Sonic Diegesis: Reality and the Expressive Potential of Sound in Narrative Film

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Notes

Notes

1 Schaeffer, Traité des Objets Musicaux. Many sources eloquently elaborate the history and development of this art form and other arts of sound, including Manning, Electronic and Computer Music; Landy, Understanding the Art of Sound Organisation; Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music; Chion, Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise.

2 List is adapted from Chion, Michel. Guide to Sound Objects 2012, p. 19–20.

3 Chion, Film, A Sound Art, p. 27.

4 Schaeffer, In Search, p. 13.

5 As Julio d’Escriván notes in Imaginary Listening, some techniques that might be considered proto-electroacoustic can be found in even the earliest of sound films. Andy Birtwistle highlights how the creative use of sound was conceptualized by filmmakers in the British Documentary tradition, in very similar terms to that of the early proponents of new music (“Electroacoustic Composition and the British Documentary Tradition” in The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media, p. 392).

6 Russolo, “The Art of Noises: Futurist Manifesto,” cited in Cox and Warner, Audio Cultures, p. 11.

7 Schaeffer, In Search, p. 38.

8 For example, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov in their famous 1928 Statement: “A Statement (on Film Sound),” in Film Sound: Theory and Practice.

9 Emmerson, Living Electronic Music, p. 7.

10 Luc Ferrari quoted in Emmerson, Living Electronic, p. 7; original emphasis.

11 Ingold, Perception of the Environment, p. 130.

12 For a detailed exposition, see Hill, “Listening for Context: Interpretation, Abstraction and the Real,” in Organised Sound.

13 Within this discussion, the term sound design is used to refer to the creation and editing of spot effects and atmospheric “wild tracks” that are used to construct the “real” world of the film. The term musical underscore or is used to refer to compositions developed that accompany narrative sequences.

14 Birtwistle, Cinesonica: Sounding Film and Video, p. 5.

15 Bouzereau, “Sound of Indiana Jones [Film],” in The Adventures of Indiana Jones Complete DVD Movie Collection—Bonus Materials.

16 Chion 2009: Film, A Sound Art..

17 That the point of view and point of audition do not always coincide is also demonstrated plainly by the fact that we hear a voice at the opening of this example clip expressing dismay, saying, “no, no, no” as we view the spaceship from an external perspective (at 0:00-0:02).

18 The acoustic environment within which these sounds exist is also quite distinct from all other sounds in the sequence: They are incredibly dry, lacking in the reverberation of the spaceship cabin or that sound which accompanies the glissandi and tones. We will return to explore this point in more detail in following text.

19 Goldmark, Kramer, and Leppert, Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, p. 3.

20 For example, Clarke and Clarke, Music and Consciousness—Philosophical, Psychological and Cultural Perspectives; Cox Music and Embodied Cognition—Listening, Moving, Feeling & Thinking; and Coëgnarts & Kravanja, Embodied Cognition and Cinema).

21 Winters, “The Non-Diegetic Fallacy: Film, Music, and Narrative Space,” in Music & Letters, p. 225, discussing Gorbman’s use of narratological concepts (Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music).

22 Kassabian, Hearing as a Contact Sense.

23 Norman, “Telling Tales,” in Contemporary Music Review, p. 107.

24 In Dunkirk the mimetic sound effects of explosions and creaking metal embody the impressions of the physical spaces and materials of the filmic world, even while the foregrounded underscore is the primary driver of the narrative.

25 For details about this psychoacoustic effect, see Stowell, Scheduling and Composing with Risset Eternal Accelerando Rhythms.

26 Smith, “The Sound of Intensified Continuity,” in The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, pp. 345, 338.

27 Even the story arcs with airplanes and boats—objects that might be considered as possessing movement—lack a sense of forward progression due to the lack of fixed reference points within the open expanses of sky and water.

28 Reyland, “The Beginnings of a Beautiful Friendship? Music Narratology and Screen Music Studies,” in Music Sound and Moving Image, p. 69.

29 Winters, Non-Diegetic Fallacy.

30 Gérard, Narrative Discourse.

31 Ibid., p. 224; Kassabian, Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music, p. 42.

32 Winters, Non-Diegetic Fallacy, p. 224.

33 Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, p. 22.

34 Stillwell, “The Fantastical Gap Between Diegetic and Non-Diegetic,” in Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema; Levinson, “Film Music and Narrative Agency,” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies; Wizerzbicki, “Sound Effects/Sound Affects: ‘Meaningful’ Noise in the Cinema,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks.

35 Stillwell, Fantastical Gap, p. 190.

36 Levinson notes, “the question becomes whether [a given cue] contributes to generating, or at a minimum, even more firmly grounds, a fictional truth in the scene which it accompanies” (Film Music, p. 260).

37 Wizerzbicki, Sound Effects.

38 Norman, A Poetry of Reality: Composing with Recorded Sound. Contemporary Music Review, p. 19.

39 Metz (Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema) quoted in Winters, Non-Diegetic, pp. 226–7.

40 Yacavone, “Spaces, Gaps and Levels: From the Diegetic to the Aesthetic in Film Theory,” Music Sound and the Moving Image, p. 29.

41 Reyland, Beginnings, p. 62; Cone, “Schubert’s Promissory Note: An Exercise in Musical Hermeneutics,” in 19th-Century Music.

42 Such principals can also be inferred or constructed within the discourse of the film, as they are within the opening sequences of Gravity.

43 Winters, Non-Diegetic Fallacy, p. 230.

44 Chion, Film, p. 465.

45 Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia, p. 98.

46 Chion, Audio Vision: Sound on Screen, p. 221.

47 Rogers, “Sonic Elongation and Sonic Aporia: Soundscape Composition in Film,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening, p. 4.

48 For more detail, see Denis Smalley’s writings on spectromorphology: Spectro-Morphology and Structuring Processes,” in The Language of Electroacoustic Music; and Smalley, Spectromorphology: explaining sound-shapes.

49 Davis, “Inside/Outside the Klein Bottle: Music in Narrative Film, Intrusive and Integral,” in Music Sound and Moving Image, p. 16.

50 Mera, “Towards 3-D Sound: Spatial Presence and the Space Vacuum,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media, p. 101.

51 Many tools are available for this kind of practice. The project in question used Altiverb XL by AudioEase.

52 Mera, Towards 3-D.

53 Chion 2009: Film, a sound art.

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Andrew Knight-Hill

Andrew Knight-Hill (1986) is a composer working with sound and the moving image. His works are composed with materials captured from the human and natural world, seeking to explore the beauty in everyday objects. He is interested in how these materials are interpreted by audiences, and how these interpretations relate to our experience of the real and the virtual. He is Senior Lecturer in Sound Design and Music Technology at the University of Greenwich and programme leader of the Sound Design BA.