Altered States, Altered Sounds

This book examines how soundtracks signify characters’ subjective experiences in narrative fiction cinema. It uses Van Leeuwen’s sound semiotic techniques (‘what sound says’) alongside other established film theorists to show how a ‘language’ has evolved in cinema to signify the difference between reality and these altered states. It explores how sound and music are used to signify characters’ subjective experiences and investigates what makes these uses of sound apt signifiers for these states of mind. Following Van Leeuwen’s (1999), it adapts Halliday’s (1978) conception of ‘modality’ not only to express different degrees of truth through the medium of language (e.g. modal auxiliaries such as: may, will, must) but also through different modality configurations of sound that express characters’ subjective experiences as they move from reality to an altered state through the adjustment (reduction, increase or neutrality) of aural parameters such as pitch, dynamic, volume, reverberation and so on.