I have been thinking a lot about worldbuilding over the last year or so, in a deliberately more expansive sense than the one common to sf discourse, though taking that sense (naturally enough) as my starting point. This is because it’s obvious to me that something that we might as well call worldbuilding is at the heart of pretty much all future-oriented imaginative work, and (perhaps a little more arguably) at the heart of all storytelling. It’s also obvious to me that it’s sorely undertheorised in a cross-disciplinary or multi-practice sense: lots of people are doing lots of different sorts of worldbuilding, but while there may be a “local” theory thereof (using a different label, or not), there’s little work or thought around the more general conceptualisation of the activity.

(Repeated attempts to pitch this as an academic “research gap” have gotten me precisely nowhere, so now I guess I just need to do the damned work off my own back; this, then, is a first step in the process of thinking about it a bit more publicly, in that incomplete way that blogging is often celebrated for. We’ll see how that goes.)

Contextualising preamble aside, here’s a bit from the indispensible Marc Weidenbaum, who somehow got a gig writing about sound and music for JSTOR’s blog. (JSTOR has a blog?!) He’s talking about American Graffiti, and particularly the innovative use of sound therein. I’m less interested in the technical stuff—though not at all uninterested, to be clear; my first gig after dropping out of my undergrad course was as an assistant sound engineer—than the, well, the worldbuilding to which it is a means.

What elevates the music in American Graffiti—and the film along with it—is what the audience hears. In Steve and Laurie’s “To the Aisle” scene, for example, the song sounds as clear as if it were playing on a hi-fi system in a living room; when the camera switches from an overhead crane shot to the interior of the car, we suddenly hear the song as the couple does: muffled and static-laden, as if over the radio. This strategy recurs throughout the film: each time the listener first gets a sense of the classic song, and then experiences it from a character’s perspective, whether in a car, a store, or the echoing hall where a school dance (a “hop,” in period parlance) takes place.

This technique has a name: “worldizing.” It is something Murch perfected during the production of American Graffiti. “Worldizing,” says Liz Greene, who writes about and teaches film sound, is “a sound recorded or created in studio or elsewhere that is then treated so that it sounds as if it is heard in another acoustic location.” In the narrative context of film, this approach, “gives multiply sourced sounds a coherent sonic signature suggestive of a shared time-space,” says Mack Hagood, a professor of media and communications.

So there’s another label for the collection… uncannily (and rather unsurprisingly) close to worldbuilding, too. But the thing I think worth noting here is that worldbuilding (and hence storytelling) starts to get really powerful in a given medium once people start pushing the affordances of the medium. Weidenbaum notes later in the article that American Graffiti‘s soundtrack is all monophonic, so Walter Murch was really having to work with the limited options available to achieve what he did in this movie.

(Side note: affordances change over time, of course. So there’s a double nostalgia to the movie, in that the means of its production are a function of its own position on the timeline of movie-making technology; it’s ahead of the affordances it is replicating, but not by a great deal.)

Who knows how much of it may be hindsight, but apparently Murch thought quite hard about this stuff, too:

Murch also explained to Jarrett, in the same discussion, how worldizing was central to American Graffiti’s sense of place: “The idea was that every teenage car in this town was turned to the same station, and, therefore, anywhere you went in the town, you heard this sound echoing off the buildings and passing by in cars.” Which is to say, the notion of using sound to depict three-dimensional space was already on Murch’s mind during that monophonic production.

Three-dimensional not in the (frankly gimmicky) sense of surround-sound in the theatre, but three-dimensional in the sense of thinking real hard about the fabula of the story as a space and a place, an environment where all the senses are being worked in certain ways. We’re taught a lot as creative writers to include sensory cues in fiction, but it can be a bit rote sometimes, a sort of laundry-list approach… it would be interesting to analyse some great works of literary worldbuilding and see what’s going on on the page, what does the best work in that medium.

A related point emerges from Weidenbaum’s own heads-up post about the JSTOR post:

One thing I didn’t get into in the JSTOR article is the difference between “diegetic” and “non-diegetic” sound. Something I wrestle with when writing about concepts is how to best employ the language that has developed to encapsulate those concepts. Sometimes it helps to just write about the concepts, because language intended to clarify can, in fact, obfuscate. I felt that focusing on “worldizing” (see the article for an explanation), a word that is central to my piece, let me do just that: focus. Now I can back up a bit and note that “diegetic” sound is, in essence, sound that happens as if it was emitted on or just off-screen, whereas “non-diegetic” sound is sound that is apart from what happens on-screen. Movie (and television) sound is often at its best when the difference between the “diegetic” sound and the “non-diegetic” sound is blurred. This is the case throughout American Graffiti when the editor moves between a Platonic ideal of a song (pristine as a movie theater or living room TV might allow) and the way that song would sound in the context of the scene where it is playing

Actually two points: first, the point about the obscurantism of using the correct technical/academic term (which I know is one of my own problems, of which I need to start deprogramming myself; academia is its own thing, and there’s no prizes for having swallowed a dictionary once you get outside the sacred groves). But the second point is something of a “yeah, but still”, and this specific terminological issue has bugged me for almost a decade. To be brief about it: Bruce Sterling’s glossing of design fiction as “the use of diegetic prototypes” (which is itself a riff on David Kirby’s academic studies of Minority Report and other such movies) uses the term “diegesis” in the film-theoretical sense of the term.

But diegesis, along with its paired opposite mimesis, are terms that originally emerge in ancient Greek dramatic theory, and have carried over from there into literary studies… and there, diegesis means something almost entirely opposite to what film theory takes it to mean. This means that making a theoretical transposition between the way those two fields talk about [this thing that we’re just gonna call worldbuilding from now on] is something of a minefield, which in turn explains (though does not excuse) the mess that is one of my earlier academic publications, and my first attempt to explore this issue.

So I think at some point I’mma have do do the hard work of mapping that theoretical-nomenclatural minefield; in order to be able to dispense with the five-dollar words, I’m going to have to spend a bunch of time working out what they actually mean, and how to explain it clearly to people with no knowledge of either field of theory. Weidenbaum’s reflections are are pointer in the right direction, I suspect, when it comes to how to approach this task.