Embodying the Soundtrack: An Analytic Approach to the Corporeality of Film Music

When coordinated, filmic image and soundtrack can afford an experience of corporeal resonance, involving kinesthetic, affective and haptic contents. This thesis analytically explores how music contributes to this phenomenon. To this end, embodied simulation theory is exploited (chap. 1) and complemented with analytic tools derived from ecological psychology (chap. 2) for application to sequences from post-2000 “popular genre” films (chap. 3). The corporeal affordances of the soundtracks are assessed in relation to potential individual, technological and sociocultural variations in the cinematic ecology (chap. 4). This research thus demonstrates the explanatory power of approaching the film soundtrack from an embodied perspective and opens up reflections on the entanglement of the “real” and the “virtual” in the viewing ecology, and on strategies of bodily involvement in other audiovisual media, formats and genres.

Thesis available here: archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:178284