Attitudes towards documentary soundstracks - Between emotional immersion and critical reflection

Musical experience is often related to an emotional and imaginative engagement of the listener. Discourses of journalistic documentaries relate primarily to inferential knowledge systems in which the uses of background music as a communicative device become an object of epistemological critique. By listening to different voices – primarily from four focus group interviews – the article will discuss attitudes towards musical soundtracks in documentaries, attitudes being negotiated between emotional immersion and critical reflection, with the concept of manipulation as an underlying theme. In the end, the article will argue for the need for an acoustemological approach (Feld, 1996) to study the epistemological potential of sound in audiovisual media.