Sound is the New Light

Abstract

Over the past thirty years or so, film has become entranced by sound. A tide of innovations in sound recording and playback technology has transformed cinematic culture in much the same way that other technologies—the optical soundtrack, the deep-focus lens, color emulsion, and cinemascope—did in the past. Filmmakers now can exploit the psychology of sonic perception to create their worlds, which means that the range of suggested dimensions expands far outside the focal limits of vision and the screen. And since sound is vaguer than sight (sound sources are hard to locate) and subtler (we cannot close our ears as we can our eyes), the possibilities for entraining the audience to the rhythm of the screen action is increased exponentially. With new sound techniques, today’s films can deliver deeper intimacies and more immersive spectacles than classical cinema. The new sound technologies enable filmmakers to use sound as music. Unlike visual stimuli, sound inputs can be layered into complex, dynamic, simultaneous arrangements. Distinct timbres, volumes, thematic lines, and spatial arrangements can be structured into symphonic weaves. All aspects of sound can become parts of a single acoustical design. In classical film, the job of sound was to anchor the visual image and to clarify the characters’ speaking voices. The sound engineer’s job was that of a guild craftsman, to reproduce the conventions of a stylized, formulaic world. Sound effects were drawn from studio sound libraries, and sound editing was often the last phase of postproduction, when all the rough spots were finally smoothed over with reasondamping sonic sutures. The new technologies allow sound engineers to construct their own sound effects, to surround listeners with shifting sound patterns, to modulate from ambient noise to music at the thresholds of awareness—in short, to create unique and powerful soundscapes that will make willing audiences accept any image without resistance. The lowly mixers and sound editors who turned off the studio lights have become sound designers. Their status in the artistic hierarchy of film production is now as great as the cinematographer’s, since they perform the functions of f/x producers, editors, and even set designers, over and above recording and mixing. In its fusion of mimetic recording and synthetic fantasy, film sound has matched, and in many cases exceeded, the visual image in its power to control an audience’s attention. Sf film has long been viewed as having a privileged role in this development. Many of the leading sound designers have worked on trend-setting sf films—Walter Murch (THX-1138 [1971]), Gary Rudstrom (Terminator 2: