Acoustic Profiles

Abstract

Abstract This book proposes a sound ecology of the cinema, addressing film sound through the field of acoustic ecology. The book’s method is referred to as acoustic profiling, a theoretical tool for hearing how filmmakers articulate spatial dimensions in their works. This method is based on a double critical movement: application of acoustic ecology’s prescribed listening practices to film sound studies, and thinking about acoustic ecology as born of film studies, drawing on film studies’ long history of dealing with problems of fidelity and positionality through recording technologies to challenge some of the tenets of acoustic ecology. The core of the book is a set of close readings of specific films and media works across a range of international narrative fiction, documentary, and experimental forms to address ecological issues at play within the aesthetic and thematic content of these works while rethinking acoustic ecology as a set of media practices. To that end, the book demonstrates how the creative use of media technologies in different fields can be understood relationally through the ecological issues that connect them, revivifying acoustic ecology for media studies while broadening the latter’s ecological scope. The book provides a tool kit for readers to hear films with new ears, to think critically about this new listening practice, and to extend that engagement beyond the walls of the screening room by opening works of audiovisual media up to the consideration of soundscape research.