New Media Workshop

On Friday, January 27, Peter Shultz, PhD candidate in the department of Music, will present and discuss “On Cues and Clues: Investigating Musical Space and Persona in L. A. Noire.”

“While film composers, sound designers, and scholars have long distinguished between diegetic and non-diegetic music (or ‘source’ and ‘score’), others have pointed out that film music frequently straddles this supposed boundary. For example, what initially sounds like underscore may be turn out to be a kitchen radio in the scene, and diegetic characters in musicals sing along with non-diegetic orchestras. Video-game scholars such as Kristine Jørgensen and Mark Grimshaw have observed that music and sound in games raises new problems for the diegetic concept of audio: agents in the game world may address the player directly, and player-controlled characters respond to audio cues that they cannot ‘hear.’ This paper uses evidence from L. A. Noire (Rockstar/Team Bondi 2011) to interrogate existing models of music and space, proposing that a theory of persona, adapted from the work of Edward Cone in the 1970s and reinterpreted through recent research on cognition and perception, affords a richer understanding of musical expression.”

There are no pre-circulated materials for this presentation.

The New Media Workshop meets from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM in Cobb 310.

On Friday, January 13, Hannah Frank, PhD student in the department of Cinema and Media Studies, will present her paper “The Invisible Visible and the Inaudible Audible: Testing the Limits of Vertov’s Kino-Eye.”

“This paper reconsiders Dziga Vertov’s conception of the camera’s role in filmmaking practice, the Kino-Eye, through an investigation of his approach to both animation and sound. To test the limits of Vertov’s radical documentary project, whereby cinematic technology affords the filmmaker a privileged access to the truth, I explore experiments in so-called “synthetic sound” (sound that is produced by visual patterns applied directly to the optical soundtrack) by his contemporaries in the Soviet Union and abroad—experiments Vertov dismissed. In other words, Vertov, who used a variety of animation techniques in service of the Kino-Eye project, was unwilling to treat sound in the same manner he did images. I argue, however, that Vertov, in keeping with the logic of his film theory and practice, very well might have embraced synthetic sound.”

This paper is no longer available for download.

The New Media Workshop meets from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM in Cobb 310.