The music that the characters play or hear belongs to the diegesis.
The notion of diegesis , whose etymological roots are found in the Greek language, refers to the narrative thread of the events that are told in a film or a book . It is about what is narrated in the fictional universe that develops in the work .
The plane of fiction
The diegesis can be understood as everything that exists on the level of fiction , which is parallel to reality. The characters , events and settings of a story, in this way, make up the diegesis.
The concept of diegesis arose in Ancient Greece . According to Greek philosophers, the diegesis is a fictional environment that is plausible, regardless of the fact that its rules are different from those followed in reality. Mimesis, on the other hand, is a narrative that seeks to reproduce social or natural events that have been documented.
Take the case of a cinematographic work . The diegesis includes the sounds that make up the narrated story, but not the narration itself. The diegetic sounds , in this way, are heard by the characters , unlike the extradiegetic ones.
Continuing with this idea, the dialogues of the diegesis are those maintained by the characters, while the music of the diegesis is that which said characters hear. On the contrary, extradiegetic music does not "sound" in the world of fiction, as is the case with the songs on the film's soundtrack that are included to produce certain emotions in the viewers. A speech given by a voice- over narrator , inaccessible to the creatures of the fictional setting, is also extradiegetic.
Internal logic
Diegetics is related, to a greater or lesser extent, to the concept of internal logic , which in short refers to the rules of the fictional world. Let's say that, while in reality we are invariably tied to physics and chemistry, in fiction it is the creators who decide what can happen and what cannot. In this way, a character in a book can be unaffected by gravity, or resist fire, or be able to manipulate time, without this being implausible in the story .
We must not forget that the diegetic text makes and obeys its own rules , unlike the mimetic one. We can also think about the special effects that are created to accentuate certain actions: if the characters perceive them, then they are diegetic, and it does not matter if their appearance, duration or sound differs from what we would see in the real world in an equivalent situation, since which is done thinking about this internal logic.
Transcendence
Perhaps the most important feature of the diegesis is that it coexists in the world of fiction and the real world , generating a powerful bond between the characters and the spectators. Returning to the music and special effects, the melodies that the characters hear or perform have greater depth than those that are placed exclusively for the audience.
The diegesis also includes the voices that the characters hear.
We could make an analogy with telepathy, since in those moments of diegesis both parties perceive the same thing, at the same time. On the contrary, when the musical curtain of a film plays or when we read a footnote, the characters do not notice, they remain to the side waiting for us to connect with them again.
When creating a story it is important to take into account this concept and its scope, to find the level of intimacy you really need. In the world of cinema, for example, there is a tendency to overload films with extradiegetic music that constantly breaks the link with fiction.