Film Sound: Listening to the Cinema PDF

CHAPTER SIX Film Sound: Listening to the Cinema Key Objectives (1 of 2) Explain the various ways sound is important to the film experience. Describe how the use and understanding of sound reflect different historical and cultural influences. Explain how sounds convey meaning in relation to images. S...

CHAPTER SIX Film Sound: Listening to the Cinema Key Objectives (1 of 2) Explain the various ways sound is important to the film experience. Describe how the use and understanding of sound reflect different historical and cultural influences. Explain how sounds convey meaning in relation to images. Summarize how sounds are recorded, combined, and reproduced. Key Objectives (2 of 2) Detail the various functions of voice in film. Describe the principles and practices that govern the use of music. Outline the principles and practices that govern the use of sound effects. Analyze the cultural, historical, and aesthetic values that determine relationships between sounds and images. A Short History of Film Sound (1 of 6) Prehistories of Film Sound – The technical advances necessary to the invention of cinema are as tied to sound as they are to image. – The melodrama, a theatrical drama combining spoken text and music, is perhaps the historical form most relevant to film. – Similarly, Edison’s phonograph became an important precursor of film sound. A Short History of Film Sound (2 of 6) 1895‒1920s: The Sounds of Silent Cinema – One of the first films made by Edison’s studios in 1895 is a sound experiment in which W.K.L. Dickson plays a violin into a megaphone as two other employees dance. – Before films had widespread synchronized sound, film exhibitions were often accompanied by lectures, pianos, organ, small ensembles, as well as performed sound effects or dialogue provided by actors. – Because of the preexisting popularity of minstrel shows and vaudeville, African American and Jewish voices became a part of film sound early on. A Short History of Film Sound (3 of 6) 1927‒1930: Transition to Synchronized Sound – From 1926 to 1927, Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox actively pursued competing sound technologies: Vitaphone and Movietone. The new technology became impossible to ignore when it branched out from musical accompaniment to synchronous dialogue. – The Jazz Singer (1927) is credited with convincing exhibitors, critics, studios, and the public that there was no turning back from talking pictures. A Short History of Film Sound (4 of 6) 1930‒1940s: Challenges and Innovations in Cinema Sound – By the 1930s, silent films were no longer produced by major studios, even though exhibition and cumbersome recording technologies posed difficulties. – The introduction of spoken dialogue made film industries outside the United States acquire national specificity. For a time, films intended for various audiences were made simultaneously in different languages. – Production company RKO, responsible for King Kong (1933) and Citizen Kane (1941), became one of the five “majors” that dominated sound-era cinema. A Short History of Film Sound (5 of 6) 1950s‒1980s: From Stereophonic to Dolby Sound – Stereophonic sound was introduced in the 1950s. – In the 1960s and 1970s, portable sound recording technology helped with the use of location shooting. – Dolby and surround sound were introduced in the 1980s. A Short History of Film Sound (6 of 6) 1990s‒Present: Sound in the Digital Era – Changes in sound technologies and practices have corresponded with historical shifts in films’ social role. With digital technologies, environments such as home video, cable, and video games have begun to converge. The Elements of Film Sound (1 of 16) Sound and Image – In considering sound in films, we have to think about the relationship between sounds and images. – Some filmmakers, such as Jacques Tati and Jacques Demy, give equal weight to the images and sounds in their films. – Sound is an afterthought for other filmmakers and many viewers and only functions to enhance the image. The Elements of Film Sound (2 of 16) Sound and Image – Film theorist Siegfried Kracauer emphasizes the distinction between synchronous and asynchronous sound, also known as onscreen and offscreen sound. – Kracauer also explores the difference between parallelism in the use of sound (when the soundtrack and image “say the same thing”), and contrapuntal sound (when two different meanings are implied by these elements). The Elements of Film Sound (3 of 16) Sound and Image – Diegetic sound has its source in the narrative world of film (diegesis refers to the world of a film’s story, including not only what is shown but also what is implied to have taken place). – Nondiegetic sound does not belong in the characters’ world. – Ask the question, “Can the characters in the film hear this sound?” to differentiate between diegetic and nondiegetic sounds. The Elements of Film Sound (4 of 16) Sound Production – Sound designers plan and direct the overall sound through to the final mix. During production, sound recording takes place simultaneous to filming, with clapperboards used to synchronize sound and image. – Direct sound is captured from its source. Reflected sound is the sound that bounces from walls and sets and gives a sense of space. A production mixer combines these sources during filming and adjusts balance. The Elements of Film Sound (5 of 16) Sound Production – Sound editing interacts with the image track to create rhythmic relationships, establish connections between sound and onscreen sources, and smooth or mark transitions.  A sound bridge carries over a visual transition in the film.  The director, composer, and picture and sound editors decide where music and effects will be added in a process called spotting. The Elements of Film Sound (6 of 16)  Foley artists are crew members who generate live, synchronized sound effects for an audience as they watch a projected film.  Postsynchronous sound is recorded after the fact and then synchronized with onscreen sources. The Elements of Film Sound (7 of 16) Sound Production – Other practices used to reproduce “real-seeming” sound include extras used to approximate the sound of a crowd (known as walla) or recording of a room tone (the aural properties of a location when nothing is happening). – Actors watch film footage and rerecord their lines to be dubbed into a soundtrack in a process called automated dialogue replacement (ADR) (also known as looping, because actors watch a continuous loop of their scenes). The Elements of Film Sound (8 of 16) Sound Production – Sound mixing can only occur in postproduction after the image track is complete (after the film is “locked”), at which point the music, sound effects, and dialogue are combined. – Sound reproduction is the stage in the process when the film’s audience experiences the film’s sound in a movie theater. – Voice, music, and sound effects are the three elements of the film soundtrack. The Elements of Film Sound (9 of 16) Voice in Film – Human speech is often central to understanding narrative film, so the main goal of early film sound recording was the creation of an intelligible record of an actor’s speech. – Advances in recording technology have allowed filmmakers to experiment with how dialogue is used. Director Robert Altman, for example, employed overlapping dialogue, which makes individual lines less distinct but better approximates the everyday listening experience. The Elements of Film Sound (10 of 16) Voice in Film – Voice-off technique refers to a voice that can be seen to originate from an onscreen speaker or from a speaker who can be inferred to be present in the scene but who is not currently visible. – Voice-off is distinguished from voiceover in that characters within the diegesis cannot hear voiceover. Voiceovers can serve as objective narrator (such as that of a documentary film) or subjective portrayal of a character’s feelings (like the semidiegetic internal dialogue in Bridget Jones’s Diary). The Elements of Film Sound (11 of 16) Voice in Film – Voiceovers can also render characters’ subjective states or prove unreliable. – Voiceovers may lead the viewer/listener to think about different levels of the film’s fiction. The Elements of Film Sound (12 of 16) Music in Film: Narrative Music – Music has rarely been absent from film. Scores steadily developed during the silent film period, from collections of musical cues to full-length compositions for specific films. Though scores are primarily nondiegetic and violate a film’s verisimilitude, they play an important role in our affective response to a film. Underscoring, or background music, literally underscores what is happening dramatically. The Elements of Film Sound (13 of 16) Narrative Music – A piece of music composed for a particular place in a film is referred to as a cue. – Music is often used to carry a film’s emotion where dialogue and action fall short in their capacity to convey the experience of feeling. The Elements of Film Sound (14 of 16) Narrative Music – Narrative cueing is how music tells us what is happening in the plot. – Stingers, for example, are sounds that force us to notice the significance of something onscreen, like sound that marks the moment when Wendy sees the word “murder” on her bedroom door in The Shining (1980). – Mickey-mousing is the overillustration of action through the score, such as a character tip-toeing to the accompaniment of plucked strings. The Elements of Film Sound (15 of 16) Pop Music in Film – Popular songs have long had a place in movies, promoting audience participation and identification by appealing to tastes shared by generations or ethnic groups. – In the 1980s, pop scores began to rival originally composed music. The importance of the music supervisor, the person who selects and secures rights for the songs used, has consequently increased. The Elements of Film Sound (16 of 16) Sound Effects in Film – In most films, every noise is carefully selected, even the sound effects that seem unmanufactured or accidental. – Sound effects are one of the most useful ways of giving an impression of depth to the two-dimensional image by harnessing the directional properties of sound and the three-dimensional space of the theater. Thinking about Film Sound (1 of 4) Sound Continuity and Sound Montage – Sound continuity is the range of scoring, sound recording, mixing, and playback processes that subordinate sound to further the aims of the narrative to create a unification of meaning and experience. – Sound montage, on the other hand, creates a collision or overlapping of disjunctive sounds and reminds us that a soundtrack is composed of different elements and creatively manipulated. Thinking about Film Sound (2 of 4) Sound Continuity and Sound Montage – Sound continuity is based on several practices:  The relationship between image and sound is motivated by dramatic action or information.  The sources of sounds (apart from background music) are identifiable.  The connotations of musical accompaniment are consistent with the images.  The sound mix emphasizes what we should pay attention to.  The sound mix will be smooth and emphasize clarity. Thinking about Film Sound (3 of 4) Sound Continuity and Sound Montage – Sound montage stresses the fact that images and sounds communicate on two different levels. – Sound contributes to key dimensions of the viewer’s sense of wonder and immersiveness. Thinking about Film Sound (4 of 4) Authenticity and Attention – Film sound surrounds and permeates the body of the viewer in a way that images cannot, contributing to the authenticity and emotion of the film. – The film environment duplicates our acoustic experience of the world, orienting us in a new space that feels genuine and gets us to feel.