Clarifying ‘Immersion’
I use the term ‘immersion’ quite a lot in my research and writings in this project, and I would like to clarify exactly what I mean. The definition of immersion is deep mental involvement in something. This is a very broad definition and doesn’t suit my project. When I refer to immersion I am referring to diegetic immersion, a maintaining of audiovisual correspondence between musical source and what’s on the screen. Perhaps it is useful to define what the opposite of this immersion is so I know what to avoid, this would be the audience becoming aware or being reminded of the fact that they are watching a film, that everything they are seeing and hearing is designed to influence them. Once aware of this fact, I believe that the viewer is taken out of the experience.
My practice is focused on the relationship between score and story, musical and diegetic. I would like to investigate methods of building musical scores out of diegetic sound, and possibly maintaining diegetic congruency throughout the score. This is not to say that a traditional non-diegetic score is not immersive, they can be extremely immersive. It is even possible that the reason the can be so immersive is because it sits on a different plane to the story (Chion), giving the story space to be experienced. Perhaps the emotional influence overpowers the ‘self outing’ (Revealing the processes/construction of film) nature of the non-diegetic score. Furthermore, it could be that the ritual of sitting down in front of a screen already presupposes the viewer has accepted the non-real nature of film.
Regardless of these possibilities, I will be investigating the avenue of composition for film. This is because the research I have conducted on cinematic sound designers leads me to the conclusion that a diegetic score should be more immersive than a non-diegetic score. As the audience, generally we identify with the protagonist. We see through their eyes and hear what they hear. Our experience of the story is channeled through a person (obviously there are multiple exceptions eg. dramatic irony, films lacking people). It therefore makes sense to me that if we want total narrative and experiential immersion, the audience should only be hearing what the protagonist could conceivably be able to hear. Anything outside of that draws attention to the medium.
This may be a futile experiment in the long run, it is possible that these techniques make no difference to the immersion of a film. I think it is still a worthwhile investigation that may lead to some interesting results, uncover some useful techniques and give me a more in-depth understanding of the construction of film sound/scores.