Experiential Intensity

Deutsche Version

In this video essay, I focus on a rather simple device that often affects us unconsciously in audiovisual media: a continuous increase in acoustic intensity that suddenly breaks off. The impression of growing intensity is created by ascending volume, pitch, or tempo, and usually referred to as a riser. But since I am interested in both the continuous rise and the abrupt fall of the accompanying tension, I prefer the visually inspired term ramp. 

Although a ramp is able to induce affective tension and release on a purely musical basis, in a film, its specific impact relies on the interaction with narrative and visual elements. Ramps frequently appear in scenes that depict characters waking up, either literally from a dream or metaphorically from an absent-mindedness. By means of increasing intensity, the ramp creates an anticipatory urgency towards the moment of awakening. At the breaking point, it relieves us from this feeling of stress and thus conveys the character’s subjective experience of snapping out of a previous state of mind. 

Furthermore, «Experiential Intensity: The Ramp» also explores how a ramp can trigger a metaphorical awakening for us as audience members. In the following paragraphs, I aim to contextualize some of the underlying theoretical concepts I refer to in my videographic analysis.

Experiential Intensity

For the past few decades, the emotional effect of music in audiovisual media has generally been categorized according to Michel Chion’s concept of empathetic and anempathetic sound.1 While empathetic music points in the same emotional direction as the narrative and visual information it accompanies, anempathetic music is perceived as independent from the emotional state of a character. Nevertheless, this indifference or irony can increase the recipient’s affective attachment to a character.

However, certain aspects of current scoring practices do not fit into either of these categories, especially when it comes to music in which the emotionalizing effects of Western tonality are less important. In a study on violence in contemporary screen media, Lisa Coulthard states that «affective intensities foreground subjective experience through sound». As a result, «we are invited to feel the impact, not just feel for a character».2

In my ongoing study of contemporary first-person narrative films, I have found that on a moment-to-moment basis, affective intensities dominate the communication of subjective experience far beyond violent scenes. Influenced by avant-garde and minimal music as well as digital automation processes, musical gestures such as crescendi, glissandi, accelerandi, or modulations of timbre have become salient in a variety of immersive narrative films. Following Danijela Kulezic-Wilson’s argument that «Sound Design is the New Score»,3 I treat them as musical gestures regardless of their origin as diegetic or nondiegetic noises, speech, or designated music.

Tension and Release

But what exactly does affective mean in the context of experiencing a sonic intensity? With reference to Brian Massumi,4 Eric Shouse defines affect as a non-conscious «pre-personal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another».5 This state is usually characterized by arousal and valence.6 David Huron adds attention as a crucial modulator of affective responses. In «Sweet Anticipation»,7 the Canadian musicologist draws on cognitive psychology and neuroscience to investigate how expectations shape our experience of music. Based on a set of interacting physiological and cognitive responses, he develops a general psychological theory of expectations that not only aims to explain the pleasure we get from listening to music, but also focuses on tension and release.

What makes Huron’s framework especially attractive for film sound studies is the fact that it seeks to explain «stream-of-consciousness listening», i.e., situations in which «a listener may direct no explicit attention to the music, and may show no awareness of the listening act».8 And although most of the book is about expectations raised from Western tonality, the basic assumptions apply to all types of sound (and narrative events).

This is crucial because the musical gestures I am investigating are non-melodic – sometimes even non-tonal – and based on continuous changes of volume, pitch, tempo, and/or timbre. Since continuous changes are intuitively perceived as unstable, they potentially generate stress responses «because our brains and bodies do not know when the change is going to stop».9

Prediction and Reaction

I analyze these gestures with the help of David Huron’s prediction, tension, and reaction responses. These responses are part of a model designed to reflect our body’s regulation of arousal and attention levels necessary to face an expected or unexpected event. All three of them describe fast unconscious processes that by-pass thought.

The tension response is gearing up our arousal and attention levels in preparation of an expected event. In the case of uncertainty about the what, when or where of the outcome, our physical tension sometimes has to be sustained over a long time. The longer an outcome is delayed, the more the »limbic reaction that arises from changes in arousal and attention» grows.10 Even when no narrative tension is present, increasing sonic intensity triggers similar physiological responses that we perceive as affective states of tension.

The outcome itself triggers a prediction response. If the event was correctly predicted, «the emotional response is positively valenced». At the same time, a reaction response assesses the situation «followed by an immediate somatic (bodily) response». Reaction responses are also triggered by surprises of any kind. The less expected an outcome, the stronger the negative reaction. This response not only «assumes a worst-case scenario.»11 It is also «protected from habituation» because in the real world, it «must be evoked reliably, even when there is an overwhelming history of false alarms».12

 Cognitive Appraisal

According to Huron, however, negative reaction responses are often «inhibited or suppressed by the slower, more accurate, appraisal process».13 Whether there is time for a cognitive appraisal response to have a lasting effect on the audience may also be down to whether a score tends to overwhelm us with constant arousal or whether it invites us to actively engage with the narrative, as the contrasting examples from How To Have Sex (Molly Manning Walker, 2023) and its trailer in the video essay exemplify.

The ramp is an ideal device to make affective overstatements without any narrative substance. After all, musically induced anxiety elicits stress and the ensuing «search for stress reduction calls up all the cognitive capacities»,14 preventing a clear-eyed assessment of the situation at hand. In audiovisual media, sonic, visual, and narrative tensions and expectations usually interact. This may also influence which part of a ramp has a stronger impact: the intensification that narrows our focus or the sudden break that opens it up after the fact. There can be experiential pleasure in both. But only the latter is able to activate the audioviewer.

In that sense, my audiovisual essay may hit you over the head with an excessive accumulation of intensifying ramps. Yet, by foregrounding this sonic affective device, I attempt to expose its ubiquity in the contemporary media environment. 

• 1Michel Chion: Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, New York 2019/1994, 8.
• 2

  Lisa Coulthard: Affect, Intensities, and Empathy: Sound and Contemporary Screen Violence, in: Miguel Mera, Ronald Sadoff, and Ben Winters (ed.): The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound, New York and London 2017, 50-60, 58.

• 3

  Danijela Kulezic-Wilson: Sound Design is the New Score: Theory, Aesthetics, and Erotics of the Integrated Soundtrack, Oxford 2020.

• 4

  Brian Massumi: Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgements, in: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus, Minneapolis 1987.

• 5

  Eric Shouse: Feeling, Emotion, Affect, in: M/C Journal, Jg. 8, Nr. 6, 2005, http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php.

• 6

  Cf. J.A. Russell and L.F. Barrett: Core Affect, Prototypical Emotional Episodes, and Other Things Called Emotion: Dissecting the Elephant, in: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 76, no. 5, 805-819, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.76.5.805.

• 7

  David Huron: Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation, Cambridge, MA 2006, 433.

• 8

  Ibid.

• 9Jeremy Smith: The Functions of Continuous Processes in Contemporary Electronic Dance Music, in: Music Theory Online, 2021, vol. 27, no. 2, 284.
• 10Huron, Sweet Anticipation, 426.
• 11

  Ibid., 37-38.

• 12

  Ibid., 496.

• 13

  Ibid., 497.

• 14

  Ulrike Hanke: Evidence-Based Teaching: Lessons You Can Learn from Psychology for Your Teaching Practice, in: Heinz Bachmann (ed.): Competence-Oriented Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: Essentials, Berne 2018, 112.