Paul Labelle

My dissertation is an investigation of techniques of presence generation in music, film, and video games. Presence is defined as a set of operations in the brain, accessible at the personal level as a perceptual sensation, that marks an array of sensory input as belonging to a single object in a space continuous with the brain’s self-model. This continuity can be constructed in two ways: the perceptual object can either be marked as accessible to the manipulation of the self-model – the presence of the object or vividness – or by extending the self-model to integrate the perceptual object – the presence of the subject or immersion. Drawing on empirical evidence from the cognitive sciences and presence research, as well as media practices, various auditory, audiovisual, and audiovisualmotoric medial configurations particularly conducive to the subjective experience of presence emerge from the analysis of music, film, and video games at differing stages of the medium’s technical development (i.e. mono to ‘immersive’ film sound; 3D to VR gaming; acoustic to AI music). The resulting, necessarily incomplete, catalogue and mechanistic explanation of these configurations serve, on the one hand, to increase our understanding of human-medium interactions, the aesthetic implications of presence, and the nature of the presence experience, and, on the other hand, to open the way for a possible historical investigation into the development of presence-generating techniques, as well as critical culture-historical investigations into society’s supposed longing for presence-inducing media and the possible societal implications of such media.

Hannover: Wehrhahn 2023.

in: Alina Hofmann, Paul Labelle (Hrsg.): Opake Medien. Metakommentar und Störung als medienübergreifende Verfahren, Hannover: Wehrhahn 2023.

in: Emilio Audissino, Emile Wennekes (Hrsg.): The Palrave Handbook of Music in Comedy Cinema, London: Palgrave Macmillan 2023.

in: Julia Mierbach, Eva Stubenrauch (Hrsg.): Gegenwartskonzepte 1750–1800. Eine kultuwissenschaftliche Revision (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie 22), S. 125–143.

in: Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 78/3 (2021), S. 181–200.

in: Ina Knoth (Hrsg.): Music and the Arts in England, c. 1650–1750, Dresden 2020, S. 181–197.

in: German Historical Institute London Blog, 06.05.2021.