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Media Aesthetics: Looking at Movies
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Media Aesthetics
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looking at movies chapter 9 (sound)
What is sound?
- What we hear in a movie is often technologically more complicated to produce than
what we see (it’s the most creative part)
- Spielberg said that sound is used as an integral storytelling element.
- Sound gives life to shots and offers clues to its meaning. It operates on physical and
psychological levels. It helps us form expectations of meaning.
- Sound calls attention not only to itself but also to silence. This is also the difference
between silent and sound films; a sound film can emphasise silence, but a silent film
has no option.
- The transition to sound began in 1927. Then, sound was more a novelty than a for-
mal element.
- It is the product of specific decisions by the filmmakers. The sound crew is responsi-
ble for the sound in movies. They manipulate the sound’s properties to produce the
effects that the director desires.
- Most sounds are constructed during the postproduction phase (postproduction
sounds).
Sound production consists of four phases:
• Sound design (planning process)
- The art of creating the sound for a film. The sound crew mix component parts into
the soundtrack.
- Soundtrack: all sound elements in film (not just the music)
- In film stock, the sound track is a narrow band to one side of the image on which the
sound is recorded.
- In digital filmmaking, this consists of a digital code being placed somewhere on the
digital recording medium.
- Until the 1970s, producers and directors thought about sound only after the picture
was sound. They didn’t realise that mise-en-scene elements or other cinematogra-
phy elements would influence sound tracks - it just provided a sense of satisfaction
to cover up mistakes.
Assumptions on the concept of sound design:
- sound should be integral to all three phases of film production (preproduction, pro-
duction, and postproduction)
- sound is as expressive as its images
- image and sound can create different worlds
- image and sound are co-expressible
- A sound designer’s process is to first identify all the sounds necessary to the story
and plot. Next is laying the background tones.
- During preproduction, they encourage directors to understand that what characters
hear is as important as what they see (e.g. POV). The planning of setting and light-
ing for example all shape how sound is affected, so it should be planned accordingly
with the help of the sound designer.
• Recording
Similar to the process of hearing.
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