‘Sonic Diegesis: Reality and the Expressive Potential of Sound in Narrative Film’
The essay opens by outlining the birth of music concrete, and how Pierre Schaeffer and Luc Ferrari’s pioneering work paved the way for our modern outlook and processes in cinematic sound design, proposing that mimetic sounds hold emotional and musical value. Andrew Knight-Hill states that analysing sound in film purely from a perspective of signification is a misstep, ‘within this context sounds can never just be- they must always be something. And as such they are denied the opportunity to reveal their full potential.’
Knight-Hill then goes on to investigate the relationship between reality and diegesis in cinema, and how reality is often subverted in favour for narrative. He provides examples, one of which being ‘Gravity’ 2013 in which if reality was favoured there would be no sound in the film at all. Instead, the sound designers weave the mimetic sound into the underscore, each composed with the same orchestral methods (tones and glissandi). Through this the score becomes inseparable from the diegetic/narrative world, and the mimetic sound becomes inseparable from the narrative. This relationship between mimesis, diegesis and underscores is contradictory to our traditional notions of cinematic sound. Traditionally the underscores occupy a separate plane to the diegesis, from which it provides commentary on the story, scores take on a life of their own, they become a ‘discourse that frames the story’. The underscore provides a ‘stream or layer of information that the audience negotiates in parallel to interpret meanings from the film’. This analysis of underscoring is extremely limited and in certain cases completely wrong.
The essay goes on to suggest that an underscore can act as an indicator and occupier of narrative space. Again, Knight-Hill provides an example, ‘Dunkirk’ 2017. The score in this film is interweaved with the diegetic sound. It represents unseen antagonists (the approaching Nazi forces), it also drives the narrative intensity (The score does not represent the narrative intensity, it is the intensity), lastly it acts as a modulator for the drive and trajectory of the film (The ticking watch is constantly changing tempo driving the narratological intensity, this is described as ‘intensified sonic continuity’ highlighting the self-consciousness of the narration).