This book examines the intersections of silence with immersive arts and experiences. Organised into three parts, this book brings critical, historical, and theoretical debates on silence into dialogue with different notions of immersion.

Florian Freitag has been a professor of American Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany) since 2019. He received his PhD in American Studies from the University of Konstanz (Germany) in 2011 and worked as an assistant professor of American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Germany) from 2011 to 2019. Freitag's publication on theme parks include articles in The Journal of Popular Culture and Continuum; book chapters in A Reader in Themed and Immersive Spaces (ed. Scott Lukas; 2016), and Popular New Orleans: The Crescent City in Periodicals, Theme Parks, and Opera, 1875-2015 (Freitag 2021), as well as the edited collections Time and Temporality in Theme Parks (2017) and Key Concepts in Theme Park Studies (2023).

Laura Katharina Mücke is research assistant in the area "Everyday Media and Digital Cultures" at the Department for Film, Theater, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Mainz. Her PhD project, based in Mainz, Vienna and Groningen, focuses on the discursivity of seemingly omnipotent concepts of media experience. From 2019 to 2022 she has been an assistant for "Theory of Film" at University of Vienna. She is co-editor of the journal Montage AV and co-founder of the junior research group "ID*A- Initiative Doktorand*innen-Austausch." Recent publications are the journal issue on "Messy Images" (together with Chris Tedjasukmana and Olga Moskatova, 2022) and the translation from French of "Kommunikationsräume: Einführung in die Semiopragmatik" by Roger Odin (with Guido Kirsten, Magali Trautmann, and Philipp Blum, 2019) as well as the article "Towards a Term of Political Immersion as Co-Immersion" (together with Tom PoljanSek) in: Jacopo Bodini, Alessandro De Cesaris: Immersivity: Philosophical Perspectives on Technologically Mediated Experience (2002).

Peter Niedermüller has been an interim professor at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Germany) and at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Mannheim (Germany). He was also a visiting fellow at the German Historical Institute in Rome (Italy). Currently Niedermüller is a senior lecturer for musicology at JGU Mainz, in 2019 he was also appointed as a professor there. His research interests include the history of concert life and musical interpretation as well as film music. Since 2002 he is consultant editor of Ad parnassum: A Journal of Eigteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Instrumental Music. Since 2016 he has also co-edited Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung. Among his latest publications are Klangkunst und musikalische Interpretation (2018) and two chapters in Geschichte der musikalischen Interpretation im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (2020).

List of Figures

List of Contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction: On the Aesthetics, Politics, and Intersections of Silence, Sound, and Immersion

Florian Freitag, Laura Katharina Mücke, Peter Niedermüller

Part I: Producing Silence

Dominic Zerhoch

1. Beyond Words: Auditive and Discursive Non-Normativity in Films of Urszula Antoniak

Tullio Richter-Hansen

2. Musical Immersion and Its Place of Silence

Fabian Kurze

3. Digital Movieloops

Anita Hafner

4. The Paradox of Musical Silence

Ioana Geanta

5. Silence as a Performative Means in Marina Abramovic's The Artist Is Present (New York, MoMA, 2010)

Karolina Zgraja

6. The Residence Within: Silence, Immersion, and Contemplative Play in Videogames

Damien Schlarb

Part II: On the Cusp between Sound and Silence

Helena Rapp, Elisabeth Sommerlad

7. The Shock of Silence: An Apporach to Philosophical Immersion in Media

Sebastian R. Richter

8. Moments of Silence in Life is Strange: Flow, Immersion, and Involvement as as Result of Lack of Gameplay

Michael Mosel

9. In the Eye of the Hurricane: How Silent Moments in The Big Short (2015) and Money Monster (2016) Configure Empathetic and Immersive Processes of Film Reception

Dieter Merlin

10. Broken Times of Silence: Choreographing Time in Once Upon a Time in the West

Saori Kanemaki

11. The Birth of the Talkies out of the Spirit of Silence: Alan Crossland's The Jazz Singer (1927)

Heinz Hiebler

Part III: Reception, Context, Space

Helena Rapp, Elisabeth Sommerlad

12. The Silenced Reception Spaces of Theater and Cinema, Or: About the Politics of Silence as Immersive Experience

Laura Katharina Mücke, Patric Blaser

13. The Delightful Paradox: Towards an Aesthetics of Silence in Early Sound Films

Daniel Wiegand

14. Empty Times: Melodic Hardcore Punk and the Problem of Immersion

Clemens Spahr

15. The Depth of the Sea, the Depth of Listening, and the Figure of Isolde as Avatar

Gabriela Lendle

16. The Sounds of Magic: Silence, Sounds, and Immersion in Theme Parks

Florian Freitag