Thoughts

Thoughts on sound space

Understanding that sound has a ‘spatial dimension’ because it comes from a source (Bordwell and Thompson, 1997), a key sequence in The Wrestler is an intriguing study of edited space because it combines a myriad of sonic sources. The result is a creative exploration of temporal space, liminal space, diegetic sounds (where a sound’s source is visible on screen such as a character’s footsteps), non-diegetic sounds (where the sound’s source is not visible on screen like mood music) and the relationship between power and space.

Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson, an ageing wrestler, dominates the space in the key sequence. He is down on his luck. Due to illness, he is forced to step out of the ring and work in a dingy deli. From wearing a compulsory misspelled name badge to covering his peroxide locks under a grim hair net, the audience become aware that this is not his natural space. The sequence’s sound design mirrors this uneasy fit. The camera tracks
him walking from the deli’s private back store out in to the public sphere of the deli. With each footstep, the soundscape’s diegetic mundane world becomes replaced by a grand non-diegetic world of wrestling.

This sound shift from diegetic to non-diegetic provides an extra dimension to the sequence. According to Michel Chion, ‘the expressive and informative value with which a sound enriches a given image so as to create the definite impression, in the immediate or remembered experience’ (1994,p.5). In other words, sound provides ‘added value’ to images (Chion, 1994, p.5). One could argue that the key sequence’s soundscape provides added value because it creatively portrays both ‘immediate’ and ‘remembered’ experience. The mundane sounds of the immediate on-screen source (the deli’s back store) become drowned out by The Ram’s nostalgic remembered aural memories. Exuberant crowd cheers drip in to the sterile space of the immediate sequence.

Sound designer Brian Emrich also toys with the audience’s sense of ‘remembered’ experience. We cannot see the source of this non-diegetic sound effect so the listener does not know if the victorious cheers of the crowd are genuine memories from past wrestling victories or whether they are fantastical cheers from The Ram’s inner rose-tinted ear. Perhaps, the non-diegetic sound effects represent his unconscious desires. The mix of diegetic and non-diegetic sounds in the sequence presents a liminal space – an aural threshold between conscious and unconscious. The Ram is consciously walking down the back store corridor listening to his footsteps reluctantly edging closer to the deli counter. However, his inner ear is tuned in to his internal psychological desires: to reclaim the supposed loud cheers from his wrestling heyday glory. The soundscape offers the audience a satisfying deeper plane of knowledge: the opportunity to hear what the protagonist is potentially thinking.

At the end of this sequence, the shifting terrain between conscious and unconscious zones and boundaries between diegetic and non-diegetic battle it out in a crescendo of cheers. The Ram dramatically stands still on the threshold of the dark space in the back store before entering the fluorescent lighting of the deli. One may argue this dark space visually represents Robynn J. Stillwell’s fantastical gap: an aural ‘transition between stable states’ (2007,p. 200). For Stilwell, this transition means ‘one moment we’re in the diegetic realm and in the blink of an eye, like walking through Alice’s mirror, we are in the non-diegetic looking glass world…a space of power and transformation’ (2007, p. 186). In this dark space of the fantastical gap, The Ram attempts to gain power over this unfamiliar space by recalling the cheers of wrestling matches; the only place in his life where he enjoyed an elevated sense of power. However, the transformation here in this space is negative. As the diegetic sounds of the deli creep back in to the frame, they remind both The Ram and the audience that he cannot escape the grim reality of his current
situation.

Ultimately, this uneasy destabilisation of his status and power is given the space to unravel because the sound effects, camera and lighting choices share the same integrated tightness building up to the threshold between diegetic /non-diegetic, internal / external and conscious and unconscious. One could argue the sequence’s technical choice are not arbitrary. Instead, they work together. Editor Don Fairservice likens this interlinking technical relationship to a string quartet (CineMe Editing Workshop, 2011). Thus, the harmonious technical space allows the sequence the creative freedom to explore the ambiguities of this liminal space of power and time.

Bibliography

David Bordwell & Kristin Thompson, Chapter 9 ‘Sound in the Cinema’ from Film Art: An Introduction: 5th Edition (New York: McGraw Hill, 1997)

Michel Chion, ‘The Audiovisual Contract’ from Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen trans. Claudia Gorbman, (1990: New York Columbia University Press, 1994)

Robynn J Stillwell, ‘The Fantastical Gap between Diegetic and Nondiegetic’ in Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer,and Richard Leppert (eds) Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema (Berkeley & London: University of California Press, 2007)

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Throwing out the rulebook: fidelity, sound and meowing dogs

In the marriage between vision and sound in cinema, sound is constantly burdened with the expectation of fidelity. The fidelity of  visuals is rarely analysed. In contrast, the critical question of fidelity and sound repeatedly boils to the surface. Scahffer (1977, p. 9)  discusses the fidelity of ‘earwitnesses’. For instance All Quiet on The Western Front’s soundscape is ‘convincing because the author was  here. And we trust him when he describes other unusual sound events – for instance, the sounds made by dead bodies’ (1977, p.  9). On a creative level, the sound designer Frank Serafine (1985, p. 363) consciously considers matching the fidelity of a sound ‘pitch  to camera angle’. In his study on sound space, Rick Altman (1992, p. 59) writes ‘we find here once again the familiar opposition of intelligibility to naturalness (or acoustic fidelity)…’.

What does Rick Altman mean by ‘acoustic fidelity’? For David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson (1985, pp. 190 – 191), this sonic buzzword fidelity:

‘refers to the extent to which the sound is faithful to the source as we, the audience 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 picture 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’.

Matching images with an accompanying ‘faithful’ sounds has been a filmmaking preoccupation since the 1930s. Altman noted (1992, p.49) that J.P. Maxfield, West coast chief of Electric Research Products Incorporated (ERPI), ‘insisted repeatedly that the eyes and ears of a person viewing a real scene in real life must maintain “a fixed relationship” to one another (Maxfield, 1930a)’. Adhering to this ‘fixed relationship’ understandably allows an audience to easily make sense of the represented reality on screen. In other words, an audience is more likely to quickly buy in to the reality of a cat on screen if the image of the cat is synced with a realistic accompanying cat sound.

However, here in lies the issue of fidelity and representing sonic reality. By the time the accompanying ‘real’ cat sound reaches our cinema’s speakers system, the natural location sound has been unnaturally cut up, its levels altered, its quality compressed or even entirely replaced by a different meowing sound bite. One could argue that it is impossible to maintain Maxfield’s ‘real’ fidelity from a technical perspective. Bordwell and Thompson (1985, p. 191) also concede that fidelity ‘has nothing to do with what originally made  the sound in production. A filmmaker may manipulate sound independently of image’.

If fidelity has nothing to do with maintaining screen reality by using real sounds recorded on a real location, then what is it? Bordwell and Thompson (1985, p. 191) argue that fidelity is ‘purely a matter of expectation’. Often, our sonic expectation of what sounds ‘real’ is not based on a real sound source. Furthermore, Altman stresses that

‘recordings do not reproduce sound, they represent sound” and “the notion of “fidelity” is not a measure of success in reproduction, but a way of assessing a recording’s adherence to a set of evolving conventions, like the parallel standards established for such culturally important qualities as “realism”…’.

Foley work in films offers an interesting insight into our expectations of represented realism and sonic fidelity. For example, a foley artist does not need real snow to capture the sound of footsteps on snow. Instead the foley artist simply presses his/her fingertips on  white corn powder to fulfill the expected sound for the accompanying image. Such expectations can also shape cinematic conventions of sound fidelity such as a gun shot effect. Marc Mancini (1985, p.365) notes that ‘certain old, badly recorded sounds have become the industry standard, so much so that people often fail to recognize a real gunshot simply because it doesn’t resemble a movie gunshot’.  Thus, our expectations of sound fidelity do not have to derive from real sources to be considered faithful to an image.

Michel Chion (1994, p.5) describes sound’s faithful relationship to visuals as a contract; each invaluable to the other. They are whole entities in which they individually add value to each other. Sound’s ‘added value’ is the ‘expressive and informative value with which a sound enriches a given image so as to create the definite impression, in the immediate or remembered experience’ (Chion, 1995, p.5). Sound-conscious directors have often challenged audience’s expectations of sonic fidelity to provide ‘added value’ to their filmic  narratives. In the opening sequence of Apocalypse Now (1979), there is a creative transition between sound spaces when the warping sound of a helicopter is linked to the image of a rotating fan in a hotel room in Saigon. The helicopter’s blades are not the ‘fixed’ sounds an audience would expect a hotel fan to make. By breaking this ‘fixed’ fidelity between image and sound, the audience is instead given ‘added value’: a psychological insight in to the crumbling mind of the troubled protagonist. Despite being in a comfortable safe place, the hotel room, we learn that the protagonist cannot escape the sounds of warfare. Being back in the jungle at war is at the forefront of  his mind and his inner ear: he can only hear helicopter blades slicing through the hotel room’s heavy air. By breaking the rules of fidelity, Coppola encourages the audience to become more immeresed in the protagonist’s personal perspective.

Another way of immersing an audience in a filmic soundscape is by not linking any sound to a corresponding image. In an interview with Frank Paine, Walter Murch (1985, p.359) proposes:

‘the perfect sound film has zero tracks. You try to get the audience to a point, somehow, where they can imagine the sound. They hear the sound in their minds, and it really isn’t on the track at all. That’s the ideal sound. They hear the sound in their minds, and it really isn’t on the track at all. That’s the ideal sound, the one that exists totally in the mind, because it’s the most intimate. It deals with each person’s experience, and it’s obviously of the highest fidelity imaginable, because it’s not being translated through any kind of medium’.

The dimension internal space can play in relation to fidelity is rarely discussed but it is a powerful sonic tool in immersing an audience. An apt example occurs in the TV drama Any Human Heart (2010) starring Jim Broadbent. Throughout his life story, the protagonist Logan imagines / remembers himself as a little boy on his own in a small boat at sea: a recurring visual motif. The image of the boy squinting up at the sun is devoid of any expected corresponding diegetic sound effects. It is up to the audience to pin sounds
on to this thought-provoking image. The audience’s understanding of this boy deepens as the drama unfolds its secrets. So when you return to this image sporadically throughout the narrative, your inner ear hears a myriad of different sounds and fresh knowledge each time you view the image again. One could argue this is an immersive sound experience and ‘the highest fidelity imaginable’ as each viewer will create and link their own personal soundscape to this visual motif.

Another immersive use of sound occurs when a director creates the reverse of the above example. In other words, an immersive event occurs when an audience has to provide their own imagined images to accompany a rich soundscape. La Jetee (1962) consists of a series of black-and-white still photographs, which are linked to an energetic soundtrack carried by a male voiceover as there is very little dialogue. Interestingly, an audience is challenged to perceive images in their mind that link in with the film’s post-apocalyptic sounds.

In a similar vein, the installation sound piece Audio Obscura (2011) also breaks away from the conventional fidelity between image and sound. Participants are given headphones and encouraged to wander around Kings Cross St. Pancras International station on their own. As the dark soundscape seeps into the particpants’ ears, they find themselves naturally trying to link the dialogue they are hearing to strangers’ faces that pass them by in the busy station. There is no ‘fixed’ or ‘expected’ image for each corresponding sound. Instead, this subjective vision of the sound installation allows the participants an opportunity for a more immersive experience which arguably promotes the ‘highest fidelity imaginable’ (Chion, 1995, p.5).

When discussing fidelity in sound, you cannot avoid discussing its image counterpoint. Sound and image are undeniably intertwined. For Murch (1985, p.356) ‘image and sound are linked together in a dance’. This cinematic dance has fixed rules, conventions and expectations. However, the above examples have demonstrated that a break in the rules often provides a richer representation of high fidelity in the case of an audience providing their own personal partner images, La Jetee (1962) and Audio Obscura (2011), or subjective soundcape, Any Human Heart (2010). A sound may also provide ‘added value’ and serve a rich narrative function when it is not linked to its corresponding image, Apocalypse Now (1979). So why not throw out the rulebook? In my own practice, I do not want to insult an audience’s intelligence by constantly feeding them the prescribed expectations of sound fidelity. Instead, I am keen to stretch audiences’ imaginations for a more immersive experience where they can provide their own accompanying sounds, images and perspective on the narrative. I aim to give an audience the space to tease out why a dog is meowing with their own personal images of cats, sounds of dogs and subjective psychological perspectives on why the dog is mysteriously meowing in the first place!

Bibliography

Altman, Rick, 1992. Four and a Half Film Fallacies. In: R. Altman, ed. 1992. Sound Theory Sound Practice. London: Routledge. Ch.1.

Altman, Rick, 1992. Sound Space. In: R. Altman, ed. 1992. Sound Theory Sound Practice. London: Routledge. Ch.2.

Bordwell, David and Thompson, Kristin, 1985. Fundamental Aesthetics of Sound in the Cinema. In: E. Weis and J. Belton, eds. 1985. Theory and Practice: Film Sound. New York: Columbia University Press, pp.181 – 200.

Chion, Michel, 1994. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press.

Mancini Marc, 1985. The Sound Designer. In: E. Weis and J. Belton, eds.
1985. Theory and Practice: Film Sound. New York: Columbia University Press, pp.361 – 368.

Paine, Frank, 1985. Sound Mixing and Apocalypse Now: An Interview with Walter Murch. In: E. Weis and J. Belton, eds. 1985. Theory and Practice: FilmSound. New York: Columbia University Press, pp.356 – 360.

Schaffer, R. Murray, 1977. Our Sonic Environment an the Soundscape: The Tuning of the World. Vermont: Destiny Books.

Filmography

La Jetee, 1962. [Short Film] Directed by Chris Marker. France: Argos Films.

Apocalypse Now, 1979. [Film] Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. USA: Zoetrope Studios.

Any Human Heart, 2010. [TV drama] Directed by Michael Samuels. UK: Carnival Films and Channel Four Television.

Audio Obscura, 2011. [Audio installation] Created by Lavinia Greenlaw. UK: Art Angel and Manchester International Festival.

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A Beginner’s Guide to Binaural Technology

What is it?

Binaural sound technology is preoccupied with producing 3Dlike sound. It differs from stereo recordings, which artificially splits sound in to left and right channels to recreate sonic directionality. Instead, binaural sound technology records sound the way our two ears would naturally hear the world. Just as one needs 3D glasses to enjoy 3D visual media, binaural technology requires a listener to wear headphones. A popular example of binaural technology is a recording of a man getting his hair cut by a barber. The immersive nature of binaural sound makes you feel as if the barber is standing right behind you cutting your hair. Have a listen here.

How does it work?

Binaural recordings sound like natural 3D sound because its technology utilizes a multi-disciplinary approach: physical acoustics, psychoacoustics, and auditory neurophysiology. Two microphones are embedded in a dummy head in the position of human ears or alternatively a recordist may place two tiny microphones (which are a similar size to mp3 headphones) in his or her ears. Recording this way replicates key elements of physical acoustics including interaural intensity difference (IID), interaural time difference (ITD) and head-related transfer functions (HRTFs). These combined elements provide a 3Dlike quality for binaural recordings.

Why use binaural technology?

My practice-based PhD research is currently focused on examining reasons why sound artists, filmmakers and field recordists choose to use binaural technology over mono or stereo microphones in their work. As part of my first residency at Pervasive Media Studio, I carried out a series of sonic experiments on suspense to ascertain listeners’ responses to binaural versus stereo sound and to explore the creative potential for using binauraltechnology in future work. I have since applied binaural technology in the creation of audio postcards for the cities of Bristol and Brooklyn. Have a listen and make a personalised audio postcard here.