Sound Matters

Twentieth-century composer John Cage famously noted, "Everything we do is music." As anyone familiar with Cage's music knows, this is particularly true of his aleatoric or chance works, but most famously enacted in his piece 4′33″, an aural homage to the unknown. Performers gather on stage ready to launch into anticipated musicality, stopping, sometimes quite awkwardly with hands poised on keys or strings, waiting. What ensues are the sounds of the audience, the room, ambient traffic noise, muffled or not so muffled coughs, embarrassed laughs—the music of flouted expectation. Yet sound, noise, music, even silence, are all part of the aural landscape, the soundscape in which we live, both in the real world and in the created worlds of film, animation, theater, and games. Even written or visualized static narratives such as graphic novels or manga/manhua contain and indicate aurality through visual sound effects or textual gestures, encouraging readers to audiate these sounds in their mind's ear.

It is not too much to say that sound design and production are necessary elements of mise en scène; not seen and yet present, sometimes in ways that eclipse visual or even narratological elements of world-building. This becomes clearer in absentia, when one watches a movie with the sound off or in those increasingly rare filmic experiments where directors intentionally avoid background music—the tension of silence or the lack of sound may cause more cognitive dissonance than any musical or sonoric accompaniment ever could. Yet scholarly discourse concerning media studies and particularly anime scholarship has tended to avoid deep dives into the meanings and uses of sound with some notable exceptions. One of these is the collection Drawn to Sound: Animation Film Music and Sonicity (2010), edited by Rebecca Coyle, which foregrounds international musical studies of such diverse topics as DreamWorks' Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Lupin III, and the fertile partnership of Miyazaki Hayao and Joe Hisaishi, to name but a few.¹ The book series 33 1/3 by Bloomsbury Press has several notable contributions to anime scholarship through its Japan series, under the editorship of Manabe Noriko, including Yamada Keisuke's study of Supercell and Hatsune Miku, Rose Bridges' consideration of Kanno Yoko's soundtrack to Cowboy Bebop, and most recently, Hara Kunio's exploration of Joe Hisaishi's music for My Neighbor Totoro.² Beyond these there are, of course, several articles and dissertations that concern the musicality of anime, manga, and related media, however, they tend to be grouped with musicological studies, separate from inter- or multidisciplinary discourses.

I was therefore delighted when Frenchy Lunning, Sandra Annett, and the Mechademia board communicated with me after the 2018 Kyoto Mechademia conference about the possibility of a sound-related topic for a Mechademia: Second Arc volume. Immediately following the provocative, interdisciplinary meeting that featured the manga nexus as a point of creative intertextuality, this volume, we decided, should attempt to gather studies and explorations into the uses of sound across popular media—not only through musicologically driven soundtrack studies, but the larger field of sound, broadly conceived. Our call was cast broadly, and was consequently widely answered, allowing for the division of this volume into the three sections of musical aurality, vocal aurality, and visual aurality, highlighting the different intersections of senses and sound organization that impact perception, consumption, and the enjoyment of this media. Soundscapes essays, drawn from sound, music, and media scholars, seek to explore the complex webs of relationships between sound, visuality, and narratology.

Musical Aurality

Starting with musicality as it is more conventionally conceived, this section considers how diverse musical discourses, from traditional Japanese music (hogaku) or Western-influenced tonality interacts, blends, or sits uncomfortably next to globalized popular musical styles including rock, punk, and rap. Functioning diegetically, nondiegetically, and even intradiegetically, these musical narratives are not merely "incidental" or "occasional," as they have been labeled in the past, but are intrinsic to a sophisticated appreciation of the larger narratives at work in modern popular media entertainments.

Authors working on diverse material, separated by decades have found that musical expression creates space for alternative discourse, another...