Full Description
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.
Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: On the Aesthetics, Politics, and Intersections of Silence, Sound, and Immersion
Florian Freitag, Laura Katharina Mücke, 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 (New York, MoMA, 2010)
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, 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, Elisabeth Sommerlad
12. The Silenced Reception Spaces of Theater and Cinema, Or: About the Politics of Silence as Immersive Experience
Laura Katharina Mücke, 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
