sound

Sound bridge (overlapping sound)

(1) at the beginning of one scene, the sound from the previous scene carries briefly before the sound from the new scene begins. (2) At the end of one scene, the sound from the next scene is heard, leading into that scene.

studios, genres, spectacle

- MGM: became a prestige studio with many stars and technicians under long-term contract - lavished money on settings, costumes, and special effects (The good earth (1937) with its locust attack and San Francisco (1936) where earthquake of 1906 was recreated) - Warner Bros: success with sound, relatively small studio and specialized in less expensive genre pictures - gangster films (Little Caesar, Public enemy) and musicals (42nd street, gold diggers of 1993, Dames - were the studio's most successful products) - Universal: depended on imaginative filmmaking rather than established stars or expensive sets in its atmospheric horror films, such as Frankenstein (1931) and the old dark house (1932) One major genre: the musical - became possible only with the intro of sound - OG intention of warner bros when they began their investment in sound equipment was to circulate vaudeville acts on film - most musicals presented a linear plot with separate numbers inserted, although a few revue musicals strung together a series of numbers - Studio RKO - made musicals starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers: Swing Time (George stevens, 1936) illustrates how a musical can be a classically constructed narrative 1930s: color film stocks widely used for the first time - technicolor improves - it now used 3 primary colors therefore could reproduce ranges of hues. It was still expensive though - First feature-length film to use the new Technicolor was After Becky Sharp (1935) and The trail of the lonesome pine (1936) - technicolor process was used for either camera originals or release prints until the early 70s

Video tutorial: contrasting rhythms of sound and image in Mr. Hulot's Holiday (1953)

- Tati bases his comedy on the idea that many people on vacation follow their normal mundane routines (Mr Hulot wants to have fun but other people are annoyed) - the scene: guests are reading, playing cards, or listening to radio... the rhythms of the action and that of the sound are slow. But then Tati introduces a great contrast between the sound and this quiet scene. Note how the guests have to move around to the music, and how they to manage to restore the balance between the rhythms of sound and image

point of view and expressiveness

- as camera follows a character, the filmmaker may use changes in sound perspective to suggest the character's movement through space, a sort of sonic point of view. But many uses of sound perspective don't try to be realistic. In a long shot, a character's voice will usually be clearer than if we were the same distance from her or him in reality, and when we cut to a close-up, the character's voice will not be significantly louder or crisper. In a convo with sound overlaps, like the one in The Hunt for Red October, the speaker's voice doesn't change perspective when the camera shifts the listener. In our hypothetical example presenting Jim and Amanda talking on the phone, one option would involve sound perspective. - If we stayed with Jim and only heard Amanda's replies, her voice would be given a different perspective. Generally, when the person on camera is speaking, the lines are clear and enhanced by natural ambient sounds. - A voice heard over the receiver is usually more coarsely rendered and more reverberant, carrying lower pitches and providing little ambient sound. Sound editors call this disparity the telephone split. It represents the fact that the listener is hearing a voice on the line, but it seldom matches what a phone call sounds like in reality. Like all conventions, the telephone split can be adjusted for expressive possibilities. - In Phone Booth, a publicist is trapped in a booth, pinned down by an unseen sniper who keeps him talking on the phone. Here the telephone split takes an unusual form. The publicist is heard normally, with ambient sound , but we don't hear the sniper as a crackling telephone voice. Instead, we hear soft , closely miked speech in a dry sound envelope. It does not change when the camera moves toward or away from the booth. The voice has a slight electronic twang, so it doesn't sound as neutral as a narrator's voice-over, but it remains closer to our perspective than to the protagonist's. Whispering, laughing, making rude remarks about what's happening around the booth, the sniper's voice hovers in a realm somewhere between us and the street. It enhances the sense that the protagonist Page 295 is being watched by a distant, somewhat ghostly threat.

Diegetic Versus Nondiegetic sound

- diegetic sound: a sound that has a source in the story world. The words are spoken by the characters, sounds are made by objects in the story, and music represented as coming from instruments in the story space are all diegetic sound - diegetic sound is often hard to notice as such. It may seem to come naturally from the world of the film. But as we saw when the Ping-Pong game in Mr. Hulot's Holiday becomes abruptly quiet to allow us to hear action in the foreground, the filmmaker may manipulate diegetic sound in ways that aren't at all realistic. - nondiegetic sound: represented as coming from a source outside of the story world - music added to enhance the film's action is the most common of nondiegetic sound - when Roger Thornhill is climbing Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest and tense music comes up, we don't expect to see an orchestra perched on the side of the mountain - movie music is a convention and does not issue from the world of the story. The same holds true for the so-called omniscient narrator, the disembodied voice that gives us information but doesn't belong to any of the characters in the film. (ex. The Magnificent Ambersons, in which the director, Orson Welles, speaks the nondiegetic narration) Nondiegetic sound effects are possible too - in Le Million, various characters pursue an old coat with a winning lottery ticket in the pocket. The chase converges backstage at the opera, where the characters race and dodge around one another, tossing the coat to their accomplices. What we hear, however, are the sounds of a football game, including a cheering crowd and a referee's whistle Nondiegetic sound effects have become in contemporary hollywood - Scott's remake of The Taking Of Pelham 123, after the ransom has been gathered at the Brooklyn federal Reserve, a nondiegetic whoosh accompanies a rapid zoom out to a satellite view showing the money's destination in midtown Manhattan - A film's soundtrack can be completely nondiegetic (A Movie, Scorpio Rising, War Requiem use only nondiegetic music) - many compilation documentaries include no diegetic sound; instead, omniscient voice-over commentary and orchestral music guide our response to the images As with fidelity, the distinction between diegetic and nondiegetic sound reflects the conventions of film viewing. Viewers understand that certain sounds seem to come from the story world , while others come from outside the space of the story events . We've learned these conventions so thoroughly that we usually don't have to think about which type of sound we're hearing at any moment . At many times, though , a film's narration deliberately blurs boundaries between different spatial categories . A play with the conventions can be used to puzzle or surprise the audience , to create humor or ambiguity or to suggest thematic implications.

Video tutorial: sound mixing in seven samurai (1954)

- final battle uses no music - it builds tension and conveys the discomfort of the rainy, muddy conditions and the pain of the wounded through a dense mix sound effects and voices - Kurosawa manipulates volume: the sound of the horses becomes louder when he cuts to shots of the bandits

Problems

- it seemed for a few years that much of the visual storytelling of the silent era would be lost. Camera positions were more limited because the camera had to be put inside a soundproof booth so that its motor noise would not be picked up by the microphone. - the camera operator could hear only through his headphones and the camera couldn't move except for short pans to reframe - bulky microphone could not move too - so actors had to stay close to the microphone - camera in their booths were filming from different angles, so lighting had to be rather broad and flat; it could not be tailored to a particular shot filmmaker's worst fears: movies would now be static and stagey

Video Tutorial; manipulation of sound in daisies (1966)

- plot: 2 young women, both named Marie, decide to act like spoiled brats - using unusual sound combos to portray their antics - Marie compares herself to a doll - the sound track effects lack fidelity to the image, with loud creaking noises accompanying the women's gestures as if they are mechanical toys - in nightclub scene, the maries disturb the people around them, who are watching a couple dance - throughout the scene we hear Nondiegetic sound effects: the cheers and whistles of the crowd. Yet the people the club are not cheering or whistling. when the manager comes to scold the Maries and escort them out, we see him speak but can't hear what he says - later the film plays with volume: the women discuss whether they exist and decide that they do. They march and chant, "we are, we are." - suddenly the sound of their voices cuts out entirely, even though they continue to march and their lips still move

video tutorial: offscreen sound in M (1931)

- plot: search for a serial killer - scene: the police raid a basement tavern frequented by thieves and prostitutes. As the action develops, notice how seldom we actually see the sources of the voices - lang creates a lively, crowded scene with multiple actions, largely by using off-screen sound

The Powers of Sound

- powerful because it engages a distinct sense mode - even before recorded sound was introduced in 1926, silent films were accompanied by orchestra, organ, piano - the music filled in the silence and gave the spectator a more complete experience. - engagement of hearing opens the possibility of what Eisenstein called "synchronization of senses"--making a single rhythm or expressive quality bind together image and sound - we seek out for patterns that will fuse lip movements and speech - power of musical structure to map onto visual structure is evident in dance and when fans of the Pink Floyd album The Dark Side of the Moon play it back over the wizard of oz - our bias toward audio-visual blending governs both our everyday activities and our experiences of arts like music, theater, film

Deep Focus and Narrative Innovations

- powerful lighting units were introduced - some cinematographers began to use the new units for black-and-white filming - these more powerful lamps, combined with faster film stocks, made it easier to achieve greater depth of field in the image late 1930s: definite trend toward a deep-focus style - Citizen Kane (1941) brought deep focus - Welles's compositions placed the foreground figures close to the camera and the background figures deep in the space of the shot, and all were kept in sharp focus - directors found that depth staging and deep-focus filming allowed them to create striking compositions and to sustain scenes in longer takes - the light needed for deep focus tended to lend a hard-edged appearance to objects, a look suited to the stories of crime and film noir - if an object or a face was placed close to the foreground, cinematographers found it hard to keep the composition balanced and in focus when actors moved around the shot. During the same period, Hollywood expanded its narrative options - flashbacks gained a new prominence in the 40s - also began experimenting with voice-over narration - both flashbacks and voice-over narration fed into a new emphasis on mental subjectivity - films rendered dreams, hallucinations, drunken or drug-induced visions

rhythm

- rhythmic audio stimuli can provoke visual attention, as when a chugging rhythm in the music prompts us to see that a train is approaching involves, minimally, a beat, or pulse; a tempo or pace; and a pattern of accents, or stronger and weaker beats - all of these features are naturally most recognizable in film music because there beat, tempo, and accent are basic compositional features - ex from Jules and Jim, the motifs can be characterized as having a 3/4 metrical pulse, putting an accent on the first beat, and displaying variable tempo-sometimes slow, sometimes fast can find rhythmic qualities in sound effects - the plodding hooves of a farm horse can differ from a cavalry mount galloping at full speed - the reverberating tone of a gong may offer a slowly decaying accent, while a sudden sneeze provides a brief one - in a gangster film, a machine gun's fire creates a regular, rapid beat, whole the sporadic reports of of pistols may come at irregular intervals speech also has rhythm - people can be identified by voice prints that show not only characteristic frequencies and amplitudes but also distinct patterns of pacing and syllabic stress - In His Girl Friday, our impression is of a very rapid dialogue, but the scenes actually are rhythmically subtler than that. In the start of each scene, the pace is comparatively slow, but as the action develops, characters talk at a steadily accelerating rate. As the scene winds down, the conversational pace does as well. This rise-and-fall rhythm matches the arc of each scene, giving us a bit of rest before launching the next comic complication

Sound decisions

- sound offers many possibilities but the filmmaker judges which ones to pursue based on how they suit the film's overall form and how they shape the viewer's experience - in the process of film production, the soundtrack is constructed separately from the images, and it can be manipulated independently - makes sound flexible and wide-ranging - auditory scientists say we have over 400,000 distinct sounds in our memory - we speak of watching a film and of being movie viewers or spectators--all terms implying that the soundtrack is a secondary factor - we are inclined to think of sound as an accompaniment to the real basis of cinema, the moving images - this inclination lets sound designers create a world without our noticing - on screen we may see merely an anxious face against a cloudy sky, but we may hear a fierce wind, a police siren, and a child's cry. Suddenly we conjure up a situation of danger. - a low-budget horror film with awkward acting and unconvincing special effects can stir an audience to shrieks with disgusting slurps, snaps, and gurgles

Dimensions of Film Sound

- sound unfolds over time, so it has RHYTHM - sound can relate to its perceived source with greater or lesser FIDELITY - sound suggests something about the SPATIAL conditions in which it occurs - sound relates to visual events that take place at particular points in time, and this relationship gives sound a TEMPORAL dimension

guiding our eye and mind

- steer our attention within the image Letter of Siberia: when the commentator describes the "blood-colored buses," we're likely to look at the buses, not the car Brian De Palma exploits the guiding function of sound in his conspiracy thriller Blow Out. - Jack Terry is a sound designer for low-budget exploitation films - While capturing environmental background noises, he records a deadly car crash... Jack takes his recording as proof that an assassin shot out of the car's tire in order to kill the politician inside... a crooked detective was on the scene as well, and he shot a film of the crackup. Using still images from the detective's footage, Jack creates a mini-film he can synchronize with his recording. The result reveals a vital clue that was unnoticed in the public images Sound can shape our expectations - ex. shot of a man in a room, if we hear door creaking, we anticipate that someone has entered the room, and we probably expect to see that person in the next shot. Offscreen sound can prolong our expectations - in horror films, its conventional to suggest an unseen menace but dwell on a character staring fearfully at something offscreen we hear but do not see. sound gives a new value to silence - a quiet passage can create unbearable tension, while an abrupt silence in a noisy passage can jolt us - during the battle between Dumbledore and Voldemort in harry potter (phoenix), the sound team slipped in brief silences between Voldemort's attacks. The contrast made the thwacks seem abnormally loud. sound bristles with as many creative possibilities as editing - through editing, one may join shots of any two spaces to create a meaningful relation. Similarity, the filmmaker can mix any sonic phenomena into a whole - with the intro of sound cinema, the infinity of visual possibilities was joined by the infinity of acoustic events

coverting to sound

- synchronized sound was born from a business decision - warner bros was expanding its facilities and holdings - an expansion: investment in a sound system using records in synchronization with film images - Don Juan (1926) - had orchestral accompaniment and sound effects on disc, along with a series of vaudeville shorts with singing and talking and this made warner bros popularize the idea of sound films - the Jazz Singer (1927) - a success as well - firms realized that whatever sound system that studios adopted, it would have to be compatible with the projection machinery of any theater. Eventually, the sound-on-disc system was rejected and sound-on-film one became the standard up to the present - By 1930, most theaters in America were wired for sound.

Solutions

- when many cameras recorded the scene from different angles, the footage could be cut together to provide continuity editing patterns, complete with close-ups - early sound films like Rouben Mamolian's Applause (1929) showed that the camera could regain considerable flexibility of movement - equipment manufacturers came up with smaller enclosures that replaced the cumbersome booths - these blimps permitted cinematographers to place the camera on movable supports - microphones mounted on booms and hanging over the heads of the actors could also follow moving action and maintain recording quality

Diegetic Sound

1. Sound simultaneous in with image: most common temporal relation that sound displays in fiction films. Noise, music, or speech that comes from the space of the story almost invariably occurs at the same time as the image - Like any other sort of diegetic sound, simultaneous sound can either external (objective) or internal (subjective). So instead of a character speaking, we might have an inner monologue, with the character talking to oneself. But that monologue is still presumably simultaneous with the image onscreen. 2. Sound earlier in story than image: the sound comes from an earlier point in the story than the action we're seeing onscreen. A sonic flashback is one example. Usually sonic flashbacks are subjective, representing character memory. Recalling Obi-wan Kenobi's words, Luke Skywalker decides to trust the Force and turn off his ship's targeting computer. Many contemporary films use these mental "replays" On rare occasions, the sonic flashback isn't subjective - sound from earlier in the story action may simply be laid over the current scene for emphasis. Losey's Accident opens with sound indicating an offscreen car crash. The plot goes on to present a long flashback tracing what led up to the accident. Back in the present, the film ends with a parallel image, accompanied by the noise of the fatal crash. There isn't another crash taking place nearby , and there's no evidence that the professor is remembering the original incident. Instead, an unrestricted narration inserts this auditory flashback Along with the repeated camera position , the sound reminds us of the opening situation and may imply that the tragedy will haunt the family's life. Sound may belong to an earlier time than the image in another way - the sound from the previous scene may linger briefly while the image is already presenting the next scene - SOUND BRIDGE. Sound bridges of this sort may create smooth transitions by setting up expectations that are quickly confirmed Sound bridges can sometimes make our expectations more uncertain. - In Tim Hunter's The River's Edge, three high school boys are standing outside school, and one of them confesses to having killed his girlfriend. When his pals scoff, he says, "They don't believe me." There is a cut to the dead girl lying in the grass by the river, while on the soundtrack we hear one of his friends call it a crazy story that no one will believe. There's a brief uncertainty. Is a new scene starting, with the friend's response an offscreen one? Or are we are seeing a cutaway to the corpse, which could be followed by a shot returning to the three boys at school? The shot dwells on the dead girl, and after a pause, we hear , with a different sound ambience , "If you brought us. Then there is a cut to a shot of the three youths walking through the woods to the river, as the same character continues, all the way out here for nothing....The friend's remark about the crazy story belongs to an earlier, somewhat indeterminate time than the shot of the corpse, and it becomes an unsettling sound bridge to the new scene. 3. Sound later in the story than image: Sound may also occur at a time later than that depicted by the images. Here we usually tend to take the images as occurring in the past and the sound as occurring in the present or future. A simple prototype occurs in many trial dramas. The testimony of a witness in the present is heard on the soundtrack, while the image presents a flashback to an earlier event. The same effect occurs when the film employs a reminiscing narrator, as in John Ford's How Green Was My Valley. Aside from a glimpse at the beginning, we don't see the protagonist Huw as a man, only as a boy, but his grown-up voice-over accompanies the bulk of the plot, which is in the distant past. Huw's present-time voice on the soundtrack creates a strong sense of nostalgia for the past and constantly reminds us of the pathetic decline that the characters will eventually suffer Since the late 1960s, it has become somewhat common for filmmakers to invert the pattern of the sound bridge found in our earlier example from The Silence of the Lambs. In this newer variant, the sound from the last scene begins while the images of the last one are still on the screen. In Wim Wenders's American Friend, a nighttime shot of a little boy riding in the back seat of a car is accompanied by a harsh clacking. There is a cut to a railroad station, where the timetable board flips through its metal cards listing times and destinations. Because the sound over the shot of the boy comes from the later scene, this portion is nonsimultaneous. In principle, one could also have a sound flashforward. The filmmaker could, say, shows us scene 2 while playing the sound of scene 4. In practice, such a technique is almost unknown. In Godard's Contempt, a husband and wife quarrel, and the scene ends with her swimming out to sea while he sits quietly on a rock formation. On the soundtrack we hear her voice, closely miked, reciting a letter in which she tells him she has driven back to Rome with another man. Because the husband has not yet received the letter and perhaps the wife has not yet written it, the letter and its recitation presumably come from a later point in the storyHere the sound flashforward sets up strong expectations that a later scene confirms : We see the wife and the husband's rival stopping Page 299 for gas on the road to Rome. To add to the uncertainty, we never see a scene in which the husband receives the letter.

volume as a cue for distance

A hiker is trapped at the bottom of a canyon in 127 Hours. One shot begins on a high-angle shot of him shouting for help. As the camera pulls quickly up and away from him, his cries diminish in volume, until the shot ends on an extreme-long view of the desert with the canyon a dark line in the landscape and the hiker's voice no longer audible. Director Danny Boyle uses sound perspective, timed with drastic changes of shot scale, to dramatize how hopeless the young man's plight is.

Accident: sound from earlier in the story

Accident begins on a long shot of a house at night. As the camera tracks forward, we hear screeching tires and a crash. We see a figure, later to be identified as an Oxford professor, come to the doorway. At the end of the film, we see a similar image of the home in daylight, after the main action of the plot has concluded. As the camera tracks back, the professor and his sons go into the house. Offscreen traffic sounds increase in volume, and again we hear the initial crash.

diegetic sound

Any voice, musical passage, or sound effect presented as originating from a source within the film's world.

rhythmic contrast in reservoir dogs

As the credits start, the opening bass line of George Baker Selection's "Little Green Bag" begins as well. When the drums join in, Tarantino cuts to a lateral tracking shot of the gang, many dressed in black suits, as they walk in slow motion. When the verse of the song starts, we cut to a medium shot of Mr. WhiteHarvey Keitel's credit is superimposed over this shot to link the actor and the character. Each of the principal cast members is introduced in a similar fashion, with each cut coordinated with the start of a new musical phrase.

An Abundance of Choices

As viewers watch a film, they don't mentally slot sounds into each of these spatial and temporal categories. We offer them here as a way of looking systematically at creative decisions filmmakers have made. Once we've done that, we can use the distinctions to help understand our viewing experience. Tracing out the choices explicitly offers us ways of noticing important aspects of films-especially films that play with our expectations about sounds. By becoming aware of the rich range of possibilities, we're less likely to take a film's soundtrack for granted and be more sensitive to unusual sound strategies.

selection guides our attention

As you read this, you are paying attention to the words and ignoring certain stimuli that reach your ears.. but if you close your eyes and listen keenly, you'll be aware of background sounds-traffic, footsteps, distant voices - if you set up a microphone and recorder in what seems to be a quiet environment, those normally unnoticed sounds can become obtrusive - the microphone is unselective; like the camera lens, it doesn't automatically filter out what's distracting Normally, the filmmaker clarifies and simplifies the soundtrack so that important material stands out - dialogue, as a transmitter of story information, is usually recorded and reproduced for maximum clarity. Important lines should not have to compete with music or background noise - sounds effects are less important than speech - they supply a sense of a realistic environment and are seldom noticed; if they were missing, however, the silence would be distracting. - music is usually subordinate to dialogue as well, entering during pauses in convo or in passages without dialogue All of these customs have become conventions. - Nolan included muffled dialogue in Interstellar (use dialogue as a sound effect).. - people thought it was technical problem Dialogue doesn't always rank highest in importance, though - sound effects are centra to action sequences, while music can dominate dance scenes, transitional sequences, or emotion-laden moments without dialogue - Charlie Chaplin's city lights and modern times eliminate dialogue, letting sound effects and music come to the fore - Robert Bresson's A man escaped, music and noise fill out a sparse dialogue track by evoking offscreen space and creating thematic associations By choosing only certain sounds, the filmmaker guides our perception of the action - Scene in Mr. Hulot's Holiday: vacationers at a hotel are relaxing. Early in the scene, the guests in the foreground are murmuring quietly, but Hulot's Ping-Pong game is louder; the sound cues us to watch Hulot. Later in the scene, however, the same Ping-Pong games makes no sound, and our attention is drawn to the muttering cardplayers in the foreground. The presence and absence of the sound of the ping-pong ball guides our expectations - filmmakers often use sound quite unrealistically to shift our attention to what is narratively or visually important The scene from Mr Hulot's holiday also shows how important how a chosen sound may have its acoustic qualities transformed for a particular purpose - thanks to a manipulation of volume and timbre, the ping-pong games gains vividness - when two sounds are of the same frequency and loudness, contemporary sound designers freely adjust one to make it sound clearly Nowadays, film sound is normally reprocessed to yield exactly the qualities desired. - a dry recording of the sound in fairly nonreflective space will be manipulated electronically to yield a desired effect (ex. if you choose to present Amanda's dialogue as heard on Jim's phone, her voice would probably been treated with filters to make it more tinny and muffled. - called "futzing" the sound)

Loudness, pitch, timbre (basic sound qualities) can also shape our experience of a film as a whole (ex. Citizen Kane)

CItizen kane offers a wide range of sound manipulations - echo chambers alter timbre and volume - a motif is formed by the inability of susan to sing pitches accurately - the plot shift's between times and places are covered by a continuing sound thread and varying the basic acoustics - A shot of Kane applauding dissolves to a shot of a crowd applauding (shift in volume and timbre) - Leland beginning a sentence in the street cuts to Kane finishing the sentence in an auditorium, his voice magnified by loudspeakers (a shift in volume, timbre, and pitch)

recording

Dialogue is usually recorded during filming, but that isn't the version we will hear in the finished film - the dialogue in the film has been dubbed, or "looped," later in a recording studio - in the process called automated dialogue recording (ADR), actors repeat their lines while watching the footage in "looped playback" - The dialogue recorded during shooting guides the ADR process Music is almost never recorded during principal photography, unless the filmmaker is documenting a musical performance, as in concert films like Stop Making Sense, U2 3D, and Year of the Horse - more often, music is added in post production.. the track might be a selection of existing pieces, such as popular songs, or it might be a score written specifically for the film - recording a score involves the composer, sometimes aided by a conductor, leading the musicians through each cue while watching the footage projected on a screen Like music, most sound effects are added during postproduction - a common method: Foley process - which creates noises tailored to each scene. In a sonically clean studio, experts record people pouring drinks, splashing mud, rubbing sandpaper, and any other actions that put human movement in contact with surfaces - Foley artists Joan Rowe used a package of liver from the market to get the "liquidy and friendly" sound to the title character of E.T. The Extraterrestrial Not all postproduction sound effects are generated from scratch - many are culled from libraries. most famous library effect is the "Wilhelm scream," first heard in a 1951 american film and recycled in star wars, raiders of the lost ark, Reservoir dogs, transformers, and more films sometimes the soundtrack is conceived before the image track - in musical La La Land, the camera films singers and players who are miming to a prerecorded track. Even the dancers' footwork, like taps or stomps, will already be on the playback. That track will be married to the filmed images during the editing process - animated cartoons typically record music, dialogue, and sound effects before the camera capture begins so the action onscreen will match the sound frame by frame

Video tutorial: voiceover narration in I Vitelloni (1953)

Diegetic Narration by an Unidentified character - a group of young men drifting through life in an Italian beachside town. In the opening scene, a narrator's voice introduces the main characters, saying he is part of the group. HI voice is diegetic since he is a character, and yet we don't find out who he is - in a later scene, the narrator's voice returns, describing the nightly routine of three of the other characters, but we still don't know whose voice we are hearing. In fact, Fellini keeps us guessing throughout the film.

Resources of Diegetic Sound: Subjectivity

Diegetic sound can give us perceptual subjectivity, in a way parallel to an optical POV shot - In The King's speech, a therapist treats a man with a bad stammer. He directs the patient to read a text into the microphone while listening to music on headphones. But we hear only the music that the patient hears. The therapist says that reading went well, while the patient believes he did badly. Who's right?.... The soundtrack here creates a restricted range of knowledge, building up suspense until we hear the recording Just as dreams, memories, and fantasies can be shown on the image track, mental subjectivity can be presented on the soundtrack too. - we may hear a character's thoughts even though the character's lips don't move; presumably, other characters cannot hear these thoughts. Here the narration uses sound to achieve subjectivity, giving us information about the mental state of the character. - a character may also remember words, snatches of music, or events as represented by sound effects. Does the sound have a physical source in the scene? - its diegetic so its external diegetic sound Does the sound come from inside the mind of the character? - its diegetic so its internal diegetic sound - Laurence Olivier's version of Hamlet presents Hamlet's famous soliloquies as inner monologues A filmmaker may cross the internal/external border for expressive purposes. - The Snake Pit begins with close views of Virginia on a bench. We hear voices questioning her, and she makes replies, looking left and right - We also hear Virginia's inner monologue wondering why people keep asking these things. We might take the voices to be offscreen , particularly because their sound quality differs from the texture of her thoughts . Eventually , though , the camera pulls back to reveal that no one is around her. Everything except her spoken replies has been internal . But the filmmakers have subtly adjusted the timbre and volume of the questions to distinguish them from her thoughts . This choice suggests that they are real to Virginia -a woman institutionalized with hallucinations . Multiple-channel theater sound has reshaped the conventions of internal diegetic sound even more. - The Iron Lady presents an aged Margaret Thatcher hallucinating that her dead husband is still alive and talking with her. Some scenes present close framings on her face, as in The Snake Pit, with the husband's voice offscreen. We might expect that his subjective dialogue should come from the center channel, where Mrs. Thatcher's head is. But in those moments , director Phyllida Lloyd chooses to let his voice issue only from the left or right channel. By suggesting that he hovers just outside the frame , the sound captures Mrs. Thatcher's sense that the dead man lives in offscreen space. More drastically , in today's films an inner monologue may not be signaled by close shots of a character who's thinking, as in Hamlet and The Snake Pit. - Wong Kar- wai and Terrence Malick will sometimes inject a character's voiced thoughts into scenes in which the character isn't prominent, or even visible. When the voice of a paid killer reflects on his job in Wong's Fallen Angels, we see distant shots of him mixed with several shots of the woman who arranges his contracts. In Malick's The Thin Red Line and The New World, characters are heard musing during lengthy montage sequences in which they don't even appear. These floating monologues come to resemble a more traditional voice- over narration . This impression is reinforced when the inner monologue uses the past tense, as if the action we're seeing onscreen is being recalled from a later time. A different sort of internal diegetic sound occurs in Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire. - Dozens of people are reading in a large public library. Incidentally, this sequence also constitutes an interesting exception to the general rule that one character cannot hear another's internal diegetic sound. The film's premise is that Berlin is patrolled by invisible angels who can tune in to humans' thoughts . This is a good example of how the conventions of a genre (here, the fantasy film) and the film's specific narrative context can modify a traditional device.

Manipulating volume for intelligibility

Establishing shots at the start of Norma Rae show the textile factory full of deafening machine noise, so that we register the harsh working conditions. As the story action starts, the noise is turned down so that the women's dialogue in the break room will be audible.

Offscreen sound and optical point of view the money exchange in Jackie Brown

Focus on optical subjectivity and offscreen sound - crucial in making the triple play clear to the audience The first run-through confines us to Jackie's range of knowledge. She tries on a pantsuit, and the saleswoman says, Wow, you look really cool. Jackie goes back to the fitting rooms and waits for Melanie. We hear Melanie arrive offscreen, and Tarantino shows us her shoes from Jackie's viewpoint. After Melanie has left, Jackie repacks the money in a shopping bag she leaves in the cubicle and hurries out. She hastily pays the sales clerk, who calls after her, Wait, your change!" and waves her bills. Jackie rushes out to the mall and summons the federal agents, shouting that Melanie stole the bag from her. Tarantino flashes back to an earlier phase of the action, with Louis and Melanie arriving at the shop. As the camera follows them, we hear the saleswoman say from offscreen, "Wow, you look really cool!" The camera pans to Jackie and the clerk. The offscreen sound has motivated showing this dialogue again, and its unnatural loudness assures that we understand that we're entering the scene at a point we've already witnessedLouis and Melanie try to look inconspicuous . When Melanie teases Louis about his nervousness, he angrily twists her arm, and she blurts out, " Hey, would you let go!". Tarantino now uses offscreen sound to test Louis's dull wits. Louis looks down at the shirts he's riffling through 7.50), and we hear an offscreen phone ringLouis doesn't look up, but we are given a shot of the clerk answering. What does get Louis's attention is Melanie, who abruptly departs for the fitting rooms. Looking uneasily this way and that, Louis sees Max, whom he dimly recognizes , and the two men exchange glances in shot /reverse shot . Then Melanie hustles out of the fitting rooms, and Louis catches up with her. They leave quarreling about who should carry the bag. The scene runs a third time, now attaching us to Max's range of knowledge. The second version hinted at his presence early, when the tracking shot following Melanie and Louis glided past him in the foreground. We see him enter and browse, waiting calmly for the scam to begin. Once more Jackie comes out wearing the outfit, and the sales clerk says, "Wow, you look really cool!" But now the exchange is observed from Max's point of view. The soundtrack fades out the dialogue between the clerk and Jackie and fades up the quarrel between Melanie and Louis. Max turns his attention to them and then back to Jackie and the clerk. Here the sound mixing is quite subjective, conveying Max's shifting attention between the two conversations . While Max is watching the action at the counter, we hear Louis and Melanie quarreling, and this motivates another switch in Max's attention, in time for him to observe her exclaiming, Hey, would you let go. The ringing phone drives his eyes back to the clerk but he keeps Melanie in mind too. A little before Louis notices, Max sees Melanie set off on her mission. Louis clumsily scans the shop, but Max is calm and purposefulEach offscreen sound snaps his attention to what is crucial to the plan. After Melanie and Louis leave, it's through Max's eyes that we see Jackie's departure, with the shop woman calling, Wait, your change!". Max pauses, then heads for the fitting room to retrieve the shopping bag and the fortune . By repeating key actions, noises, and lines of dialogue, the replays lay out the mechanics of the exchange cogently. The variations between the second and third sequences allow Tarantino to characterize the thieves. Max is more alert than Louis and Melanie , and offscreen sounds prompt him to shift his attention preciselyMoreover, each version of story events is nested neatly inside the next one: Jackie and the clerk, then Jackie and the clerk watched by Melanie and Louis, then all the others watched by Max, who completes the money exchange. Sound and image work together to peel back each layer and expand our appreciation of Jackie's intricate double- cross.

Conversation Piece

Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation makes fluent use of many of the options we've surveyed in this chapter-particularly the ways in which sound works in space and time. But instead of using sound to help us follow the action , the film's soundtrack creates ambiguities about the action, and eventually it helps us reflect on how we can misunderstand what we thought we heard. The plot centers on Harry Caul, a sound engineer specializing in surveillance . Harry is hired by a shadowy corporate executive to tape a conversation between a young man and woman in a noisy park. Harry cleans up the garbled tape, but he starts to suspect foul play and refuses to give the tape to his client. Harry obsessively replays, refilters , and remixes all his tapes of the conversation . Finally Harry arrives at a good dub, and we hear the man say something extremely damaging. The overall situation is quite mysterious . Harry does not know who the young couple is. (it the woman his client's wife or daughter ?) Still , he suspects that they are in danger from the executive When the executive's hirelings steal Harry's tapes, he feels he is involved in a criminal plot. After a highly ambiguous series of events , including an overheard act of violence, Harry realizes that the basic situation was not as he had thought. From the very start, The Conversation suggests that we can't trust what we hear. The problems are initially about space: What is the source of the sound on the track? As described in Chapter 5the film begins with a long, slow zoom in on a bustling city square at lunchtime. Initially we hear a Dixieland combo playing "Bill Bailey", gradually increasing in volume as the camera enlarges the view. Almost immediately, the music starts to warp and distort. Is the interference part of the soundtrack? Is it a glitch in the theater's sound system? The distortion returns periodically during the band's next number, When the Red, Red Robin (Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin' Along)." Eventually, the film's first cut reveals a man on a rooftop. He aims a shotgun microphone at the young couple who are the target of Caul's surveillance. The sound we've been hearing is not that heard by the people on Union Square, but rather the audio picked up by this microphone. Our initial impression was that these sounds were external and objective. Now, however, we realize that at least some of them were the input to the unknown technician's headphones apparently objective, external sound is colored by subjectivity. After an extreme long shot of the city square with the camera closer to ground level, a cut back to the musicians brings with it a jump in the volume of the music. This implies a shift to a more objective narration, particularly as the camera picks up passersby as they cross the frame. Eventually, though, the scene's action returns to the couple, following them as they talk. The harsh distortion returns, suggesting that all this, too, has been audio picked up by a microphone . We start to realize that Harry has other sound recordists planted in the square. One shadows the couple's movements, while another sits in a van monitoring all the audio inputsAny of the sounds we've been hearing could be what one of these spies microphones have picked up. This creates continual play between offscreen and onscreen sound. Once we're shown that the surveillance team surrounds the couple, we often hear their conversation over shots in which they aren't present . Throughout the opening scene the sound sources don't mesh comfortably with the images. Coppola's spatial manipulation of sound departs from convention in other ways. As the scene develops , the couple walks toward a group of drummers playing in the park . The music's volume swells as they approach , creating a massive "foreground plane " of sound ( 7.78)When the man leans in to tell the woman something , his line is buried under the hammering of the drums . This is the line that Harry will devote himself to revealing . As The Conversation develops from this opening, the narration tightly restricts our knowledge to Harry's. We are with him in every scene, and we learn details about the conspiracy at the same time he does. This restriction is reflected in Coppola's creative choices regarding the phone calls Harry makes and receives. The director's handling of these scenes recalls some of the options described in our earlier Jim and Amanda example (p, 263). At some moments we know even less than the protagonist . Harry calls his landlady to scold her for entering his apartment without permission , and Coppola presents only his side of the conversation . We don't see or hear the landlady. Later phone conversations attach us spatially to Harry but "futz" the dialogue from the other party to evoke his perceptual subjectivity When Harry calls the director's office, Coppola doesn't show his assistant , Martin Stett , on the other end of the line. Stett's speech is clearly audible , but we cannot see his facial expressions or demeanor . By confining us to what Harry hears Coppola allows Stett's role in the conspiracy to remain shrouded in mystery. The payoff to this pattern comes toward the film's end . Harry plays his saxophone to jazz recordings as he did earlier. The phone rings unexpectedlyHarry answers, but gets no response. The phone rings a second time. Harry answers and this time hears the tinny whine of a tape rewinding. Martin Stett warns Harry to stay out of the company's business saying that people are watching him. Then Stett plays back the sound of Harry's saxophone. The music has been "futzed," and its aural texture is thinner and more muffled than it was moments earlier. The playback through the receiver reveals that Harry's apartment has been bugged. Harry has come to realize that the Director is the victim of a murder conspiracy. But without seeing who is on the other end of the phone, we, like him never learn how deep it goes. The Conversation's play with sound space is partly motivated by Coppola's use of restricted narration. Yet Coppola also uses sound techniques to add depth of information to Harry's character, revealing his emotional states and even sometimes entering his mind. Harry^ prime s fierce desire for privacy leads him to distrust others. This , in turn, causes him to be, in the words of his rival, "lonely and anonymous ." David Shire's score captures the emotional cost of Harry's isolation. A minor-key, solo piano theme often accompanies his actions, suffusing these scenes with melancholy . The music conveys to us emotions that Harry conceals from his girlfriend and coworkers. Sound enhances an even deeper plunge into Harry's mind: his haunting, apparently prophetic dream. The return of the burbling distortion heard in the first scene signals the changeIn the dream, Harry chases the Director's wife, Ann , through a park. In an effort to gain her trust, Harry describes a childhood illness , his Catholic upbringing, and an incident where he punched someone in the stomach who later died. Harry rambles in his monologue, but these anecdotes all touch on themes of guilt and death that are key to his psychology The misty exteriors give the dream an eerie calm that is undercut by the noisy soundtrack. Besides the distortion , Harry's dialogue is underscored by the constant clanging of a railroad crossing and Shire's dissonant , ominous score . Even more striking is the absence of sounds we've come to expect from outdoor settings. We don't hear breezes, birdcalls , or Ann's footfalls when she runs away from Harry. The splitting of sound from image (sound from unseen sources, silence where we expect to hear sounds) helps make Harry's dream unnerving. At a crucial point Harry employs equalizers and filters to uncover what the man said in the opening scene. To some extent , his task is like that of Jack Terry in Blow Out reconstructing an event that isn't what it seems (p. 267). But Jack has photographic evidence he can sync up with his recording. Harry has only the sounds . Here is where Coppola and sound designer Walter Murch start to manipulate auditory time as well as space. As Harry obsessively replays his tapes, Coppola could have simply presented shots of him working with his gear. Instead, the film's imagery returns us to the pivotal moment in the conversation. We get a visual flashback, with the plot repeating action shown earlier in the story. Is it Harry's memory? Unlikely, because he didn't see this part of the conversation. Most likely, this passage is simply the narration's repetition of the moments in the city square. As an objective flashback to what occurred, it seems to be like those rearrangements of story chronology we find in Pulp Fiction (p, 80) . Thanks to the repetition of actions and camera positions we saw earlier, The Conversation's flashback to the first scene seems reliable. That impression, however, is undercut by noise and hiss on the tape recording. If the image is supposedly in the past, then the sound is in the present, as Harry patiently cleans it up. There is a temporal split between image and sound. Still, both channels seem compatible. We're cued to assume that the present-time sound replays are, like the images, accurate and reliable- what others would hear if they were at Harry's workstation. And when Harry's tweaking makes the man's line intelligible , the sound seems to fit what we see. Later, however, we will find that these replays encourage us to misunderstand what we hear. The disjunctions between past and present, onscreen and offscreen sounds , and external and internal sounds run through the film. Although the opening has warned us to be on our guard , Coppola trusts that our habits will lead us to keep misinterpreting what we see and hear. The film's surprise climax and its lingering mysteries rely on sonic ambiguities operating in space and time. The Conversation shows that distinguishing different types of sound can help us analyze filmmakers' creative choices. The film, like the examples we've analyzed in this chapter, also suggests that our categories correspond to how viewers understand what they hear. We unconsciously distinguish between diegetic and nondiegetic, internal and external simultaneous and nonsimultaneous sound. That's not surprising. Filmmakers have worked for nearly a century to teach us those conventions. Coppola, like other filmmakers we've considered, plays with those conventions. But he still counts on our knowing them. By surveying options for creating the soundtrack, we can make explicit what audiences and filmmakers take for granted. We can also analyze how more innovative films appeal to our assumptions about sound. By considering both the conventions and the ways they may be manipulated, we gain an understanding of how sound shapes our experience of a film.

Breakfast At Tiffany's: music suggests narrative development

Henry Mancini's "Moon River" is introduced during the film's opening credits, but reappears later in the film to recall Holly's past as a wild thingScenes show Holly talking in her sleep, bidding good-bye to Doc Golightly, and searching for Cat. A final variant of the theme enters for the couple's embrace.

editing dialogue: to overlap or not to overlap?

If the soundtrack is a stream, the current may carry auditory elements to the surface or sink them out of awareness. One decision that faces the filmmaker involves that current: should it be choppy or smoothly flowing?

Subjective silence

In Babel, when the deaf teenage girl enters the disco, the club music is about to climax. Instead, it drops out when we cut to her optical point-of-view on the boy she's following. Instead of subjective sound, we get subjective silence, and this sharply dramatizes her isolation from what is happening around her.

sound reveals a clue

In Blow Out, Jack studies his DIY film made from magazine photographs. He synchronizes his tape with the image track. When the two play together, the blowout sound matches a flash from the bushes near a fence post. The flash was visible in the replayed footage, but it took the soundtrack to make Jack and the audience notice it.

Pitch synchronized with cutting

In Ivan the Terrible, Eisenstein emphasizes changes in vocal pitch by cutting from a medium-long shot to a medium shot to a close-up of the singer

selective sound volume

In Jurassic Park, Hammond and Ellie are closer to the camera than is anything else in the shot, but their dialogue is an unintelligible murmur. In the background, the hunter supplies important information about velociraptors , and that is clearly audible.

nondiegetic sound becomes diegetic: Drama

In Stagecoach, Ford shows a medium close-up of one of the passengers, Hatfield, who has just discovered that he is down to his last bullet. He glances off right and raises his pistol. The camera pans right to Lucy, praying. During all this, orchestral music, including bugles, plays nondiegetically. Unseen by Lucy, the gun comes into the frame from the left as Hatfield prepares to shoot her to prevent her from being captured by the Indians (7.66) But before he shoots, an offscreen gunshot is heard, and Hatfield's hand and gun drop down out of the frame. Then bugle music becomes somewhat more prominent. Lucy's expression changes as she says "Can you hear it? Can you hear it? It's a bugle. They're blowing the charge". Only then does Ford cut to the cavalry itself racing toward the coach.

sound perspective in the theater space

In daily life, a sound reaches one ear a few thousandths of a second before it reaches the otherSlight as the difference is, the proportion of direct and reflected sound gives us information about where the source is. Thanks to multichannel playback, modern theater design can mimic these disparities with great accuracy. In the typical Dolby 5.1 setup, the three speakers behind the screen transmit most dialogue, effects , and music. These channels can suggest regions of sound within the frame, as in Splice when the winged human/animal hybrid created by Clive and Elsa assaults them from above. Its whooshes are panned from left to center to right and then back again. The front channels can evoke space offscreen as well. In farcical comedies such as The Naked Gunleft or right channels can suggest collisions and falls just outside the frame. During the climactic scene of The Fugitive, Richard Kimble is sneaking up on the friend who has betrayed him and he reaches down past the lower frame line . As he slides his arm to the right, a rolling clank in the center channel tells us that there is an iron pipe at his feet. With use of surround channels , a remarkably immersive sound environment can be created in the theater . The Star Wars series uses multiple -channel sound to suggest space vehicles whizzing all around the audience . As one sound designer puts it, surround effects allow the filmmaker to "hang" noises in the auditorium much as an interior designer might hang draperies on a wall . We've mentioned one example of the process in a scene from Brave. Like other techniques, sound localization in the theater needn't be used for realistic purposes. - Most dialogue is placed in the center channel speakers, but as we've seen, The Iron Lady spreads imaginary conversations to subsidiary channels (p. 291). In Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, James Cole is a convict volunteer sent from the future to discover the cause of a viral outbreak. The dialogue of onscreen characters comes from the front channels, but when the doctors from the future attempt to communicate with Cole, we hear their voices coming from every channel around the audience. Their disembodied quality evokes Cole's sound perspective and raises the possibility that he may be a delusional schizophrenic who "hears voices" and imagines being part of a future world.

dialogue overlap

In editing a scene, arranging the cut so that a bit of dialogue coming from shot A is heard under a shot that shows another character or another element in the scene. - in this technique, the filmmaker continues a line of dialogue across a cut, smoothing over the change of shot

time

Just as the sources we hear need not be in the space we see, the time represented on the soundtrack need not coincide with the time that the image presents. More often, the filmmaker decides to hear the sound at the same time as we see what makes it. - characters move their lips, and we hear the appropriate words. A gun fires and we hear a blast - SYNCHRONOUS SOUND when the sound does go out of synchronization, through mechanical error, the result is quite distracting - would a filmmaker put ASYNCHRONOUS, NOR OUT-OF-SYNC SOUND into the film itself? - yes, sometimes. - it can spoof poorly dubbed films in other languages - Wayne's World 2 - asynchronous sound in a fight scene between Wayne and his gf's father, Mr. Wong SINGIN IN THE RAIN creates gags based on asynchronous sound. - in the early days of sound filming, a pair of silent screen actors have just made their first talking picture, The Dancing Cavalier. Their film company previews the film for an audience, but the technology fails and the pictures gets out of synchronization. All the sounds come several seconds before their sources are seen in the image. A line of dialogue begins and then the actor's lips move. A woman's voice is heard when a man moves his lips, and vice versa. The humor of this disastrous preview in SINGIN IN THE RAIN depends on our realization that a film's synchronization of sound and image is simply a mechanical illusion Matters of synchronization are fairly easy to spot - they relate to screen duration, or viewing time (note: narrative films can present story time and plot time) - story time consists of the order, duration, and frequency of all the vents pertinent to the narrative, whether they are shown to us or not - plot time consists of the order, duration, and frequency of the events actually represented in the film. Plot time shows us selected story events but skips over others. Filmmakers realized that sound can manipulated story and plot times in 2 ways - does the sound take place at the same time as the image, in terms of the story events? - if so, its simultaneous sound. This is the most common usage. We see or hear two characters speaking, or we see a truck driving down the street and hear the truck's sounds. The plot isn't manipulating the order of sound events - filmmakers also realize that the sound we hear can occur earlier or later in the story than the events we see in the image. This manipulation of story order on the soundtrack involves nonsimultaneous sound. Most common example of this is the sonic flashback. For instance we might see characters chatting in the present but hear another character's voice from an earlier scene. Or instead of hearing the truck's engine, we hear gunshots from an earlier scene. But means of nonsimultaneous sound, the film can present earlier story events without showing them

A dramatic sound stream: Seven Samurai

Kurosawa was aware of how sounds can combine to create a stream of information, as we can see from the final battle sequence in Seven Samurai - in heavy rain, bandits charge into a village defended by the villagers and the samurai. He chooses to keep the torrent and wind as a constant background noise. Before the battle, he punctuates the convo of the waiting men, the tread of footsteps, and the sound of swords being drawn with long pauses in which we hear only drumming rain. Like the defenders, we're uncertain about when and how the attack will come Suddenly distant horses' hooves are heard offscreen. This triggers the expectation that we will soon see the attackers. He cuts to a long shot of the bandits; their horses' hooves become abruptly louder (this scene employs vivid sound perspective: the closer the camera is to a source, the louder the sound) - when the bandits burst into the village, yet another sound element appears--the bandits' harsh war cries, which increase steadily in volume as they approach. The battle begins. The rhythmic cutting and the muddy, storm-swept mise-en-scene gain impact from the way in which the incessant rain and splashing are explosively interrupted by brief noises--howls of the wounded, the splintering of a fence one bandit crashes through, the whinnies of horses, screams of women.... the sudden intrusion of certain sounds marks abrupt developments in the battle, standing out against the pounding rain. such frequent surprises heighten our tension, as the narration rapidly snaps us from one line of action to another The scene climaxes after the main battle has ended. - Offscreen the pounding of horses hooves is cut short by the sharp crack of a bandit's rifle shot, which fells one samurai. - A long pause, in which we hear only the rain, emphasizes the moment. - The samurai furiously flings his sword in the direction of the shot and falls dead into the mud. Another samurai splashes toward the bandit chieftain, who has the rifle; another shot cracks out and he falls back, wounded; another pause, in which only the relentless rain is heard. - The wounded samurai kills the chieftain . The other samurai gather. At the scene's end, the sobs of a young samurai, the distant whinnies and hoofbeats of riderless horses, and the rain all fade slowly out. Kurosawa's relatively dense mix gradually introduces sounds that turn our attention to new narrative elements (hooves, battle cries) and then modulates these sounds into a harmonious stream. - This stream is then punctuated by abrupt sounds of unusual volume or pitch associated with crucial narrative actions ( hooves, archery, women's screams gunshots). - Overall the combination of sounds enhances the unrestricted , objective narration of this sequence , which shows us what happens in various parts of the village rather than confining us to the experience of a single participant

basic sound qualities

Loudness, Pitch, Timbre

Rhythm in Sound and Image: Disparities

May choose to create a disparity among the rhythms of sound, editing, and image - one of the most common options is to edit dialogue shots in ways that cut against natural speech rhythms. In the example of dialogue overlap from the The Hunt for Red October, the editing doesn't coincide with accented beats, cadences, or pauses in the officer's speech. By smoothing over shot changes, the editing emphasizes the words and facial expressions of captain Ramius. If a filmmaker wants to emphasize a line of dialogue, the cut usually comes at a pause, as in our example from M The filmmaker may contrast the rhythm of sound and picture in more noticeable ways - for instance, if the source of sound is primarily offscreen, the filmmaker can utilize the behavior of onscreen figures to create an expressive counterrhythm - toward the end of John Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, the aging cavalry captain, Nathan Brittles, watches his troops ride out the fort just after he has retired. he regrets leaving the service and longs to go with the patrol. The sound of the scene consists of 2 elements: the cheerful title song sung by the departing riders, and the quick hoofbeats of their horses. Yet only a few shots show the horses and singers, who ride a rhythm matched to the sound. Instead, the scene concentrates our attention on Brittles, standing most motionless by his horse. The contrast of brisk musical rhythm and the static images of the solitary Brittles expresses his regret at having to stay behind for the first time in many years Sometimes the musical accompaniment might even seem rhythmically inappropriate to the images - at intervals in Four Nights of a Dreamer, Robert Bresson presents shots of a large, floating nightclub cruising the Seine. The boat's movement is slow and smooth, yet the soundtrack consists of lively calypso music. The strange combo of fast sound tempo with the slow passage of the boat creates a languid, mysterious effect In Chris Marker's La Jetée, the contrast between image and sound rhythms dominates the entire film. La Jetée is made up almost entirely of still shots; except for one tiny gesture, all movement within the images is eliminated. Yet the film utilizes voice-over narration, music, and sound effects of a generally rapid, constantly accented rhythm. Despite the absence of movement, the film doesn't seem uncinematic partly because it offers a dynamic interplay of audio -visual rhythms . Most films don't follow just one strategy in combining the rhythms of pictures and sounds. A filmmaker may change rhythms in order to reset our expectations . In the famous battle on the ice in Alexander Nevsky, Sergei Eisenstein develops the sound from slow tempos to fast and back to slow. The first 12 shots of the scene show the Russian army anticipating the attack of the German knights . The shots are of moderate length , and they contain very little movement . The music is comparably slow , consisting of short , distinctly separated chords . Then , as the German army rides into sight over the horizon , both the visual movement and the tempo of the music increase quickly , and the battle begins . At the end of the battle , Eisenstein creates another contrast : A long passage of slow , lamenting music accompanies majestic tracking shots with little figure movement .

Musical Motif's in Breakfast at Tiffany's

Musical motifs can subtly compare scenes, track patterns of development, and suggest implicit meanings - Henry Mancini's score for Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) mixes Jazz and pop elements to reflect vibrant, cosmopolitan NYC. At the same time, the film employs musical themes to suggest traits of a character and situation The film's main musical theme, "Moon River," hints at Holly Golightly's rural past - Mancini claimed the concept of the score grew out from the lonesome, melancholy timbre of the harmonica, an instrument associated with American folk music -the theme first appears over the opening shots of Holly exiting a cab. She walks over to the display windows of Tiffany's jewelry store. Later, the visuals echo the film's title by showing Holly munching a croissant and drinking coffee, but the music tells a somewhat different story - the guitar and harmonica sounds may seem an odd choice to accompany shots of NYC. yet the orchestration reflects character traits rather than the setting. - The harmonica in "moon river" expresses holly's wistful longing. Its rural association foreshadows the revelation that she was once Lulamae Barnes, a child bride living in Tulip, Texas, married to a widowed veterinarian. Repetitions of "moon river" develop the storyline of Holly's past - when holly beds down next to Paul early in the film, "moon river" plays over vibraphone chords, its wavering vibrato adding a pensive tone as Holly talks in her sleep - "moon river" returns in the bus station in which holly bids a tearful adieu to Doc Golightly, her former husband. This arrangement places the theme in the high register of the violins, a musical technique that often indicates strong passions and emotional conflict - Mancini's arrangement captures Holly's feelings by expressing her sadness at abandoning a man she loves but whose life she cannot share At the climax, "moon river" underscores for Cat, whom Holly capriciously turns loose in an alley. - Holly gesture demonstrates both her complete independence and her desire to escape the limelight of scandal-infested NY. Holly's emotional resolve softens, though, after Paul rebukes her for not letting anyone penetrate her brittle shell. Regretting her impetuous decision, Holly joins Paul as they search the alley. Here "moon river" melody plays in a minor key over the lurching rhythm of dissonant piano chords. when Holly finds Cat hiding in a cardboard box, the melody returns to a major key and a slow, simple waltz tempo Holly and Paul's reconciliation is emphasized by a lush arrangement of the theme for orchestra and chorus that signals a happy ending. - By tailoring each cue's harmony , orchestration , and meter to the needs of each scene , Mancini makes "Moon River not only dramatically appropriate but also a reminder of the rural motif through the film.

sound summons up an unseen space

Orson Welles had a radio career before going to Hollywood, so he understood the power of sound to arouse the audience's imagination. At the start of this scene from The Magnificent Ambersons, Georgie Minafer says good-bye to his Uncle Jack who's about to board a train. But there's no establishing shot of the station, not even a sign identifying it. We see the two men against a pillar while we hear announcements echoing in a large, hollow space. The locomotive is evoked by a whistle, a chugging engine, and blasts of steam. Welles's sound design, aided by rear projection of a roof, has conjured up an entire locale .

Fidelity (sound continuity)

Refers to the extent to which sound is faithful to the source as we conceive it - if a film shows us a barking dog and we hear a barking noise, that sound is faithful to its source; the sound maintains fidelity - but if the image of the barking dog is accompanied by the sound of a cat meowing, there enters a disparity between sound and image- a lack of fidelity Filmmaker's standpoint: fidelity has nothing to do with what originally made the sound in production. Even if our dogs emits a bark onscreen, perhaps in production the bark came from a different dog or was electronically synthesized. - we do not know what light sabers sound like, but we accept the whang they make in Return of the Jedi as plausible (in production, their sound was made by hammering wires that anchored a radio tower) - you can make a dog meow as easily as making it bark - if the viewer takes the sound to be coming from its source in the diegetic world of the film, then it is faithful, regardless of its actual source in production - Fidelity is this purely a matter of expectation When we're led to notice that a sound is unfaithful to its source, that awareness is used for comic effect, as with our meowing dog. - In Tati's Mr. Hulot's Holiday, much humor arises from the opening and closing of a dining room door. Instead of recording a real door, Tati inserts a twanging sound like a plucked cello string each time the door swings. Its amusing in itself, this sound functions to emphasize the rhythmic patterns created by waiters and diners passing through the door. - Tati films are based on quirkily unrealistic noises, his films are good for studying fidelity Still not every play with fidelity is comic - Hitchcock's The Thirty-Nine Steps, a landlady discovers a corpse in an apartment. We see her scream but hear a train whistle; then the scene shifts to action on a train. The whistle isn't faithful to its apparent source, but it provides a swift, vivid transition

sound shapes our understanding of images

Sequence of Letter from Siberia: Chris Marker demonstrates the power of sound to alter our understanding of what's onscreen. He shows the same footage-a shot of a bus passing a car on a city street, three shots of workers paving a street - but each time the footage is accompanied by a completely different soundtrack. Three versions: (of commentary) 1. heavily affirmative 2. harshly critical 3. mixes praise and criticism - The audience will construe the same images differently, depending on the voice-over commentary

Recording, Altering, and Combining Sounds

Sound in cinema is of three types: speech, music, and noise (usually called sound effects) - occasionally a sound may cross categories-is a yell classified as speech or noise?--and filmmakers have exploited these ambiguities... In Psycho, when a woman screams, we expect to hear a voice but instead hear violins

Summarize diegetic and nondiegetic ideas

Sound may be diegetic (in the story world) or nondiegetic (outside the story world). If it's diegetic, it may be internal (subjective) or external (objective). If it's external, it may be onscreen or offscreen.

internal diegetic sound (subjective)

Sound represented as coming from the mind of a character within the story space. Although we and the character can hear it, we assume that the other characters cannot.

synchronous sound (onscreen sound)

Sound that is matched temporally with the movements occurring in the images, as when dialogue corresponds to lip movements.

nondiegetic sound

Sound, such as mood music or a narrator's commentary, represented as coming from a source outside the space of the narrative.

Loudness

Sounds we hear result from vibrations in the air. The amplitude, or breadth, of the vibrations produces our sense of loudness, or volume Filmmakers manipulate volume constantly - a long shot of a busy street is accompanied by traffic noises, but when 2 people meet and start to speak, the loudness of traffic diminishes - a convo between a soft-spoken character and a blustery one is characterized as much by volume as by what they say - comedy in Mel Brooks's The Producers comes from the contrast between the voices of booming Max Bialystock and meek accountant Leo Bloom Although loudness can be measured in precise acoustic terms, for the listener it's relative - a lengthy passage of high-amplitude may not sound as loud as a lower burst of sound after each stretch of silence - Capote: a killer's confession is presented in a quiet scene, with only the wind audible. That ambience makes the shotgun blast that follows seems exceptionally loud. As with the mise-en-scene and tonal qualities of the image, the contrast on the soundtrack seizes our attention. Loudness is related to perceived distance - all other things being equal, the louder the sound, the closer we take it to be (assumption works in the street traffic example: the couple's dialogue, being closer to us, is sensed as louder, while traffic noise recedes to the background) - a film may startle the viewer by exploiting abrupt and extreme shifts in volume (usually called changes in dynamics), as when a quiet scene is interrupted by a very loud noise - changes in loudness may be combined with cutting or camera movement to reinforce our sense of moving toward or away from the source of the noise

Harsh sound contrasts

The Godfather. As Michael sits opposite Sollozzo, the sudden rumble and whine of an offscreen train sound all the more harsh when compared with the calm expression on Michael's face.

Timbre

The harmonic components of sound give it a certain color, or tone quality-musicians called it timbre) - when we call someone's voice nasal or a musical tone mellow, we're referring to timbre - its indispensable in describing the texture or "feel" of a sound Filmmakers rely on timbre constantly - an actor's voice-Sean Connery's gruff Scots accent , Tom Waits's plaintive rasp-becomes distinctive, thanks to timbre - For Beauty and the beast: Robbie Benson's speaking voice was mixed with tiger and lion sounds to enhance the beast's animalistic side - timbre along with pitch, distinguishes musical instruments from each other and often enhances emotion, as when sultry saxophone music comes up during a seduction scene In opening sequence of Rouben Mamoulian's Love Me Tonight... - people starting the day on a street pass a musical rhythm from object to object--a broom, a carpet beater--and the humor of the number springs in part from the very different timbres of the objects. - in preparing the soundtrack for peter weir's witness, the editors drew on sounds recorded 20 or more years before, so that the less modern timbre of the older recordings would evoke the rustic seclusion of the Amish community

sound perspective

The sense of a sound's position in space, yielded by volume, timbre, pitch, and, in stereophonic reproduction systems, binaural information.

resources of Diegetic sound: offscreen sound

We know that the space of the narrative action isn't limited to what we can see onscreen at any one moment. The same thing holds true for sound. - In the last shot of our The Hunt for Red October scene, we hear the officer speaking while we see a shot of just Captain Ramius, listening. - Early in the attack on the village in The Seven Samurai, we, along with the samurai, hear the hoofbeats of the banditshorses before we see a shot of them. *These instances remind us that diegetic sound can be either onscreen or offscreen, depending on whether its source is inside the frame or outside the frame. Offscreen sound is crucial to our experience of a film, and filmmakers know that it can save time and money. - A shot may show only a couple sitting together in airplane seats, but if we hear a throbbing engine, other passengers chatting , and the creak of a beverage cart we'll conjure up a plane in flight . - Offscreen sound can create the illusion of a bigger space than we actually see, as in the cavernous prison sequences of The Silence of the Lambs. As with our creaking -door example (p. 265), offscreen sounds can shape our expectations of how a scene will develop. Offscreen sound can fill information very economically. - In Zodiac, we see alcoholic reporter Avery wake up after sleeping in his car. As he abruptly sits up, we hear the clink of of bottles on the floor. The sounds confirms our suspicion that he has spent another night drinking Used with optical point-of-view shots, offscreen sound can create restricted narration guiding us toward what a character is noticing. - In No Country for Old Men, Llewelyn Moss is holed up in a hotel room with a bag of cash, hiding from his implacable pursuer Anton Chigurh. When he realizes that a tracking device has been hidden among the bills, the narration is limited solely to what Moss sees and hears. He tries calling the downstairs desk. We dimly hear the distant phone ringing unanswered, so like him we infer that Chigurh has killed the clerk. The sonic texture is very detailed, highlighting the slight noises of Moss shifting on the bed and switching off the lamp. Then, against a muted background of wind, we hear steadily approaching footsteps in the hall, accompanied by rapid pinging on a homing device. Moss's optical point-of-view confirms Chigurh's arrival: We see the shadows of his feet in the crack under the door. Moss cocks his shotgun, creating a click that seems abnormally loud and close. The shadows move away, and we hear the slight creaking of a light bulb being unscrewed in the hall, eliminating the streak of illumination under the door. The auditory climax of the scene is the metallic burst of the door lock rocketing into the room. No Country's narration has created suspense by restricting both vision and sound to Moss's range of knowledge. For another instance of sound controlled by narration.

nondiegetic sound - most nondiegetic sound has no relevant temporal relationship to the story.

When mood music comes up over a tense scene, it would be irrelevant to ask if its happening at the same time as the images because the music has no existence in the world of the action. But occasionally, the filmmaker uses nondiegetic sound that does have a defined temporal relationship to the story. Welles's narration in The Magnificent Ambersons, for instance, speaks of the action as having happened in a long-vanished era of american history

The classical Hollywood cinema after the coming of sound (1926-1950)

arrival of synchronized sound filming in late 20s shows how technological change can widen a filmmaker's creative choices

sound mixing: video - postproduction sound

audio post production: process of editing and mixing sounds to create a film's final soundtrack - goal: to create the sensation that the audience is there, wherever the film takes place, and they hear the sounds that they would if they were watching the scene unfold Types of post production sound: - Dialogue: may be from set or recorded afterward in a process called automatic dialogue replacement (ADR) - sound effects: short duration non-dialogue sounds such as door slams, footsteps, etc. A specific type of sound effect recording is called Foley, where effects are recorded in a studio in sync with the edited film. Foley is common for walking, fighting, and character movements - presence: also called ambience, are made out of longer duration sounds used to establish locations, such as the birds and traffic for an outdoor daytime scene - music: can be diegetic (coming from the world of the story) or non-diegetic (we assume that the cannot hear). In either case, music is either recorded for the film or taken from pre-recorded sources Audio post-production process: - mixing stage: goal to have each sound isolated - on set, the goal will be to get the cleanest possible version of the actor's dialogue - other effects and presences are recorded when possible, usually without an accompanying moving image - in dialogue editing: tracks are edited down to the syllable. Actor's breath or any other distracting sounds are removed.. the goal is take the dialogue as clear and legible as possible. When necessary through ADR, actors can replace their lines in a studio while watching the film footage - ambiance gives the scene life, creates the sense of offscreen space and helps covers the gaps created by the audio edits - in the mixing process, the sonic relationship between all the sound track components is established. The volume of each sound is adjusted. Audio filters, such as reverberation, may be applied - equalization is used to boost frequencies of sounds we want to emphasize - if mixing for surround sound, the mixing process would determine how audio is routed to the theater's speakers. Surround sound systems create a 360 degree sound field in which the mixer can locate sounds in relation to the audience

Sound and Film Form

by choosing and combining sound materials, the filmmaker can create engaging patterns that run through the whole film. This process is evident in a film's musical score Sometimes the filmmaker picks preexisting pieces of music to accompany the images - Directors Stanley Kubrick and Terrence Malick are known for their bold choices of classical music - Directors Wes Anderson and Tarantino select older pop songs to give their films a hipster cachet In other cases, music is composed for the film, and here the filmmaker and composer make many choices - the rhythm, melody, harmony, tempo, volume, and instrumentation of the music can strongly affect a viewer's emotional reactions saw how commentary track of Letter of Siberia created different impressions of the footage. The same thing music alone - a close-up of an actor with a neutral expression may seem happy, excited, melancholy, or disturbed depending on the kind of music that accompanies the image - end of Queen Christina: heroine renounces her throne in order to marry the Spanish envoy she loves. After he dies in a duel, Christina sails from Sweden to live in his homeland. Director Mamoulian told star Greta Garbo to maintain a neutral expression in the final shot as the camera tracks into a tight close-up of her on the ship's deck. We might expect to hear mournful music, but instead a triumphant melody suggests Christina's courage and determination a melody or musical phrase can be associated with a particular character, setting, situation, or idea - the ominous, two-note motif played in the lower strings in Jaws (1975) becomes a musical signal of the shark's movement toward his victims - the brassy fanfare for Star Wars (1977) captures Luke Skywalker's bravery and impetuousness In opera and musical comedy, themes can intertwine - Local Hero, a film about a confused young executive who leaves Texas to close a business deal in a remote Scottish village, uses 2 major musical themes. A rockabilly tune is heard in the urban southwest, whereas a slower, more poignantly folkish melody is associated with the seaside village. In the final scenes, after the man has returned to Houston, he recalls Scotland with affection, and the film plays the 2 themes simultaneously

mixing

combining two or more sound tracks by recording them onto a single one

diegetic sound provided a powerful addition to the system of

continuity editing

nonstimultaneous sound

diegetic sound that comes from a source in time either earlier or later than the images it accompanies

simultaneous sound

diegetic sound that is represented as occurring at the same time in the story as the image it accompanies

Max Steiner's scores for the most dangerous game (1932) and king kong (1933) showed that music could powerfully

enhance both the image and spoken dialogue-sometimes amplifying frenzied action, sometimes quietly stressing a single sentence

Fundamentals of Film Sound

film sound can include any mixture of speech, music, noise. Filmmakers make decisions about the types and density of sounds as well as their properties, including loudness and pitch

rhythm in sound and image: coordination

filmmaker who wants to exploit sonic rhythm faces the fact that the movements in the images have a rhythm as well, distinguished by the same principles of beat, tempo, and accent - also editing has a rhythm. A succession of short shots helps create a rapid tempo, whereas shots held longer tend to slow down the pace in most cases, the rhythms of editing, of movement within the image, and of sound all cooperate. Possibly the most common tendency is for the filmmaker to match visual and sonic rhythms to each other - in a dance sequence in a musical, the figures move about at a rhythm determined by music. but variation is always possible. In the "Waltz in Swing Time" number in Swing Time, the dancing of Fred and Ginger moves quickly in time to the music. Yet no fast cutting accompanies this scene. Indeed, the scene consists of a single long take from a long-shot distance animated films often coordinate visible movement and sound - In walt disney films of the 30s, the characters often move move in exact synchronization with the music, even when they aren't dancing (exactness was possible because the soundtrack was recorded before the drawings were made) - tightly matching movement to music is known as Mickey-Mousing The credit sequence in Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs shows how a director can coordinate the different rhythms of music, editing, and figure movement - although the gang of thieves is striding in slow motion, the music has a fast tempo (around 190 beats per min) - the editing rhythm is somewhat slower, as each cut comes at 5-second intervals to match the phrase structure of the song - the rhythm of movement and gesture is even slower: the slow-motion image stretches out the characters' movements a tight correspondence between musical and visual rhythms can yield a powerful dramatic climax - Mann's The Last of the Mohicans culminates in a chase and a fight song along a mountain ridge. Alice has been captured by the renegade Magua, and Hawkeye, Uncas, and Chingachgook race up the trail to rescue her. We might expect the standard thunderous action score, but what we hear is a quick, grave Scottish dance, initially played on the fiddle, mandolin, and harpsichord. The tune was heard in an earlier dance scene at the fort, so it functions to recall the two couples' romances, but here it gives the scene a propulsive energy. Hand-to-hand struggles stand out against the throbbing music. - at the scene's climax, Chingachgook sprints into the fray, and faster musical figures played by stringed instruments recall the early dance time. Chringachgook's attack on Magua consists of 4 precise blows from his battle-axe; each blow coincides with the third beat in a series of musical measures. - in the final moment of combat, the two warriors stand frozen opposite each other. The shot lasts 3 beats. On the fourth beat, Chingachgook launches a fatal blow. As Magua topples over, the music's pulse is replaced by a sustained string chord - The Last of the Mohicans synchronizes dance music with visual rhythms, but the result doesn't feel like Mickey-Mousing. The throbbing 4/4 meter, the accented beats, and leaping melody give the heroes' precise movements a choreographic grace Rhythmic coordination usually involves only music and image, but in rare cases sound effects are synchronized as well - action scene of Baby Driver, bursts of gunfire are accompanied by the Button Down Brass's "tequila" which plays on the protagonist's iPod. The "rat-a-tat-tat" of a machine gun perfectly matches the eighth notes of the song's saxophone melody

Sound mixing

guiding the viewer's attention, then, depends on selecting and reworking particular sounds. It also depends on mixing, or combining them. - think of a soundtrack not as a set of discrete sound bits but as an ongoing stream of auditory information. each sound takes its place in a specific pattern. This pattern both link events in time and layers them at any given moment The auditory stream goes beyond linking one line of dialogue or bit of noise to another - it involves a constant set of decisions about how it meshes with the image track. (ex. many fine-grained choices are involved in blending the stream of sound with classical principles of continuity editing)

Playing with diegetic/nondiegetic sound distinction

in most sequences, the sources of the sounds are clearly diegetic or nondiegetic. But some films blur the distinction. (a film might cheat our expectation) In Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles, we hear what we think is nondiegetic musical accompaniment for a cowboy's ride across the prairie-until he rides past Count Basie and his orchestra - This joke depends on a reversal of our expectations about the convention of nondiegetic music. A more elaborate example is the 1986 musical version of Little Shop of Horrors. - There a trio of female singers strolls through many scenes providing musical commentary on the action without any of the characters noticing them. To complicate matters , the three singers also appear in minor diegetic roles, and then they do interact with the main characters . one scene of John Ford's Stagecoach, a diegetic sound slowly emerges out of a nondiegetic score. - the stagecoach is desperately fleeing from a band of Indians. The ammunition is running outand all seems lost until a troop of cavalry suddenly arrives. But instead of showing the cavalry riding to the rescue, the film's narration confines us to what happens inside the coach. First, offscreen sound shows one passenger killed, but then a bugle call signals that the coach is being rescued, a moment in The Magnificent Ambersons when Orson Welles creates an unusual interplay between the diegetic and nondiegetic sounds (a character replies to the narrator) - A prologue to the film outlines the background of the Amberson family and the birth of the son, George. A nondiegetic narrator, who isn't a character in the story, explains the Amberson family history. At one point, a woman replies to the narrator's comment. Welles playfully departs from conventional usage to emphasize the arrival of the story's main character and the hostility of the townspeople to him. This passage from The Magnificent Ambersons juxtaposes diegetic and nondiegetic sounds in a disconcerting way. In other films, a single sound may be ambiguous because it could fall into either category. At a major point in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, several characters are shown in different locations, each singing softly along to the Aimee Mann song Wise Up." When the sequence begins in Claudia's apartment, the song might be taken as diegetic and offscreen because she has been listening to Aimee Mann tunes in an earlier scene. But then Anderson cuts to other characters elsewhere singing along, even though they cannot be hearing the music in Claudia's apartment. It would seem that the sound is now nondiegetic, with the characters accompanying it as they might in a The sequence underlines the parallels among several suffering characters and conveys an eerie sense of disparate people for once on the same emotional wavelength. The sound also works with the crosscutting to pull the characters together musical before the climax, when many will meet face to face. A more disturbing uncertainty about whether a sound is diegetic often crops up in the films of Jean-Luc Godard. - He narrates some of his films in nondiegetic voice-over, but in other films, such as 2 or 3 Things Know About Her, he seems also to be in the story space, whispering questions or comments whose sound perspective makes them seem close to the camera. Godard does not claim to be a character in the action, yet the characters onscreen sometimes behave as though they hear him. This uncertainty as to diegetic or nondiegetic sound sources enables Godard to stress the conventionality of traditional sound usage .

instead of wiping out all the options of classical Hollywood form and style, recorded sound would be

integrated into that system

Reworking sound

once the sounds are captured (recording), the creation of the film's soundtrack resembles the editing of the image track - just as you can pick the best image from many shots, you may choose what exact bit of sound will serve your purpose - a sound may be processed to change its acoustic qualities a common form of manipulation is blending - the noises emitted by the demonically possessed girl in The Exorcist consists of screams, animal thrashings, and english spoken backwards - to create the roar of a T-rex for Jurassic Park, sound engineers blended a tiger's roar, a baby elephant's trumpeting, and an alligator's growl for lower tones

before sound filming in late 20s.. all the music heard in cinema was...

played on the spot, provided by a piano, an organ, or an orchestra. Sound effect might be added; some organs could mimic pistol shots. but there would be no spoken dialogue. The silent cinema had written language in its intertitles, but not speech

Loudness, pitch, and timbre define the overall

sonic texture of a film - ex. these qualities enable us to recognize different characters's voices - John Wayne and James Stewart speak slowly, but Wayne's voice tends to be deeper and gruffer than Stewart's querulous drawl.. this difference works in The Man who shot liberty valence, where their characters are sharply contrasted - during an action sequence, the threshold for loudness is raised, so the sound designer may have to introduce noises of different frequencies or textures-a whining bullet during a rumbling car chase, for example--to make sure that details aren't drowned out

space

sound has a spatial dimension because it comes from a source. Our beliefs about that source have a powerful effect on how we understand the sound

sound perspective

sound perspective: the way a film suggests the placement of the sound in the story world. It operates in a way similar to the cues for depth that we get with visual perspective. Earlier examples have shown that sound perspective is often indicated by volume - volume varied with distance in the canyon scene of 127 hours - increasing loudness signaled the approach of the bandits in The Seven Samurai Timbre helps to create sound perspective too - if you combine directly recorded sounds with sounds reflected from the environment, you'll create reverberations suggesting a particular distance. timbre is most evident with echoes. - in The Magnificent Ambersons, the convos that take place on the baroque staircase have a distinct echo, giving the impression of huge, empty spaces around the characters. A small room wouldn't yield the same timbre. Sound perspective is important in cinematic narration because it can ease us from one point of view to another, as we saw in the Jackie Brown example. - A similar shift occurs in Robert Altman's Gosford Park. A music-hall star performs a song for guests at a country estate. At the start, the sound perspective places us in the drawing room, where guests gossip and play bridge. When Altman cuts to two servants listening in another room, the song's softer volume and a touch of reverberation indicate greater distance from the performance.

external diegetic sound (objective) - can be onscreen or offscreen

sound represented as coming from a physical source within the story space that we assume characters in the scene also hear

asynchronous sound, or out-of-sync sound

sound that is not matched temporally with the movements occurring in the image, as when dialogue is out of synchronization with lip movements

Star Wars and other hits of the 70s introduced the broad -public to new

technologies of sound recording and reproduction - audiences came to expect Dolby noise reduction processes, expanded frequency and dynamic range, and four- and six-track theater playback - during the early 90s - digital sound became routine for big-budget pictures, and now virtually all releases have crisp, dense soundtracks - today's rom-com is a densely packed with sound effects as an action picture was 20 years ago - multiplex theaters upgraded their sound systems to meet filmmakers' challenges, and the popularity of DVDs prompted consumers to set up home theaters with ravishing sound - viewers' new sensitivity to sound is apparent in the custom of starting a film's soundtrack with dialogue or sound effects before the images appear - you can argue that this device serves to quiet down the audience so that the opening scene gets the proper attention, but often sonic information draws us slowly into the story. many modern films lead us by the ear. Not since the first talkies of the late 1920s have filmgoers been so aware of what they hear

a line of dialogue could continue over a cut, creating smooth...

temporal continuity

Pitch

the frequency of sound vibrations affects pitch, or the perceived highness or lowness of the sound - most sounds are complex tones, in batches of different frequencies. Pitch helps our ear sort out of the sounds - very low-pitched sounds suggest rumbling, high-pitched ones suggest tinkling -pitch helps us distinguish music and speech from background noise - filmmaker can use pitch to distinguish objects too (a thump suggest the object is hollow, but a high-pitched jingle bells suggest smoother, harder objects Pitch can serve more specific purposes - the effect of an octave leap in the song "over the rainbow" in the wizard of Oz. When a young boy tries to speak in a man's deep voice and fails, as in How Green Was My Valley, the joke was based primarily on pitch - in the coronation scene of Ivan The Terrible, Part 1, a court singer with a deep bass voice begins a song of praise to Ivan, and each phrase rises dramatically in pitch. - when Bernard Herrmann obtained the effects of shrill, birdlike shrieking in Hitchcock's Psycho, many musicians could not recognize the source: violins played at extraordinarily high pitch.

Layers an Contrasts

the sounds flow not only in streams but also in layers - we seen that in production, combining sounds is usually done after shooting, in the mixing process. the mixer can control the volume, duration, and tone quality of each sound, weaving them in and out, making them momentarily clear or pushing them out of hearing - ex. Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg manipulates volume unrealistically for purposes of narrative clarity (after a live cow has been lowered into the dino's pen, the south African hunter gives important info about the habits of these predators, and his voice comes through louder than those of characters closer to the camera.) in modern filmmaking, a dozen or more separate tracks may be layered at any moment. - the mix can be quite dense. An airport scene may combine the babble of voices, footsteps, luggage trolleys, Muzak, and plane engines - the mix can be very sparse, with an occasional sound emerging against a background of total silence *Most cases will fall somewhere between a thick mix and a thin one The filmmaker can create a mix in which each sound blends smoothly with the others - commonly the case when music and effects are mixed with speech. - in classical hollywood cinema of the 30s, the musical score may become prominent in moments in which there is no dialogue, and then it's likely to fade unnoticeably down just as the characters begin to talk (called sneaking in and sneaking out). This sort of smooth rising and falling pattern provides a clearer, simpler sound world than we encounter in everyday life Alternatively, the acoustic stream may contain much more abrupt contrasts - The Godfather: As Michael Corleone is steeling himself to shoot the rival gangster Sollozzo, we hear a loud, metallic screech, presumably from a nearby elevated train. The sound suggests impending danger, both for the victim and for Michael: after the murder, Michael's life will change irrevocably another alternative is seen in Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra - soldier's grandma visits him at his camp and wanders freely among the men preparing for war - the soundtrack includes naturalistic dialogue and effects. But these conventional elements are wrapped in soft voices, orchestral chords, and snatches of rising and falling soprano singing. The murmuring auditory collage suggests a collective dimension to the old lady's stay, as if she is visiting on behalf of the unseen families of al the men, perhaps all soldiers' families throughout history