot of the use of music in contemporary television and begins to unpack the role(s) of music in binding together our increasingly fragmented viewing experiences in the “post-TV” landscape (Strangelove 2015).

Contemporary Sound Design (Tarun Madupu)

Dynamic range is the variation in loudness in a selected piece of audio. It is defined as the difference between the loudest sound to the quietest discernible sound that a system is capable of producing. This paper aims to unravel the meaning and emotional impact this variation has on the audience in the context of film.

The paper analysis the way contemporary sound designers use the wide dynamic range that modern sound systems are able to create and examine how the application of loudness, silence and moments of dynamic contrast between the two are used as a tool of narrative storytelling. Primarily, the thesis aims to understand the trends, mechanisms and effectiveness of the application of dynamics and how it is relevant to the emotion of a film. In brief, the aim is to study the use of dynamic range in sound design for film.

By referring to studies conducted on the psychological, physiological and social effects of dynamic range on humans, the paper sheds light on how sound designers wield dynamic range as a tool to generate desired outcomes among audiences. The linguistic framework of pragmatics and metaphors are used to uncover the meaning and the resulting cinematic discourse.

Kolkata Chronicles: An Analysis of the Urban Soundscape in Alternative Bengali Films (Amrita Biswas)

The alternative Bengali films of the post- millennial period critically engage with the diverse sensory regimes of the city of Kolkata, capturing the hybrid materiality of its essence. For instance, a film like Shabdo/Sound (Ganguly, 2012), through the sensibility of the foley artist, Tarak, charts the layers of sounds that saturate the aural ecosystem of the city of Kolkata. The film presents the acute perceptions of Tarak, who is so obsessed with his work that he attentively registers all the natural and mechanical sounds that envelope him, frequently relegating the voices of people to utter neglect. The sound design of the film provides the viewers with auditory cues that enable them to comprehend the concentration of ambience sounds that occur in Tarak’s perceptual regime. It is through Tarak that the film highlights the stratified sounds and sensations of the city that the human ear fails to chronicle and respond to. Although banal and strenuous, the concoction of sounds is nonetheless composed of diverse and distinct tones and cadences. In the collective conscience, sights and sounds constitute undecipherable and banal sensory impressions that are associated with the cosmopolitan experience.The film is a critique of the potentially hazardous exposure to noise that the foley artist, and by extension, the inhabitants of the city are subjected to everyday. Manifesting a critical mode of analysis, the contemporary alternative films of Kolkata seek to illustrate the banal as well as the significant sensory impulses that design and configure the metropolis. This paper, by focusing on the sound design of contemporary alternative Bengali films, analyzes the multiple forms in which the films confront the soundscape of Kolkata.

"Listen to the Sounds": The Role of Sound and Music in Twin Peaks: The Return (Michael Goddard)

In the very opening of Twin Peaks: The Return in the White Lodge (we presume), the Fireman/Giant (Carel Struycken) says “Agent Cooper, listen to the sounds”, after which one of two key sounds is heard, a kind of repetitive clicking and buzzing sound, seemingly coming from an ancient gramophone. But who is this instruction for? This paper will argue it is in fact aimed at the audience as an instruction to pay attention to the sonic dimensions of the series, and not only to this sound or the more beatific non-localisable high-pitched hum mostly heard in the Great Northern. After all the series will culminate in an ear shattering scream from Laura Palmer or one of her doubles, which is hardly the first time such a scream is heard. In this regard it is important to recall that David Lynch is credited with the sound design in the series, in collaboration with Dean Hurley. In addition to this, the music in Twin Peaks is by no means limited to the Angelo Badalamenti score but typically most parts of the series culminate in musical performances at the Roadhouse now rechristened as the Bang Bang Bar; some of these just provide appropriate atmosphere and a kind of punctuation between different parts of the narrative but in some cases these performance enact uncanny repetitions, especially when they involve cast members like James Hurley (James Marshall) or Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn). This paper will attempt to disentangle these sonic elements by following the instructions referred to above and ‘listening to the sounds’, encompassing the two highlighted ‘key’ sounds, the David Lynch sound design and the diegetic musical performances and non-diegetic music within the series. It will argue that the whole soundtrack is fundamental to the expanded metaphysical topology presented in the show and a key to fully grasping the mysteries of its bewildering proliferation of moving images.

Sonic Elongation: Stretched Sounds in Experimental Documentary Film (Holly Rogers and Heather Britton)

This paper combines spoken and sonic investigation into an audiovisual process I call “sonic elongation”. Sonic elongation arises when diegetic sound from within the film’s world is broadened until it becomes unfamiliar: when source sounds lose their synchronicity with the image and develop in timbre until they assume musical form and texture. Sonic elongation can occur in all types of film but is particularly powerful in documentary traditions, where location sound, although often enhanced and rendered in postproduction, is often left in a natural state. When location sound that undergoes a transformation so radical that the connection with its associated image is troubled, an audience is encouraged to use interpretation and imagination to navigate between large audiovisual gaps. This gap invites a wide range of subjective responses. This process is most often found at the experimental edges of the documentary tradition, where the potential for audiovisual rupture can powerfully destabilize conventional modes of film consumption. Using experimental documentaries as examples, this paper will explore how sonic elongation can intervene in traditional viewing practices by radically activating our interpretative capacity.

The presentation itself will enact the process of sonic elongation. The crux of sonic elongation is that sound lengthens away from the image but our memory of the original audiovisual connection is maintained. When it reaches a certain rhythmic and aesthetic distance, however, the stretched sound no longer tells us what the image is, but rather encourages us to speculate, interpret and rethink what it might be. To respond to this process in a performative theoretical way, the film—a collaboration with filmmaker Heather Britton—is in two sections that elongate from one another, prefaced by a brief soundscape of live real-time manipulation. The first section outlines the theory through prose and analysis: the second unravels this prose until the semantic roots of the words become untethered, or elongated. This textural reconfiguration creates a theoretical poetry appropriate to the cinematic poetry of its subject.

Lies, Damn Lies and Acoustics: Examining Aural Modality in Animated Documentary Cinema (Joe Sudlow)

The growing presence of animation in documentary cinema signifies a social acceptance of experimental approaches towards the communication of ‘truth’. In contrast, global calls for a re-examination of accuracy in our media-saturated era of ‘post-truth’ and disinformation sit in opposition to such postmodern developments. Leo Murray suggests that “Animated documentaries use real life audio interview material as the basis for an animated film” (2019:129), encouraging the perception that if the images appear artificial, the sound must be ‘real’. This paper will challenge this definition by examining notions of authenticity in animated documentary sound. It will adopt a multimodality framework (Kress & Van Leeuwen) to assess the aural representation of reality and interrogate the wider role of sound in documentary cinema.

Through analysis of Ari Folman’s feature-length animated documentary Waltz with Bashir (2008), the paper will question whether a reduced visual modality places greater pressure on the soundtrack to represent reality. It will assess sound’s ability to hide discontinuity, recontextualise source material and deceive audiences with greater ease than its visual counterpart.

The visual hybridity of animated documentary offers freedom in visual expression. This paper will question whether screen sound is in need of these same authorial freedoms to fully realise the creative scope of the craft and challenge the over reliance on the soundtrack to operate as a tool for confirming authenticity. A further aim will be to identify creative limitations placed on sound designers in a supposed greater service of high modality, fidelity and conformity to dominant Hollywood approaches.

Imperially Unheard: African Music and Visual Geography in the Work of the Colonial Film Unit - CFU (Anushrut Ramakrishnan Agrwaal)

The June 1947 issue of Colonial Cinema, published by Britain’s Colonial Film Unit, was dedicated to discussing the importance of African music in CFU’s instructional/propaganda film pedagogy for the colonised African populations. A CFU employee argues that African music does not have a ‘universal or even a territorial meaning’ and therefore its use should be avoided (32). The other two pieces, one by a Nigerian schoolteacher and another by an ex-welfare officer argue that employing African music would be beneficial, as it is fundamental to the African way of life. While Colonial Cinema does not take an official stance, it republished the CFU employee’s piece ‘by special request’ in March 1949, while the other two are never mentioned again (22). The 1949 issue also has CFU’s deputy director George Pearson stating, that their approach was to give ‘picture messages’ to the illiterate Africans so that it enters the native’s ‘memory store and stirs a new consciousness’ replacing their current form of life with a more educated one (17). To pun, African music is quietly side-lined in favour of an imperial visual pedagogy.

Analysing the discourse on African music in Colonial Cinema this paper and understands this side-lining as a championing of imperial geography through ‘educational’ use of film. It argues that CFU’s prioritising of the eye over the ear, ties in with the colonial practices of visually mapping territories as a means of establishing control. Further, there is an awareness of the subversive possibilities of sound and the alternative geographies it can give rise to viz. the visual (Vogelin 2019), and the Unit’s subordination of African music seeks to stave of the threat the latter posed to the coloniser’s visual regime. Here, the paper supplies a historical engagement with the regulation music’s presence and absence in a pedagogic and propagandistic use of film, and its role in supporting structures of power and knowledge.

Phantacusis: Visually Implied Sound in Silent Film (Jacob Browne)

Despite being referred to as the ‘silent’ era, cinema before the coming of synchronised sound was more than capable of communicating auditory information to its viewing audience, whatever accompaniment was present. Through visual, gestural and editing techniques, a filmmaker could convey complex auditory cues, using the depiction of sound events to create atmosphere, structure cinematic space, or add fine psychological detail to a scene. In the most direct cases, such moments may even encourage the viewing audience to ‘hear’ a phantom sound, as if ‘listening through the eyes.’ As René Clair put it, ‘[w]e do not need to hear the sound of clapping if we can see the clapping hands.’ Following a suggestion by neurologist Oliver Sacks, I call this device ‘phantacusis.’

Unlike its conceptual inverse, the ‘acousmatic,’ this effect remains theoretically underexplored, though filmmakers (and silent film musicians) continue to exploit its effects. Michel Chion is among those who have lain foundations for this enquiry, particularly in his suggestions of the effects of ‘sensory phantoms’ and the device he calls ‘athorybos’ (Greek for ‘without noise’). Demonstrating how extensively and adeptly this onscreen device was used across the silent era, this presentation will give an account of how film exhibition conditions supported the effect, and further build on Chion’s suggestions to explore the device I call ‘phantacusis’ and its implications, with reference to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology.

In this, these on-screen ‘phantom sounds’ of silent cinema pose important questions for sound studies, incorporating the role of absence and silence in perception, the relation of sound to the other senses, and how we evaluate the ‘imaginative mode of sound’ and the sounds we may hear in silence.

Exploring Music as Resistance in Meet Me in St Louis's Patriarchal Utopia (Katy Jayasuriya)

In 1944 audiences flocked to the cinema to watch MGM’s latest Technicolor film musical Meet Me in St. Louis, starring Judy Garland and directed by Vincente Minnelli. The film’s beautiful set, charming characters, and soon-to-be iconic songs would make it one of MGM’s most successful releases. Decades later Meet Me in St. Louis would go on to rank as number ten on the AFI’s Greatest Movie Musical’s list. Film and musicology scholars often focus on the film’s utopian sensibilities, suggesting that it portrayed a nostalgic (if somewhat, unrealistic,) view on the ‘past’ which provided comfort to a nation in the midst of the Second World War.

Within the framework of Mary Ann Doane’s theory on the ideologies of the visible and audible, this paper will show how the music and song moments provided the female characters a space for expression that contradicts the film’s “angel of the house” narrative. By investigating the traditional American values that it supposedly champions, this paper will first suggest that the film’s ‘visible’ representations of a nineteenth-century version of femininity, reflected the ideological agenda of entertainment in 1940’s America. It will then explore the ‘audible’ via an analysis of the film’s most iconic songs: “The Trolley Song” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” as well as the orchestrations that accompany the Halloween scene. This will demonstrate how music provided a space for difference, offering resistance to patriarchal dominance whilst pointing towards a more liberal and freeing society for women.

'You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet!': Pre-Existing Musical Temporality in the Jazz Singer (1927) (Sarah Moynihan)

- Paper not presented -

When Adolf Paul, the Swedish playwright, went to watch The Jazz Singer in 1927, he may have expected to be struck by the first ever use of synchronised dialogue in film. Yet he seems more surprised to have heard work of his friend, Jean Sibelius. ‘They have used the whole of the Mélisande movement’, he wrote to the composer, ‘which incidentally fits in quite well’ (Tawaststjerna, 1976). Warner Bros used Sibelius’s Pelléas et Mélisande Suite, Op. 46/II (1905) in the film’s soundtrack without the composer’s knowledge, editing and restructuring the piece around a pivotal scene in the film's narrative.

The scene in question foregrounds what Michael Rogin (1996) perceives to be ‘exclusionary emulation’: appropriation of a racial group’s image to affirm the appropriator’s own freedom to cross the boundaries of dominant culture. Applying blackface makeup in his dressing room, Al Jolson’s character contemplates the musical life his father desires for him – traditional Jewish canting – and that which he desires for himself – the life of a ‘jazz singer’ – all while Sibelius’s music plays non- diegetically. He looks into the mirror and briefly sees his father canting in the synagogue. At this moment, an altered segment of Max Bruch’s orchestral setting of Kol Nidre, Op. 46 is interpolated to provide an almost uncannily seamless segue to a metadiegetic sequence.

As John Mundy (1999) observes, 'much of the film's meaning is encoded in its music', and furthermore, in the specific technologies used to record its sounds: Jolson’s live Vitaphone recordings are associated with modern secular America, and the pre- recorded and lip-synced canting with the older generation. But what of the third musical element in The Jazz Singer? Alongside Sibelius and Bruch are several other chunks of late Romantic music that together represent a continuation of the silent film ‘compilation score’. The synchronisation of the music to action, or rather, seemingly the inverse in this film, creates a kind of musical temporality, whereby the music appears to determine the action on screen. This paper will consider the intertextual and historical significance of this music in the score, its synchronisation, and what this means for the film’s uncomfortable place in Hollywood’s history.

Considering Hanns Eisler's score to Nuit et Brouillard (1955) (Matt Lawson)

Films based upon the Holocaust have received little academic attention in the field of film musicology. Through a case study of Hanns Eisler’s score to Alain Resnais’ influential Nuit et Brouillard (1955), this paper focusses on three key musical themes and examines them from political, historical, compositional, ironic and anti-literal viewpoints under an encompassing banner of representational and semantic issues. The research found within this paper is built upon a foundation of pre-existing film music literature and Holocaust film literature. It acknowledges, challenges and develops these to create a critical, theoretical analysis of Eisler’s score and the issues surrounding its place in the film.

KEYNOTE: Biblical References and Ominous Anticipations in John Williams' Score for Raiders of the Lost Ark (Emilio Audissino)

2021 marks the 40th anniversary of Raiders of the Lost Ark (S. Spielberg, 1981), whose score is one of the most famous penned by the dean and, we can say, archetype of the Hollywood composer, John Williams. The Raiders score is exuberant, colourful, and a direct homage to the music of Hollywood’s Golden Age. The score is the most Steineresque that the composer has produced, and hence to a superficial glance it might be labelled as a superficial, ‘on the nose’ action score that does nothing but closely mimic the visual actions, with that music/image parallelism called – mostly derogatorily – ‘Mickey-Mousing’, for which Max Steiner was precisely famous and which Williams resurrected as a stylistic option in his old-fashioned ‘neoclassical’ scores. Indeed, in a too simplistic and characteristically vitriolic statement, Norman Lebrecht claimed that what Williams does is ‘plastering movies with bits of what we know, rather than revealing an unseen dimension’ (Lebrecht 2002). On the contrary, at a keener look and deeper analysis, the Raiders of the Lost Ark score presents a number of subtle anticipations and hints of the narrative denouement – hints at what we do not know yet. More importantly, it does reveal an unseen dimension. John Williams's score is the fundamental device that traces the development of the theme of Faith in the narrative. The music also hints at God's presence throughout the film, even translating into music specific Biblical references. There is much more in the score to Raiders of the Lost Ark than the superficial eye and ear might think. The film’s 40th anniversary is a propitious occasion to celebrate the less evident aspects and merits of this popular John Williams work.

A Wave of 'Madness': Scoring Mental Illness in Asylum Film Through the Visual and Musical Symbol of Water (Eleanor Smith)

It is no surprise that when watching a contemporary film featuring an asylum, we are often met with ‘mad’ characters, who are troubled, deviant and dangerous. Although being abolished more than fifty years ago, mental institutions, asylums and their patients have become a fascination and the setting for many contemporary horror films, set to scare, excite and thrill audience viewers with grotesque, alien and othered characters. One connection to mental illness found in contemporary asylum films including A Cure for Wellness (2016) and Shutter Island (2010) is water, often used visually and musically to demonstrate a character becoming mentally unstable. Water already had a connection with asylums through hydrotherapy treatment, with the idea that the plunging of water (to near drowning) would rid patients of their sins and cure their senses (Cox et.al, 2019, 59). Throughout literature, water is a prominent theme within various texts such as Moby Dick, The Tempest and as far back as Odyssey and biblical texts. Both visually and metaphorically, it is seen as both the destroyer and rebirth of life, the cleanser and the idea that the weather may replicate a human’s emotions (Ferber, 2007, 180).

This paper examines the echoes of these concerns by examining visual and musical motifs of water linked to the protagonist, who often endures mental instability through the course of the film, imitated in the musical scoring. With a focus on Hitchcock’s interpretation of water in his work and how it is imitated musically, this paper will question how this symbol has now become so heavily connected with mentally ill characters in contemporary film.

Musical Call: An Animal-Orientated Approach to Film Music (Emilia Czatkowska)

This paper presents the penultimate chapter of my thesis, entitled The Call: a cinematic encounter with nonhuman animal characters and their worlds, in which I discuss problems, limitations, and possibilities that arise at the intersection of film music and the portrayal of nonhuman animal characters. I introduce the term cinematic call (on behalf of nonhuman animals), which denotes the instances in which the use of film features and film techniques helps to create animal-oriented, or animal-centric, cinematic representations.

I then identify the necessary conditions for film music to function as the cinematic call. This process begins with the concepts of polarisation and affective congruence, imported to the studies of film music by Jeff Smith. Some of these conditions are self-evident, such as the congruence between the emotional quality of film music and that of film image. Others, such as the ability of music to create moments of powerful and poignant silence, are less obvious. I will discuss the examples of the musical cinematic calls (and their absence) on a selection of case studies, among them Of Horses and Men (Benedikt Erlingsson, 2013) and Battle of the Queens (Nicolas Steiner, 2011).

As much as screens are ubiquitous in our lives, so are screen animals. The ‘animal turn’ has been transforming Arts and Humanities in the past decades, which is evident in the growing literature on animals in Film and Media Studies (Burt 2002, Pick 2011, Mills 2017, Brown and Fleming 2020). However, this is not reflected in the scholarship on film music, especially in relation to character engagement. As the discussion of presence and representation of nonhuman animals in film becomes more complex, it is important to investigate the role film music plays in this process as well as the animal-oriented directions film music can take.

"Noise, Air and Wind...": Direct, Ambient Sound in the Soundscapes of Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (Laura Lux)

Danièle Huillet’s and Jean-Marie Straub’s dedication to direct sound is well-know and has often been challenged in light of the technical and ontological conditions of sound production. As Emile Wennekes concludes in his recent objections to Straub’s legendary comments on the value of direct sound over dubbing for a sense of reality in “Fidelity in the Soundtrack” (Mera et al, 2017): “soundtrack reality will always remain a plural, multi-layered, multi-sourced illusion”. Despite the validity of his and other discussions on dubbing and music in their work, scholarship has yet to engage with Straub’s appreciation for “noise, air and wind” in his landmark text “Against Dubbing” (1970). For him, these ambient sounds mark the “unreproducible” in cinema. Contrary to the filmmakers’ frequent use of embodied text recitation and “voice-offs”, direct ambient sound evades visualisation and indexical authenticity as these multiple sounds are barely “embodied” onscreen, bear no indexical link to their source and depend on the recording technology used (Chion, 1994). Ambient sound is plural in its origin.

In my presentation, I will analyse key moments of noise, air and wind in the films History Lessons (1972), Fortini/Cani (1976) and Too Early / Too Late (1981) and ask: what is recorded and transmitted in the “unreproducible”, experiential character of direct ambient sound? Destabilising in relation to the image, these elusive sounds create a particular experience of presence and space, which attunes us to the environment within the soundscape. Their role in these films complicates established notions of Huillet/Straub’s politics and ethics of sound, and open a new perspective on authenticity, realism and history in their cinema.

Audiovisual Space: Recontextualising Sound-Image MEdia (Andrew Knight-Hill)

The spatial turn, which swept the wider humanities, has not significantly contributed to inform our understandings of sound and image relationships. Bringing together spatial approaches from critical theory and applying these to the re-evaluation of established concepts within electroacoustic music and audiovisual composition, this talk seeks to build a novel framework for conceiving of sound and image media spatially. The goal is to negate readings of sound & image media as oppositional strands which entwine themselves around one another, and instead position them – within critical discourse – as complementary dimensions of a unified audiovisual space.

Standard readings of audiovisual media are almost ubiquitous in applying temporal conceptions, but these conventional readings act to negate the physical material of the work, striate the continuous flow of experience into abstract points of synchronisation and afford, therefore, distanced observations of the sounds and images engaged. Spatial interpretations offer new opportunities to understand and critically engage with audiovisual media as affective, embodied and material.

The perspectives within this research have potential to be applied to a wide range of sound & image media: from experimental audiovisual film and VR experiences, to sound design and narrative film soundtracks; benefitting not only academics and students, but also creative industry practitioners seeking new terminologies and frameworks with which they can contextualise and develop their practices. Audiovisual space positions potentiality and anticipation to replace notions of dissonance and counterpoint, enabling the reframing of terminologies from electroacoustic music such as gesture and texture in light of their common spatial properties.

Applying practice research perspectives and phenomenological analyses of the author's creative works GONG (2019) and VOID (2019), along with perspectives from embodied cognition, spatial approaches are demonstrated to embrace materiality, subjectivity, and embodied experience as fundamental elements within our understandings the audiovisual.

This research is funded by the AHRC through their Leadership Fellowship programme.

Soundscapes in Fragmented Local Archive Film (Angela English)

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

My research into local archive film, public history, place and audience reception has shown that many of these films do have commentary, vox pops and natural sound as well as diegetic music and library music dubbed on to provide atmosphere. This paper explores how these soundscapes help contextualise fragmented archive film and how audiences respond to this. I explore this through analysis of audience engagement studies I have undertaken using creative interventions into practice with archive film. These studies involved screening fragmented archive film to community audiences in outer London and four New Towns on the periphery of London. As part of my exploration of soundscapes, I will screen and analyse 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 the ‘local’ film can develop a new chapter in film historiography. In this paper I will demonstrate the important role that sound and music plays in developing film historiography with archive film.

This paper addresses the following conference topics:

· The Absence of Music and Sound in Film

· Audience Engagement with Music and Sound in Film

Birdman, Musical Materiality, and Embodied Cognition (Jonathan Godsall)

Scholars have begun to apply theories of sonic materiality and embodied cognition to film music and its audiences. Existing research in this area has tended to approach music quite broadly as a category of sound, and to consider common effects on the bodies of human spectators (e.g. Mera 2016 on ‘haptic music’ that we ‘feel as much as we hear’). This paper shifts focus to the experience of soundtracks in which musical performance is likely to be understood primarily as such, with consequent variation in embodied response between audience members. Specifically, I examine Antonio Sánchez’s drum-kit score to Birdman (Iñárritu 2014), in which high-definition recordings of Sánchez improvising on an intentionally imperfect-sounding instrument offer a sense of materiality and ‘sonic “liveness”’ (Carlson 2019) — and more specifically ‘performedness’ — that is unusually strong for a conventionally exhibited sound film. I argue that the score thereby issues its listeners with a compelling invitation for mimetic embodied engagement — that it prompts us to ‘play along’ with Sánchez through actions both voluntary and involuntary, physical and imagined, based on our human proclivity to ask ourselves the question ‘What’s it like to do/be that?’ (Cox 2016) — and explore how film critics’ common descriptions of the music as ‘propulsive’ and ‘urgent’ may provide evidence for this general effect. But I also reflect on my own highly embodied experience of the score, in which my inclination and ability to ‘feel’ the music are strengthened by my instrumental expertise as a drummer. This suggests a need to include embodied musical knowledge more explicitly in our accounts of film-music audiences’ subjectivity, as one of the ‘ways of knowing’ music that influence our attention to and interpretation of it (Anderson 2016), and that can therefore have a significant impact on our overall experience of a film.

Sounds of Futuristic Nostalgia: The Cultural Legacy of Blade Runnner (1982) and the Yamaha CS-80 Synthesiser (Julin Lee)

“She’s a replicant,” declares Arturia’s landing page for its software emulation of the legendary analogue polyphonic Yamaha CS-80 synthesizer. It quotes the line delivered by Harrison Ford’s character, Rick Deckard, in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) – a fitting reference, as Vangelis’ utilisation of the CS-80 in the film’s celebrated soundtrack marks a significant milestone in the instrument’s history. From pre-set emulation sounds labelled “Blade Runner blues” to physical replicas of the CS-80 synthesizer named “Deckard’s Dream”, Blade Runner has left a significant impact on the cultural legacy of the Yamaha CS-80. Conversely, the CS-80 is inextricably linked to Blade Runner’s signature sound, prompting Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch to bring back this vintage synthesizer for the soundtrack of Denis Villeneuve’s sequel Blade Runner 2049 (2017). The Blade Runner-CS-80 association is particularly remarkable considering the lack of substantial material or oral evidence regarding the extent to which Vangelis used the CS-80 amongst the many other synthesizers at his disposal in his London studio.

In this paper, I explore the intricately linked reception histories of the Blade Runner soundtrack and the Yamaha CS-80 by integrating approaches from film music analysis and organology. Besides determining how the physical design and technical affordances of the CS-80 synthesizer could have contributed to Blade Runner’s iconic soundtrack, I examine how the film’s musical and narrative themes encouraged the enduring Blade Runner-CS-80 connection by drawing parallels between the film’s retrofitted aesthetic with the nostalgia associated with the transition from analogue to digital synthesis in the 1980s. By arguing that Blade Runner and the CS-80 mutually reinforced their cultural value in the intersecting fields of science-fiction film, electronic music and analogue keyboard synthesizers, I aim to demonstrate that the cross-fertilisation between film music and organology can yield new insights into how artefacts of popular culture acquire meaning.

Patriarchal Domination, Violence and Gender in Alberto Igleias' Film Music for The Skin I Live In (Diego Alonso)

In 1987, Spanish composer Alberto Iglesias wrote a string trio entitled Cautiva (Captive), whose programme he described as the "struggle" of the solo violin to escape from the “sinister” domination imposed by the other two instruments. With this and four other early pieces by Iglesias, Nacho Duato created a choreography, also entitled Cautiva, which the Spanish National Dance Company premiered in Madrid in 1993. Developing the trio's programme in collaboration with the composer –and in reaction to the debates on gender violence at the time– Duato produced a piece with a main female dancer, who is captivated, subjugated, and finally killed by her companions, two male dancers. Almost two decades later, the string trio Cautiva became the core and centrepiece of Iglesias’ music for La piel que habito(The Skin I Live In, 2011). Iglesias explained that this had "obvious conceptual and plot connections" to the programme of Cautiva. Now instrumented for solo violin and string orchestra, the piece accompanies key moments in the film, which are marked by Vicente's furious resistance to his captivity and the imposition of the female gender by Dr. Ledgard. As Iglesias pointed out, the violin "symbolises" the protagonist and her (or his) conflict. The surgeon's sophistication and the scrupulous precision of his revenge is expressed through neo-baroque music, derived stylistically from Captive. This presentation analyses the compositional strategies by which Iglesias articulates concepts associated with patriarchal domination, violence and gender in his music for La piel que habito and the stylistic, narrative and conceptual links between the string trio Cautiva (1987), Duato's choreography (1993) and Almodóvar's film (2011).

"Bands who are indie? Like, okay, you got the TV on the radio. But the rest of them are white": Indie Music, American Independent Film and Blackness (Jamie Sexton)

Indie music has frequently been considered a ‘white’ mode of music: the majority of indie musicians and fans are white, and the music itself – particularly indie rock – has also been perceived by many critics as white, particularly through the music’s lack of black musical influences. Consequently, indie music rarely appears on the soundtracks of films made by African American directors. In this paper, I will explore the uncharacteristic use of indie music within two black, American independent feature films: Medicine for Melancholy (Jenkins, 2008) and Pariah (Rees, 2011). Both of these films, in their different ways, employ indie music to question racial identities, most notably normative conceptions of blackness. In Medicine for Melancholy indie music reflects the two main characters’ status as black hipsters, while in Pariah it contributes to the main character Alike’s development of a confident, lesbian identity. Indie music therefore contributes to the important presentation and exploration of characters who can be considered ‘post-soul eccentrics,’ a phrase Francesca T. Royster (2012: 15) has coined to refer to ‘“nonnormative” black identities which are located “in-between” and in excess of norms of sexual identity and racial difference, as well as musical practice.’ In Medicine for Melancholy, indie music is encoded as white and is indicative of the dwindling black population of San Francisco, the film’s setting; in Pariah, however, the focus on a primarily black locale leads Dee Rees to incorporate some black indie folk and rock, which not only questions indie as a white category, but in the process expands received ideas of what indie music is, a strategy which I will argue can contribute to an expansion of dominant conceptions of indie music.

Eyes Re-Opened: Elucidation and Enlightenment Through Music in Eyes Wide Shut (1999) (Marie Bennett)

The employment of pre-existing classical music within a film’s soundtrack was not something new for director Stanley Kubrick when he decided to include sections from a number of such works in what was to be his final film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Indeed, Claudia Gorbman argues that his ‘strength as an auteur lay in his inspired handling of pre-existing music,’[1] while Chris Chang suggests that Kubrick ‘had a knack for irreversibly wedding sound and image.’[2] In this paper, I will focus on the way in which the inclusion of sections of the second piece from György Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata can be interpreted within the movie’s narrative. As I will argue, each use of Ligeti’s music is employed proficiently as being connected to Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his presence in the renowned ‘orgy scene’ at the Somerton mansion. Furthermore, the usages combine with the narrative to suggest moments of revelation or enlightenment for Bill, the movie’s central character, especially in a role in which the lead actor ‘gives little away,’[3] thereby figuratively disclosing his thoughts and actions in a movie in which disguise and masquerade play an important role. Even though the Ligeti piece is instrumental, the music can be heard as observing and reflecting on the action; it is of particular interest that, after its first usage, all the scenes in which the work is subsequently heard have little or no dialogue, such that the music provides its own aural critique regarding the visuals. This allows the composition to be perceived as directly commenting on the events taking place.

Distinguishing Characters: The Symbolic USe of WAM and Pop in Fernando Meirelles' The Two Popes (Anika Babel)

Upon the death of Pope John Paul II in 2005, the Catholic Church found itself at a papacy crossroads: reinforce conservative dogmata by electing Cardinal Ratzinger (Sir Anthony Hopkins) or move forward with the reformationist Cardinal Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce)? In the film, these two protagonists are immediately polarised. This is evidenced in a number of ways—lighting, the use of colour, costume, and set design, for example. However, music plays a particularly perceptible role in distinguishing the German intellectual from the Argentinian man-of-the-people. This tension is illustrated through the contrasting use of Western Art Music (especially piano works) and popular music (notably ABBA and the Beatles). Interestingly, amid these characters’ incompatible ideologies and interests, it is at the intersection of pop and Western art music that the pair eventually find commonalities.

Since there has not been direct analyses of The Two Popes, this papers draws upon Jonathan Godsall’s Reeled In (2019) in approaching bespoke instances of pre-existing music; recent debate on the diegetic/non-diegetic distinction (particularly Winters 2016, Smith 2009, Stilwell 2007); and David Bordwell’s interpolation of the fabula and syuzhet into screen studies (1985). This paper combines these concepts as analytical tools to investigate the narrative effect of the piano and pop in The Two Popes. In line with my broader research, I scrutinise both the positive and pernicious representations of Western art music in contemporary mainstream film to contribute to our broader understanding of Western art music as a sociocultural phenomenon in the ‘real’ and ‘reel’ worlds.

"Galaxy Wars" and "Caribbean Pirates": The Practice of Soundalikes in Library Music (Julia Durand)

The industry of library music (also known as stock or production music) has undergone a significant expansion since its transition to a digital medium in the past two decades, with the development of new licensing models and a tremendous growth in the number of composers writing this music and of audiovisual creators using it in their projects.

A common practice in library music, both in decades-old companies supplying music for television and in newer, more affordable royalty-free catalogues directed at online videos, is the creation of “soundalikes”: tracks that deliberately resemble well known music, be it pop hits or renowned soundtracks. These soundalikes are presented as a low-cost alternative to the licensing of the original music they attempt to emulate, which is often prohibitively expensive for small audiovisual productions with low budgets. However, library music composers and publishers are well aware of the possible legal risks of soundalikes which sound too alike the original music they are modelled on. The composition and categorization of soundalikes in a library music catalogue is therefore shaped by a set of guidelines and strategies in order to avoid any accusations of plagiarism or copyright infringement.

In this paper, I will explore a few of these strategies, drawing from interviews with library music composers and publishers, as well as from an analysis of a few soundalike tracks from various catalogues. I will focus on how composers tackle this practice, often viewing it as a valuable exercise in learning how to write in specific genres or styles, while simultaneously negotiating a tenuous line between emulation and plagiarism. In addition, I will also inquire into how these tracks are tagged, with the use of keywords that hint at the music they are modelled on while avoiding any explicit (and potentially damning) references to the original material.

50 Percent: Sound and Narrative in Telefantasy Franchise (Leslie McMurtry)

Filmmaker George Lucas harnessed the power of sounds above that of the content of speech in Star Wars; he “loved cool sounds and sweeping music and the babble of dialogue” more than the sense of dialogue itself (Taylor, 2015), declaring that sound was “50 percent of the motion-picture experience” (cited in Hearn, 2005, p.141). This has led to a long and rich tradition of sound in the transmedia Star Wars storyworlds, including films, TV series, video games, and radio dramas, and across elements such as dialogue, SFX, and music (especially that composed by John Williams). The “earconic” sounds of Star Wars can be said to “suture” (Coyer, 2010) the narrative of The Mandalorian (Disney, 2019- ). Its music, composed by Ludwig Goransson, is a departure from more classical Williams-ian iterations. And what are the implications for dialogue when the main character is masked for nearly the entire first series? Sound also sutures the narrative in Star Trek: Lower Decks (CBS, 2020- ), a foray into animation by Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek franchise. Given the tonal dissimilarities between Lower Decks’ irreverence and previous transmedia iterations of Star Trek, sounds that are essential to the franchise universe (such as the transporter) help establish its canonical primacy. Furthermore, its opening titles are a striking example of the use of an anempathetic (Chion, 1994) score. This paper will argue that in these current telefantasy examples, sound—although usually overlooked—accounts for at least 50 percent of the experience and helps establish canonicity.

'A Natural Kind of Partnership': The Crafts of Music, Sound and Graphic Design in Television Idents (Melissa Morton)

Television idents—the channel logos appearing between programmes—are ubiquitous, yet easily overlooked. Since the BBC’s first ident in 1953, they have evolved from ‘crude badging exercises’ to creative expressions of the channel brand. From the echoing chimes of BBC Two’s esoteric soundscapes to the punchy Netflix ‘ta-dum’ heartbeat, the music and sounds of idents have been used by broadcasters and on-demand platforms alike to connect with their audiences and persuade them to ‘stay tuned’ or ‘keep binging’.

I aim to contribute to the emerging interest in musicology in what Rodman (2009) labels television’s ‘extradiegetic space’. This space functions as a ‘meta-narrator’ of television and includes advertisements, trailers and idents. Drawing on musicology, television studies, and marketing, I echo arguments made in Mera et al (2017) and Deaville et al (2020), that to understand the cultural role of these texts, it is valuable to research their production. Accordingly, my paper combines audiovisual analysis of idents with in-depth interviews with London- and LA-based graphic designers and composers. The brevity of idents—which can last just 10 seconds—demands specific skillsets from these creatives, who consider their work as a ‘craft’ that borders art and commerce.

My paper first explores the role of composers and designers in the television branding industry, in which multiple parts—branding and art, sound and image—form a whole. I then examine case studies of UK-based broadcasters and online platforms, investigating notions of creativity and collaboration. Within this discussion, I highlight the attempts of composers and designers to ‘translate’ between visual and sonic disciplines when collaborating, as well as their need to respond to the demands and priorities of their client. Ultimately, I enquire into the processes that lie behind idents—the work that becomes, as one interviewee described to me, ‘the soundtrack to our lives’.

Narrative TV and the Neo-Silent Aesthetic (Peter Adams)

I will present a sub-section of my PhD thesis, which examines the selective omission of diegetic sound in contemporary media, and the development of a so-called “neo-silent” aesthetic. My research draws attention to a rich seam of diegetically-silent content – including cinema, television, and video games – that is heavily (and often self-consciously) indebted to the formal and aesthetic characteristics of the silent era.

My paper will specifically focus on the adoption (and reinterpretation) of the neo-silent aesthetic in the context of narrative television. It will consider the ways in which diegetic sound – particularly dialogue – can be deliberately suppressed, disrupting the well-documented “flow” of TV as a medium, and foregrounding music as a substitute for speech.

As television has matured, the traditional boundaries between the “televisual” and the “cinematic” have become increasingly blurred, resulting in greater aesthetic experimentation. Narrative TV shows, in particular, have embraced this creative freedom, releasing episodes that consciously deviate from their usual formats and conventions. For instance, several shows have produced one-off musical episodes, which parodically subvert their best-known quirks and tropes.

Amongst these more established episodic deviations, we can identify the development and deployment of the one-off “silent” or “mute” episode. Whilst this is less common, it is by no means unprecedented, as exemplified by a spate of recent releases, including Inside No. 9, BoJack Horseman, Mr. Robot, and the reboots of The X-Files and Twin Peaks.

One of the most prominent early examples of the silent (or semi-silent) episode is Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s ‘Hush’ (1999), which I will examine in this paper as a representative example of the neo-silent aesthetic on the small screen.

Overall, my paper will engage with timely film-musicological issues, shedding light on the lineage of screen silence, and highlighting connections between the conscious suppression of sound in different audiovisual contexts.

Manchester by the Sea (2016): Amazon and the Prime Age of Indie Film Scoring (James Moffatt)

This paper analyses the compositional strategies and commercial contexts of scoring the critically acclaimed ‘Amazon Original’ feature film Manchester by the Sea (2016).

Scored predominantly using multi-tracked solo vocals, performed and recorded by the composer’s daughter in her college dorm, the film earned an ASCAP Composers' Choice Award nomination for ‘Film Score of the Year’. The film was also nominated for six Academy Awards, winning two. However, composer Lesley Barber was disqualified from Oscar consideration due to existing classical repertoire featuring heavily in the film’s soundtrack, exposing tensions between ‘temp’ music, licensing and original score within film.

Produced independently of major studio support, within a limited budget, the film secured a subsequent distribution deal through newly founded Amazon Studios at Sundance Film Festival. This paper explores the challenges composers face when tasked to score ‘indie’ films with budgetary restrictions and a lack of supporting infrastructure, such as the scoring stages at major film production studios, as well as revealing the creative solutions to music making composers employ under these conditions.

While independent filmmaking, and scoring, is no new phenomenon, developments in digital technology and the emergence of online streaming services, such as Amazon Prime, provide new platforms and opportunities for filmmakers, composers and audiences alike.

Differing facets of digitisation are interlocking in the changing status of the composer, from the tools they use to the way their work, film music, is consumed. These changes are having material effects on music for new media and are explored through this case study.

Absences in Sound and Image: The Transmedia Project of Soundtrack (2017) (Camila Figueiredo)

Soundtrack (2017) is a Brazilian film, written and directed by the duo 300ml, formed by Bernardo Dutra and Manitou Felipe, who follows the story of a photographer in his artistic process. Cris, played by Selton Mello, travels to a polar station to take self-portraits inspired by a list of songs that reflect his emotional state at certain times; such portraits would later be collected and would be part of an exhibition. From a narrative point of view, the film addresses the importance of art and the fragility of human relationships, especially those built under strict conditions of isolation, in an inhospitable environment.

The film, however, frustrates the viewers by not giving them access to the music that the artist listens to when he takes his photos, nor to the photos themselves. This decision, however, is deliberate, since it is part of a project that will expand the narrative beyond the limits of the film medium. Soundtrack is, therefore, a transmedia project that will fill in the gaps of the film with an exhibition in which the photos allegedly taken by the character are placed side by side with the songs he listened to on those occasions.

Relying on the works of Henry Jenkins, Robert Stam and Michel Chion, among others, this presentation intends to examine the absences and silences as the main motif of the film, first in relation to the interactions among the characters, but also as the core of the transmedia phenomenon, in the sense of these sound and image gaps that are filled in by other media.