An example of diagetic sound is the first scene of the show where she is in a college classroom learning. It is an example of diagetic sound because they only sounds you hear are coming from the scene. The teacher lecture, the clock ticking, and nothing else; no music. This is still the case in the next scene when she is walking in the hallway talking to a guy. This is being used because it is a scene showing just another ordinary day with nothing special happening. It is contributed to horror by putting a baseline on normal things. If the normal things have only diagetic sounds, then when you place more than just diagetic sounds in scary scenes it seems more dramatic. The mise-en-scene again in this scene was just showing a normal college classroom and hallway. It was relatively light showing that again, the scene was normal. I chose this example because it seemed to be purely diagetic sound with no added sound. It helped to form a contrast between normal scenes and horror scenes in the show.
A good example of non-diagetic sound was when the smoke or supernatural thing was going into the box, there were whispers, and there was also music in the background. This is non-diagetic because these were sounds that weren’t being made by anything in the scene, but they were added to the scene. These were put into the scene in order to make it seem more spooky and dramatic. If the whispers weren’t in the scene, it wouldn’t seem very scary at all. The music just intensifies the horror and makes it more dramatic. The mise-en-scene of this scene had dark lighting, if you call smoke a prop, it worked really well at showing that something supernatural was happening and again, adding to the horror. There wasn’t a lot of diagetic sound in this scene that was contributing to anything because the whisper sounds and the music were much louder than the faint sounds in the scene. I chose this scene because it was a very obvious change from the college classroom scene with very different mise-en-scene and it mostly had non-diagetic sound.
Another scene that has a good example of mise-en-scene is when the girl is running from the floating evil people in the dorm hall. The lighting is very dark and dim, the framing and angle are as if the audience is watching it happen as if they were standing right there but can’t do anything and are helpless which adds to the horror I think. The actor is frantically running and banging on the door for help, you can see in her movements that she’s terrified. And the diegetic sound is there but at a relatively low volume compared to the diagetic sound which makes the scene more dramatic.
July 31, 2014 at 3:21 pm
The opening scene is an interesting one to analyze because it is a blend of external reality and Buffy’s internal dream world. In film analysis there is a lot of different perspectives on internal sounds and what type of diagetic sound they represent, with alternative distinctions like meta-diagetic, internal objective and internal subjective. For our purposes, I think it is valueable to just be aware that the audio in the first scene are diagetic sounds and they can be further categorized as diagetic and internal diagetic sounds.
August 1, 2014 at 5:30 pm
You made a good point about the intent of the music in the second scene. The addition of that music and those noises adds to the emotional element of the scene. Without the non-diegetic sound there would not be the feeling of peril when watching the scene. I found it difficult in some scenes to determine whether or not the sound was coming from the scene, or if it was coming from somewhere else. Reading through your post helped me to think about these styles a bit better. The important thing I figured out is to determine what is in the scene. If there is something that can make noise in the scene then there is a good chance that the sound is diegetic. But, like in this show, there were many times that the sound was used for dramatic effect, which for me was a big clue about the difference of the origin points.
August 3, 2014 at 5:31 pm
The connection that you made between only diegetic sound and the normal “baseline” scenes is really interesting, and not one that I had thought of before. Now that I am reflecting on it though, it seems to be a very common technique, to have the ‘normal’ scenes seems as realistic as possible by only having diegetic sounds, and the ‘horror’ scenes as being extra dramatic with the inclusion of non-diegetic mood music. This seems to fit into the idea of categorization and ambiguous sensory input that Carroll discusses in relationship to monster-horror: if scene that are normal have sensory input that we expect, we would be more likely to find they believable, whereas horror scenes seem odd because there is sensory input occurring, like mood music, that doesn’t happen in real life. It does make me wonder though if having a horror scene that did not have non-diegetic music might actually be more horrific, since it would be more believable from a realistic standpoint. It’s true in movies, half the fear comes from the music, but a scene could also be creepy if it was done with only the sounds we would expect to hear if it was actually happening. What are your thoughts on this tactic? Do you think a scene would be scarier with or without non-diegetic sound, and if it would be scarier would that fear possibly be ‘too real’ and therefore detract from the aesthetic pleasure of the viewing?