Diegesis
A Semantic Paradigm for Electronic Music
In the field of narratology, diegesis is known as “the spatiotemporal universe of a story” (Genette 1969, quoted in Bunia 2010). This concept can be traced back to Plato’s dichotomization of narrative modes into imitation and narration, or mimesis and diegesis (Plato 1985 [c. 380 BC]). However, it has since yielded various incarnations that have been used for describing narrative structures in art and situating the components of an artwork in relation to one another. On a meta-level, the resulting narratological perspectives also provide insights into the fabric of the artistic experience through delineating relationships between the artist, the artistic material and the audience.
As an artistic form of temporal nature, music too prompts narratives. This, however, occurs in the abstract realm of the musical sound. Narratives are conveyed to the listener through a culturally embedded musical language that has been established over the course of centuries. The outcome of a musical experience, therefore, is the material’s unmediated transition to emotion. Electronic music, on the other hand, fosters an entirely new vocabulary of sounds. Extending beyond the well-ingrained structures of a traditional musical language, this new material engages with the cognitive faculties of the listener, inducing a layer of meaning attribution amidst the continuum from material to affect.
Consequently, electronic music assumes a mimetic role: the listeners are presented with sounds that represent extra-musical events while the medium of the recounting remains the same as that of the recounted. However, when this material meets the æsthesic capacity of the listener, the physical artifact is inevitably succeeded by the manifestation of a narrative. Therefore, a diegesis emerges in the intellectual domain. The cognitive processing of the music institutes a bond between the mimetic and the diegetic: the figure and ground relations between musical gestures extend beyond that of physical forms, and a narrative unfolds both in the spatial domain of the concert hall and in the semantic space superimposed onto this domain by the listener.
This article approaches the matter of “Inner and Outer Sound Places” by investigating the semantic and the spatial dimensions of electronic music and the contacts between these two dimensions. Explicit and implicit sonic worlds are discussed on the axes of focus and proximity in an effort to elicit new perspectives towards the concepts of figure and ground in electronic music. Diegesis is utilized as a paradigm to explain the tension/interaction between near and far while questioning the extents to which the listener is inside or outside the musical material. Rather than merely contrasting the mimetic and the diegetic aspects of electronic music through a dichotomy between the physical and the intellectual, this article studies the role of their coexistence in actively shaping our experience of electronic music.
The inferences that lead to the formulation of the aforementioned perspectives are extracted from both the author’s artistic practice over the years and the experimental data obtained from extensive subject group studies which were conducted to investigate the cognitive foundations of electronic music. In the context of this article, the experimental data is used to substantiate the remarks on the experience of electronic music. The theoretical framework of the diegesis approach is therefore motivated with real world examples.