My research explores the emerging concept of the ‘Integrated Soundtrack’, a way of viewing film soundtracks that recognise the interconnectedness of all its elements – music, sound design and dialogue. The PhD will explore how this interconnectedness is achieved through a set of relationships that exist between said elements, defined by myself, and expanding upon a non-exhaustive list already defined within my MA short-dissertation. Additionally, the PhD will focus on mainstream English speaking horror films, released theatrically from the year 2000 onwards, and will examine the structural, semantic, explicative and expressing storytelling functions of the soundtrack relationships. 

Building on the work of Kulezic-Wilson (2020), my PhD will offer an analytical framework, in the development of film soundtrack analysis, to explore how the interconnectedness of soundtrack elements are achieved through stoytelling function-derived relationships. This framework will be developed throughout my research, and put chosen case studies under a so called ‘integrated microscope’, which can be used to observe and analyse, any or all function-derived relationships and the film sound prodiction methods that create them. Aditionally, due to the chosen case studies being specific to mainstream horror films released from 2000 onwards, the PhD will explore how the modern film sound production methods used to create the soundtrack relationships, have been triggered by the digitasation of audio production.