There is a Body in the Sound: Timbre and Embodiment in the Overlap of Film, Music, and Dance
Full document accessible here: https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/26704
Abstract:
Dance, film, and music are living art forms. They unfold through time, motion, environments, and bodies. They take up shapes, rhythms, textures, and tones. They tell stories. And they often amplify one another in ways that I find deeply moving. In this dissertation, I argue that dance, film, and music move me not because they can intersect, but because they do. They are pieces of one another, enacting the very shapes and motions of living.This dissertation contributes to the growing scholarship at the edges of these overlapping disciplines. Drawing on new material feminism, theories of musical and cinematic embodiment, kinesthetic empathy in dance, and timbre studies, I propose a collection of theoretical models to analyze the coalescence of sound, bodies, motion, and meaning. These models include a semiotic approach to the analysis of timbre in film music (with a case study focus on musical timbre and spell sounds in the Harry Potter film saga), a system of music-dance analysis applied to dance-centric music videos (with a focus on two politically powerful case studies that responded to the 2016 Orlando Shooting), an embodied approach to timbre and meter in dance scenes that reference flight (with analyses of scenes in WALL-E [2008], La La Land [2016], The Dragon Prince [2019], and The Witcher [2019]), and a model of dance as the structuring force in certain montages, even when dance is not present as the subject of the scene (with analyses of “Married Life” in Up [2009] and “Look What We Made” in The Theory of Everything [2014]). Though these models may seem many and varied, what unites them is the premise that there is a body in the sound, and in it, film, music, and dance converge.