Silence, Sounds, Music

This book examines the intersections of silence with immersive arts and experiences. Silence and immersion may seem antithetical: while immersion is supposedly induced by acoustic and other stimuli, silence is commonly understood as the absence or opposite of sound. Since the eighteenth century, however, silence has been established as a multifarious and polyvalent cultural concept. Immersion, in turn, though often used as a simple "all-inclusive" term, has old and complex ontological and epistemological roots.

Organized into three parts, this book brings critical, historical, and theoretical debates on silence into dialogue with different notions of immersion. The 16 theoretical articles and case studies engage in discovering and questioning the continued prominence of both concepts in aesthetics, culture, and media. Covering music, film, digital, visual and performance art, theater, video games, and theme parks, the chapters discuss both highly canonical and rarely examined artifacts. Written by scholars from Germany, Austria, France, and Switzerland, the interdisciplinary collection includes perspectives from musicology, film studies, cultural and media studies, gender studies, art history, and philosophy.

Silence, Sounds, Music addresses both an academic and a wider audience. It will be of interest to anyone interested in music, sound, immersive experiences, the so-called experience economy, and contemporary art and culture.

Florian Freitag has been a professor of American Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany) since 2019. He received his PhD in American Studies from the University of Konstanz (Germany) in 2011 and worked as an assistant professor of American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Germany) from 2011 to 2019. Freitag’s publications on theme parks include articles in The Journal of Popular Culture and Continuum; book chapters in A Reader in Themed and Immersive Spaces (ed. Scott Lukas; 2016), and Popular New Orleans: The Crescent City in Periodicals, Theme Parks, and Opera, 1875-2015 (Freitag 2021), as well as the edited collections Time and Temporality in Theme Parks (2017) and Key Concepts in Theme Park Studies (2023).

Laura Katharina Mücke is a research assistant in the area “Everyday Media and Digital Cultures” at the Department for Film, Theater, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Mainz. Her PhD project, based in Mainz, Vienna, and Groningen, focuses on the discursivity of seemingly omnipotent concepts of media experience. From 2019 to 2022, she was an assistant for “Theory of Film” at the University of Vienna. She is co-editor of the journal Montage AV and co-founder of the junior research group “ID*A (Initiative Doktorand*innen-Austausch).” Recent publications are the journal issue on “Messy Images” (together with Chris Tedjasukmana and Olga Moskatova, 2022) and the translation from French of “Kommunikationsräume: Einführung in die Semiopragmatik” by Roger Odin (with Guido Kirsten, Magali Trautmann, and Philipp Blum, 2019) as well as the article “Towards a Term of Political Immersion as Co-Immersion” (together with Tom Poljanšek) in: Jacopo Bodini, Alessandro De Cesaris: Immersivity: Philosophical Perspectives on Technologically Mediated Experience (2002).

Peter Niedermüller has been an interim professor at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Germany) and at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Mannheim (Germany). He was also a visiting fellow at the German Historical Institute in Rome (Italy). Currently Niedermüller is a senior lecturer for musicology at JGU Mainz, in 2019 he was also appointed as a professor there. His research interests include the history of concert life and musical interpretation as well as film music. Since 2002, he has been a consultant editor of Ad Parnassum: A Journal of Eigteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Instrumental Music. Since 2016, he has also co-edited Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung. Among his latest publications are Klangkunst und musikalische Interpretation (2018) and two chapters in Geschichte der musikalischen Interpretation im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (2020).