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This chapter analyzes a familiar aesthetic experience in our everyday life: appreciation of the distinctive characteristics of objects, environments, and temporal contexts. It ranges from the quintessential attributes of a natural object, the ambience created by harmoniously-united diverse elements, sense of place, and seasonableness, illustrated by a number of examples from 18th century British aesthetics, Japanese culture, including literature, gardening, the tea ceremony, food, and packaging, and the Arts and Crafts movement. This aesthetic sensibility nurtures a moral sensibility by promoting an open-minded and respectful attitude toward what the objects offer, an attitude underlying today's ecological design premised upon designing with nature. At the same time, certain limits to this kind of aesthetic sensibility also need to be observed for moral, social, and political reasons in order to avoid aestheticization of suffering and misery, as well as guarding against denying minority taste in favor of preserving a sense of place.

Silence isn’t included in our discussions or definitions of closed captioning but it sometimes needs to be closed captioned. Captioners not only inscribe sounds in writing but must also account for our assumptions about the nature, production, and reception of sounds. This chapter provides an ontology of captioned silences by discussing three types: The illusion of audible speech (mouthed words), the termination of sustained sounds, and the insertion of phantom words. The second half of this chapter discusses the challenges of captioning ambient sounds and music, which are too often reduced to discrete captions and lyrics only. This chapter aims to redraw two main boundaries around captioning. First, the boundary that defines captioning in terms of objectively verifiable sounds. Every definition of closed captioning tends towards positivism by treating captioning as an exercise in translating audio content. But not everything that needs to be captioned can be empirically verified outside of specific visual and narrative contexts. Second, the boundary that equates non-speech information (NSI) with speaker identification and screen placement. A broader view of NSI accounts for how sound functions rhetorically (in specific contexts and for specific purposes) and ideologically (according to the rules and assumptions of how sound works in film).

The introductory chapter consists of four broad sub-chapters that present a framework for understanding the topic, namely the mediation of the sonic environment, and defines ambient sound and ambience through their various connotations and associations. This introductory section examines the book’s context through a review of existing literature on research in the field. The book’s conceptual approach is clarified in terms of in-depth discussion of a number of keywords and concepts such as mediation, diegesis, mimesis, presence, soundscape theory, ambience, sound studies, digital aesthetics, through a historical analysis of relevant works. The chapter delineates how the investigation is drawn through the study of various generic and ordinary sites that have been recorded and (re)produced in film and media works. The chapter also underscores the methodology addressing the similarities and differences between ambient sound recordings made to reconstruct the site within the film production’s interior world and field recordings used in certain site-driven sound and media artworks. Relevant new knowledge is proposed about the extent to which sonic environments are mediated. From a practical standpoint, such knowledge challenges the idea of best practice in sound production. The book’s structure and methodology is also explained.

The fourth chapter is a reflection on the book’s findings regarding presence, rendering and sonic reality presented across three chapters. In critically listening to the trajectories of sound production within world cinema and audiovisual media arts, it is observed that sites have been irregularly rendered and produced through various phases of sound production. Three primary historical markers are underscored that seem useful when locating and mapping prominent technological shifts. These developmental stages have manifested as aesthetic choices embraced by sound practitioners. This chapter details how these principles are reflected in the production of a site’s sonic presence. In other words, the various forms and formats of technological innovations and transformation have informed the degree of site-specific presence produced through the use of ambient sound components. Critical listening, reflection and analysis of the passages of sound from representative films, specifically depicting select generic sites and sonic environments in film and media works, qualify the evidential account of this research. The book’s final chapter also hints at future directions for film and media sound production.

The chapter underscores the powerful emotional ambiguity that characterises the final moments of As You Like It and Twelfth Night. This alteration introduces a new understanding of melancholy that revolves around ideas of mood, time and setting. No longer tied to physical characterisations but grounded instead in the languor elicited by the inevitable passage of time, melancholy impresses itself into the very fabric of the plays it occupies. It finds particular resonance within the various musical interludes they contain, as well as in the several allusions to the bittersweet temporal perception that characters express. In both plays, the sense of a comic ending is seriously problematised by the growing sense of wistfulness that develops. Despite the promise of a return to court, the multiple loose ends in As You Like It undercut the otherwise joyful resolution. Similarly, a strong sense of this more spectral melancholy, embodied in Feste’s closing ballad, sweeps through the final act, coating it in a wistful longing for times past. The powerful emotional ambiguity of these final moments underscores the symbiotic revisions of melancholy and comedy into a melancomic theatrical and philosophical affect.

The chapter examines the octatonic scale, which is the term to describe any eight-note musical scale. It has been at issue insofar as it interacted with the old diatonic scales to surround the tonic with a relational situation. The octatonic is capable of two scales with different interval orderings depending on whether it starts with the whole-tone or the semitone. It is a symmetrical scale since the dyad, whether whole half (TS) or half hole (ST), repeats itself throughout the system, just as the single whole-step does in the whole-tone scale. One cannot expect that any simple octatonic scale passage presenting the referential order unmitigated is going to suffice to create the octatonic ambience just as we encounter it in Stravinsky. If all the notes of an octatonic scale are similarly depressed at once, we would scarcely be able to detect anything of the octatonic sound, but we would also hear, rather, a cluster comprising an undifferentiated mass of notes out of the chromatic scale.

The introduction opens with the Jellyfish ambient DVD as an example of ambient mood regulation, before moving into a genealogy of thinking on atmosphere and its relation to self. Roquet draws on Foucault’s ‘techniques of the self’ to explore how media serve as tools of what he calls ambient subjectivation.