Today our discussions led to a great observation: ‘depends what you mean by tone’.

What do we mean by tone?

Here’s what came up:

the attitude the piece takes

feeling

‘colour’ and ‘temperature’

type of resonance (and possibilities for extending on the musical metaphor implied by ‘tone’ more broadly)

mood (which could also lead to genre)

and

tone affects the way the WORLD is portrayed.

Based on this discussion, we each tried to come up with our own definition for ‘tone’.

Here’s one from Ed: “Tone is the culmination of sensory stimuli employed to extract a general feeling, attitude or emotion from an audience/consumer”.

And another from Michael: “The degree and nature by which aesthetic and narrative elements formulate an intended emotional and psychological affect in a viewer or reader in construction of a world”

And from Vera (in terms of the active process of considering tone): where the story world sits in the continuum of lightness and darkness

And from Stayci – Tone: the quality of the piece as denoted by attitude, feeling and mood.