Sensing Sound, Feeling Film - Exploring haptic aurality in cinema

Abstract

This thesis aims to broaden the studies of hapticity in cinema through further development of haptic aurality. This relatively unknown term is the counterpart of haptic visuality, and represents the totality of sound elements in a film soundtrack, ranging from silence and ambient noise to songs and score. It has often been claimed that film is a visual medium, which has generally led to a much less developed theoretical field on sound in film, and thus the development of haptic aurality as a concept is still its infancy. This tendency has be noticed by a number of authors, but they are few and far between. What makes matters even more complicated is that the authors that do focus on the haptic quality of sound in film tend to work with different aspects of haptic aurality, their focus is all over the place, and there is hardly any common ground when it comes to terminology and conceptualization. Therefore, my theoretical framework covers the most important theories, ideas and concepts created by a variety of authors, after which these are filtered, selected and structured. Combined with a methodology that draws upon the anthropological, ethnographic method of thick description, I analyze five films in separate case studies, adhering to separate categories. These categories are created using two parameters; the kind of sound (silence, noise, or music), and the depth of haptic intensity (ranging from haptic to visceral). Since the experience of sound comes in so many varying ways, it is appropriate to work with five different cases in order to show the variety in haptic manifestations that these sounds showcase. The results of these five analyses lead me to the conclusion that the field of haptic aurality should be seen as a legitimate arena of research that expands film studies beyond the limitations of rational, narrative-driven analysis, focusing on intuitive and sensory experiences.