Sounding escape: examining the sonic contours of play and story in The Author’s Enigma

ABSTRACT

This article draws on video data from a larger empirical project tracing how five adults learned to escape a series of complex multi-linear escape rooms. Zeroing in one room, The Author’s Enigma, it interrogates sound as a design feature and more-than-representational resource that co-produced play. Refracted through more conceptual and methodological conversations concerning the sonic, analyses highlight how sound mediated participant interaction and shaped the encounter of escape through affective sonic encounters. As this article suggests, sound was both a mediating resource and an atmosphere. Using transcription as theory, authors demonstrate how sound – as an atmosphere and vibrational force – forwarded activity and produced moments of affective resonance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Following Barad’s (2007) theory of agential realism – an onto-epistemology that “doesn’t presume the separateness of any-‘thing,’ let alone the alleged spatial, ontological, and epistemological distinction that sets human apart” (p. 136), we use intra-action (rather than interaction) here to signal the entangled agency of people, materials, tools, technologies, space, time and so on.

2. For some in the field of the “New Aesthetics,” atmospheres are phenomenological events in their own right (Böhme, 2000; Schmitz, 2014). We pick up this line of thought, while also following the intrasubjective turn to understand atmospheres as structured forms of “lived affect” (Stewart, 2011) or what Stern (1998) would call “affect schemas in the form of ‘Temporal Feeling Shapes’” (p. 82).

3. Sonic atmosphere, as a concept and analytic, has divergent definitions. For a more extensive review of the term’s origins, possible incommensurabilities, and forward thoughts across fields, see, Toppano et al. (2019).

4. Similar to the inclusion of excerpts from a transcribed corpus of interaction data (Hepburn & Bolden, 2017), we include close-ups of the transcript as extracts. These are meant to highlight specific interactions and phenomena not as figures but as key sonic microevents and atmospheres.