Sound but no Space...?
Despite the bias of critical thinking, analysis and certainly production focus on the visual elements of cinema over the aural there is none who would deny the sheer power of a soundtrack, in all its forms, to make or break a movie. Ted Pigeon over at '
The Cinematic Art' offers up a two part mini (
part 1and
part 2) essay on cinema sound with a focus on music that provides much food for thought.
However Teds argument also centres on a narraowness of sound perception attached to emmotional responses and signal flagging to the audience non-diegetically the drama of a scene.
"Beyond its representative qualities, music also enables the spectator to more easily process the nature of the moving images. It can easily provoke a response from the spectator virtually whenever it wants. For some, this means that the music would "follows the action" of the image, a la mickey mousing"
(Sound/Music) "exists for the viewer to better comprehend the emotion of a particular moment or character. Much like camera angles, colors, and other visual aspects processed on an unconscious level of cognition and interpretation, the score often helps the viewer to identify with a character as well as the "world" of the film."
What is missing to make a more complete picture of cinema sound is the representation of space to the audience. It's this area that is so often neglected in sound studies of cinematic form. More intrinsic and immediate than any musical motif of drama is the spatial awareness a sound brings to the audience - Echo, reverb, dampening and the simple level of volume of a sound, all communicate a wealth of information to the viewer in regard to spatial positioning and location of all that they both see and cannot see within the frame.
This is of course all before we introduce multi-channel and surround sound technologies into the mix which opens up another large can of worms. In many ways it can be argued that because of the overt restrictions of spatial depiction within a framed mise-en-scene, the viewer 'navigates' and is orientated to the cinematic world not simply 'more' by sound than vision but, in large regard, almost exclusively by sound. A very simple example might be shown in the severe restrictions of the screen frame itself. Hearing a person speak but not actually seeing them on screen has no viable implications what so ever or the viewer as to whether the person is present in the room or not. They could just as easily be or not be. But add muffled reverberation to the sound or mix the voice down in volume level and there is an immediate articulation of spatial positioning and indeed a spatial composition of the scene beyond anything within the frame.
Below is a three-part podcast of a lecture given on the spatiality of sound - form its simple origins to surround technologies.
Sound and Space - Part 1Sound and Space - Part 2Sound and Space - Part 3
Posted at 01:00AM Jul 10, 2007
by Mike Jones in audio |
