Paper Abstract:
Music and time have much in common: both have momentum (moving forward, backward, stopping, or changing speed) and we tend to measure both in patterns of repetition (seconds, minutes, hours; subdivisions, beats, measures). Non-diegetic music and time have even more in common: both run alongside “three-dimensional” worlds and are seemingly source-less. Scenes that toy with time, then, raise a question: if music is “the sound of time passing,” (Brubaker 2009) or better yet, if music is time (Knowles 2021), can music really be non-diegetic?
This paper isolates time’s momentum as a starting point. Through several case studies, and by drawing on scholarship that variously situates music, film, and time (Epstein 1981, Clifton 1983, Griffiths 1985, Van Elferen 2010, Kulezic-Wilson 2015), I explore how music in sci-fi and fantasy media embodies time’s speed, direction, and stoppage. Scenes from Futurama (1999-present) and The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (2000) show that music can express time’s speed through its tempo and rhythmic density. Music in Majora’s Mask and the film Tenet (2020) sonifies the direction of time through retrograded melody or acoustic reversal. And when time stops, as in famous scenes from Chrono Trigger (1995) and Futurama, music can evoke time’s stasis semiotically (Oden 2021).
Together, these case studies blur the diegetic boundary, showing that music as the sound of time is anything but temporally distant (Winters 2010) from the diegesis. Instead, I argue, perhaps music-as-time exists in the “thickness of the glass” deemed by Stilwell (2007) the fantastical gap.