Disruptive Vocalities: Auditory Immersion in Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable and First-Person Digital Games
Abstract
The intimate associations between video (or digital) games and new modes of immersive performances have been observed by scholars. The liberal interactivity and experience of ‘being in’ the virtual space of play and ‘inside’ the fictional world, as an avatar-like audience-participant are just some similarities in both encounters. While Gareth White (2012) has critically interrogated the term ‘immersive’ in these forms of theatre from an ontological perspective, this paper examines immersion acoustemologically. Through a comparative examination of the acoustic ecologies and experienced auditory immersions of First-Person digital games and Punchdrunk’s most recent production, The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable (2013), this paper posits that immersion in immersive performances is always more than ‘total’ since sonicities and disruptive vocalities produced by audienceparticipants, sounds that cannot be anticipated or appropriated to be part of a designed soundscape (utterances, whispers, sounds and noises), would necessarily puncture the virtual integrity of the performance with frequencies of emergence from the intended submergence.
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