The Diegesis and Non-Diegetic Sound

Sound Designer at Work

The term "diegesis" refers to the fictional world filmmakers create and everything in it. The word comes from a Greek word that evidently means narration or narrative. I don't know this from any study of Greek. I read it in my film school text books. There is more about the terms here at DailyWritingTips.

I contribute answers now and then to Quora on the film and screenwriting threads. This morning someone asked "How does the non-diegetic sound contribute to the atmosphere in a film?"  This brings up one of those things movie goers take for granted and yet are so important to the experience of going to the movies. 

Screenwriters struggle with communicating the emotional context of a scene. The emotional content of a scene is more important to the movie goers than the intellectual aspects of the diegetic action, although there can be no emotional response without the diegetic making intellectual sense. The interplay between these two is a paradox of communication. Screenwriters must work only (well, 98% of the time) with the intellectual diegetic elements and yet hope to create an emotional response in the audience. 

However, the diegetic intellectual elements by themselves, rarely create the deep emotional response that audiences subliminally crave and that make the movie moment (the diegetic moment) memorable. We can all remember great movie moments and describe them to our friends. But I'll bet you can't remember the non-diegetic elements that triggered your emotional response, which in turn allowed you to remember that scene so well. This is one of the great mysteries of storytelling and especially narrative films.

Perhaps the single most important aspect of transferring the intended emotional response is NON-DIEGETIC SOUND, which is typically NOTHING that the screenwriter can write.  The paradox is that audiences rarely, if ever, can recall non-diegetic sound, unless they buy the Motion Picture Soundtrack CD or tracks and listen to the music. Yes, the music bed that plays in the background (and not from a radio or music source supposedly on the set) is non-diegetic sound. But there is so much more to it, like sound effects and sound mixing of the diegetic sound (e.g. dialogue, Foley sound, and on-camera noise).  Screenwriters try to infer non-diegetic sounds, but generally the ideas for such sounds and the genius of creating them and mixing them is left to suggestions by the Director and expertise of Sound Designers, Supervisors, Editors and Mixers. Sound Design is incredibly important to the success of motion pictures and yet as screenwriters we have very little to say about it. Sad but true. Which is one reason skilled screenwriting that can imply such things is so important. 

All that to say Markus Innocenti (a former Supervising Sound Editor), gives a wonderful answer to the above mentioned Quora question, which is linked HERE. 

On the linked thread I thanked Markus for his excellent answer and make some remarks, which I have elaborated above. He then wrote this, which should be an encouragement to all screenwriters:

Thank you — and I agree. It is extremely difficult to suggest non-diegetic sound in a screenplay, and to do so is often ‘unwelcome’ given the traditional view that a director interprets a script to conform to a personal ‘vision’. I think it’s true to say that good writers work endlessly on finding ways to “suggest” an interpretation that lies closest to their own — in the full knowledge that, at the end of the day, the emotional impact of the film will rely on the director’s choices as to how the non-diegetic is applied.