The general understanding of the function of sound in visual media, be it film, television, or video games, is that diegetic sound operates separately from the soundtrack/score. That is not to say that the two do not compliment one another, but rather that the distinction between the two is usually easily made. However, there are examples of media in which both the diegesis and nondiegetic music are so aligned in their textural representation of the work that they blend together to feel like an extension of the work itself. Perhaps on two opposite ends of the spectrum of horror which utilize sound to this effect are Shinya Tsukamoto’s 1989 film Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Kojima Productions’ 2014 “playable teaser” for the now cancelled Silent Hills, simply titled P.T. Where P.T. features a low and echoed ambiance within a looping haunted hallway, Tetsuo: The Iron Man is an onslaught of thrashing metal and tearing human flesh, screams of agony throughout. Through the synthesis of sound, noise, and music, both diegetic and nondiegetic, the two generate horror through subversive use of sound.
In their essay “What Makes It Sound ’80s?” Megan Lavengood credits the iconic “80s” sound in part to the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, particularly it’s electric piano function. As Lavengood concludes: “The ’80s sound, or the ’80s genre, is a constellation of shifting interrelations, between an aesthetic of artificiality, a culture rapidly adapting to swift advances in computing tech- nology, and the technologies themselves… The ’80s sound is likewise recognizable through its overall timbral trend of brightness and clarity—the brightness and clarity that the timbre of E. PIANO 1 epitomizes” (Lavengood pp 90) Following this line of thought, one must ask “what makes something sound horrific?” Or, more specifically, what does an endless, haunted hallway in a separate, shifting reality sound like? What sound is associated with the merging of human flesh and metal?
Tetsuo: The Iron Man’s respective answer feels obvious: industrial metal/rock/punk. Much of Tetsuo’s soundtrack involves the clang of metal as percussion, with harsh strumming of guitars seemingly blowing out whatever speaker or amp they are attached to. The film’s opening credits, a chaotic sequence in an abandoned factory or refinery that is equal parts music video, interpretive dance, and descent into madness, integrates the sounds of various machinery with the soundtrack, such that it is difficult to make a delineation between what is soundtrack and what is diegetic. The film’s title is presented as an amalgamation of television static, the accompanying noise overtaking all else. Tetsuo: The Iron Man explores the pain and suffering of humanity through a biotechnological lens, and frames itself thusly. Memories are viewed through a CRT monitor, the static hum that accompanies it a constant and oppressive presence. Sexuality and libido is made analogous to body horror and transfiguration, the sounds of lust quickly transforming into screams of fear and pain, metallic and technological sounds mixing in to create a sound that is as all encompassing and thematically textured as the soundtrack.
P.T. operates within a specific subset of horror well trodden in both film and video games: the haunted house. Often, works that have come before and since P.T. utilize sound and music in somewhat formulaic ways; establishing tone, underscoring a specific mood, and, more recently, emphasizing a jumpscare. One can often predict the coming of a jumpscare in modern horror films and games just by noting when the work suddenly gets quiet. This diegetic silence, in which only background/white noise can be heard, is used for the purpose of creating anticipation and fear, the audience waiting for a continuation in the natural flow of the experience only to be suddenly jolted out by a sudden movement or shocking sound. While this can work in the moment, the scare often feels cheap and without a lasting impression, as it feels more like a gimmick than an integrated element of the media. The purpose of music is of course to be an extension of the emotion of a scene, however in lesser works this purpose can feel so blatant and planned that the illusion breaks. How does P.T. subvert this? By fully immersing the player in the diegetic quietude. Or at least, giving the player the impression of said diegetic silence.
With it’s photorealism, P.T. captures the specific terror of navigating one’s house in the late hours of the night, except the game plays up the fact that this is not only a foreign space, but one in which something is off. “Watch out. The gap in the door… it’s a separate reality.” With this framing, P.T. heightens the reality of its soundscape. The player’s footsteps are imminently noticeable, each step leaving an echoed click on damp concrete or creak on hardwood floors. Among the recurring and repeated sounds of P.T. is a prominent creaking. The origin is seemingly never elucidated; there is a chandelier in the foyer, an opened door to a basement, yet I have never once found the origin of this sound in my time playing. A radio broadcasts news of a father murdering his whole family, feedback and static breaking up the newscaster’s voice. As the player repeats the loop of the same hallway, things begin to change, both visually and audibly. Just when the player lulls themselves into a false sense of security or familiarity, a baby can be heard crying, or the newscaster will suddenly talk directly to the player. For years P.T. remained in my memory as a game without a score, yet an unofficial 2019 vinyl pressing of the game’s audio by Tacet Montis Records tells a different story. Beneath the unnerving diegesis of the cursed hallway are ambient synths that produce an echo effect, a kind of space for which all the other sounds of the game to filter through.
Common between the sounds of both Tetsuo: The Iron Man and P.T. are the discomforting effects they produce. Aberrations in both become so intense it feels as though the sound itself may collapse in on itself. In their article “Between silence and pain: loudness and the affective encounter,” Michael C. Heller describes the various impacts loud and intensive music can have on a listener. First among them is “listener collapse,” which can occur “…when loud sound dissolves the ability to distinguish between interior and exterior worlds, especially in regard to sound and self. Sound does not only touch, it saturates and fills mental and physical consciousness, eliminating the possibility of detached listening… it is a moment in which penetration erases our ability to distinguish between exterior/sound and interior/self, bringing both together in a single inescapable vibration” (Heller pp 45). With the crescendo of static distortion and intensifying synth echoes accompanying the uncanny approach of P.T.’s primary ghost Lisa, I found myself effectively shutting down, having to physically turn away from the television to find some semblance of reprieve from the terror I felt in the pit of my stomach.
At the height of its action Tetsuo: The Iron Man fills it’s entire soundscape with noise: the screams of pain and anger, the mutation of the flesh, and general noises of industrial machinery. The sounds of drilling or scratching or stabbing or slicing are so caustic that it feels as though the film is breaking apart, just as the characters seem to collapse and break down as their bodies morph with metal and grow. Tetsuo also exemplifies Heller’s concept of “imagined loudness,” in that a sound is always expected or perceived to be loud, even if played softly as a product of its aesthetics and both “..individual and social experience” (Heller pp 47). Where one could remember P.T. as an eerily quiet experience, the central emotional expression of Tetsuo: The Iron Man is pain. The film expresses this pain through the distortion of television static, the squelching and distending of the human body, the violent whirring of industrial technology, and the blood curdling screams of humans made into monsters. It is near impossible to view Tetsuo, as a whole, as anything but a cacophony of pain. The screams of both the man and the woman as she fights him off while he continues to mutate pierce the space of the scene, outweighing even his violent mechanical sounds or the sizzling of a frying pan. Describing the power of a cry or scream, operatic or otherwise, Heller writes: “Its loudness foregrounds sound’s identity as a physical presence, while at the same time dissolving selfhood through the approach toward physical pain (or – in the related example of the silence that screams – psychological terror)… even when the orchestra’s volume does not approach the threshold of physical pain, listeners may be able to fill in the remainder through an act of imagined volume. The timbral associations invoked by a crying, straining, distorted voice can work to create a phenomenological perception of loudness that is sufficient for the cry to have its crushing effect. Through imagined volume, the aesthetic–affective impact of the cry can be experi-enced by those straining to hear from the highest balconies, just as it is by those who are engulfed in the front row” (Heller pp 52-53).
All of these sounds in Tetsuo coalesce into an experience that intersects somewhere between Heller’s concept of “noise occupation” and the antithesis of the onkyō as described by Lorraine Plourde’s article “Disciplined Listening in Tokyo: Onkyō and Non-Intentional Sounds,” a practice in which performers and listeners actively incorporate any unintentional sounds as a part of the music being performed (Plourde pp 276-277). The all encompassing clash of sounds in Tetsuo not only takes over the space of the film, but the meshing of sounds together creates a dizzying experience in which distinguishing the individual sounds becomes not only a challenge but near impossible.
P.T. as a game is a fascinating blend of linearity and procedurality; despite its looping hallway that gives the impression of changes occurring at random intervals, the game reacts to player input and generally follows a linear path with a beginning and end. It’s incorporation of sound into these systems of play are interactive and procedural, as outlined by Karen Collins in her articles “An Introduction to Procedural Music in Video Games” and “In the Loop: Creativity and Constraint in 8-bit Video Game Audio.” An example of “Interactive non-diegetic sound” as described in “In the Loop” are the interactions with the radio. According to the IGN guide for the game, at a certain point the radio will suddenly tell the player “don’t touch that dial now…” or “look behind you.” If these aren’t followed the player will be attacked by the ghost and the loop will reset. There are also scenarios where the ghost will appear in front of the player or the ambient score will rise to the foreground with intensity, and the player is to stand still and look away from the ghost until the overwhelming sound dissipates, allowing them to resume. Even if these scenarios are tied to specific parts of the game, their actual occurrence is varied, and a player returning to P.T. is liable to boot up the game and find themselves unaware of just which loop they are currently in. This gives the processes of playing P.T. an unpredictability through the marriage of its procedural mechanics and linear structure.
As Collins describes in “In the Loop,” looping video game music often occurred as a product of hardware limitations. Cartridges could only store so much data, and thus workarounds had to be made in order to fit the game and everything in with it. As previously described, P.T. is a game that plays with expectations. The looping of sounds in the game comes in the form of its diegesis, be it the radio, the clock at the stroke of midnight, or the mysterious creaking. The game disrupts this however by breaking the consistency of the loops, a new sound punctuating a distinctive loop to unnerve the player. Though Silent Hills was cancelled, it’s no secret that much of its DNA likely found its way into Kojima Productions’ next venture, Death Stranding (2019). In a 2017 interview with IGN, writer/director Hideo Kojima said the following: “Games started over 40 years ago with arcades. When the player dies, it’s game over. You continue, and time goes back to before you die. You can die as many times as you want, but you always go back to a little bit before you die. That was a mechanic made specifically for putting in coins, and it hasn’t changed since then” (Kojima qtd in Sliva). Kojima goes on to describe that with Death Stranding his goal was to remove the mechanic of death being an endpoint for which to set the player back. The broaching of the concept of an existence between life and death is one among the common threads between Death Stranding and P.T. From this perspective, the “playable teaser” for Silent Hills could be interpreted as a kind of purgatory for which the player character finds themself trapped in. If the player turns around in the room they spawn in upon starting P.T., they can find a bloodied, talking brown paper bag, which says: “I walked. I could do nothing but walk. And then, I saw me walking in front of myself. But it wasn’t really me. Watch out. The gap in the door… it’s a separate reality. The only me is me. Are you sure the only you is you?” If this notion of purgatory is extrapolated to the genre of video games, P.T.’s looping structure could be an extension of Kojima’s criticism of death as a mechanic in video games being outdated; the repeating cycle common to arcade games being reinterpreted as a torturous nightmare of which there is no escape from.
Sound, be it music, noise, or diegetic sfx, are among the most crucial elements within the genre of horror, and its implementation can not only punctuate the emotion and tone of the work it’s in, but elevate it. By synthesizing these disparate sounds, works like Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man or Kojima Productions’ P.T. are able to create a textured soundscape in which music, sound effects, and noise all meld into one, not only in service of the themes and tonal quality of their narratives, but also to create a mood that is discomforting or even hostile to an audience.
Works Cited
Collins, Karen. “An Introduction to Procedural Music in Video Games.” Contemporary
Music Review, vol. 28, no. 1, 2009, pp. 5–15., doi:10.1080/07494460802663983.
Collins, Karen. “In the Loop: Creativity and Constraint in 8-Bit Video Game Audio.”
Twentieth-Century Music, vol. 4, no. 2, 2007, pp. 209–227., doi:10.1017/s1478572208000510.
Kojima, Hideo, director. P.T. Kojima Productions (as 7780s Studio)/Konami Productions, 2014.
Lavengood, Megan. “What Makes It Sound ’80s?” Journal of Popular Music Studies, vol.
31, no. 3, 2019, pp. 73–94., doi:10.1525/jpms.2019.313009.
Plourde, Lorraine. “Disciplined Listening in Tokyo: Onkyō and Non-Intentional Sounds.”
Ethnomusicology, vol. 52, no. 2, 2008, pp. 270–295.
Ryan, Jon, and Samuel Claiborn. “P.T. Demo Walkthrough – PT and Silent Hills Wiki
Guide.” IGN, IGN, 4 Jan. 2019, www.ign.com/wikis/silent-hills-pt/P.T._Demo_Walkthrough.
Sliva, Marty. “Kojima Explains Death Stranding Gameplay and Lore.” IGN, IGN, 2 Nov.
2019, www.ign.com/articles/2017/12/11/kojima-explains-death-stranding-gameplay-and-lore.
Tsukamoto, Shinya, director. Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Kaijyu Theatres, 1989.