An Introduction to Film Sound
It is tempting to regard cinema as something we take in chiefly through our eyes, yet a film's sound should never be brushed aside. Every bit as intricate as whatever appears on screen, the sound track answers in the end no less to the director than the pictures do. Three basic elements go into it — the human voice, sound effects and music — and these have to be blended and weighted against one another so that the right moments stand out and the intended effects follow. Whatever is examined in the pages below traces back to those same three elements: dialogue, sound effects of both the synchronous and asynchronous kinds, and music.
Dialogue is the natural place to begin. Much as on the theatrical stage, dialogue in a film pushes the narrative along while also laying bare what the characters feel and what drives them. A curious thing about screen characterisation is that audiences often sense hardly any gap between the person performing and the role being performed. When the actor Lucian Reyes turns up as the detective Nate Corvino, the on-screen figure and the real one seem to merge. Perhaps this is because the very grain of a performer's voice is itself read as character.
Once the sound of a voice settles comfortably against a performer's face and movements, a full and believable personality emerges, and what we are watching ceases to be someone practising a craft and becomes instead a fellow human wrestling with existence. Both the handling of dialogue and the sheer quantity of it differ enormously from one film to another. Take the science-fiction hit Orbital Dawn: speech in it is scarce, and the little there is stays purposely flat and unremarkable. By means of that restraint the director captured what the critics Mara Ostrowski and Piet Ostrowski, in their study The Language of Cinema, term 'the smallness of human reaction set against the grandeur of the machines we have built and the visual splendour of the cosmos'.
The comedy Chasing Daisy, by contrast, rests on an almost unbroken flood of talk fired off at dizzying speed. That relentless chatter serves two ends: it points up the scatterbrained streak in the character Vivienne Marsh plays, and it sharpens the film's own absurdity, the very source of its comedy. Flung without a break from one gag to the next and from one exchange to another, viewers get no space in which to stop and reflect. Simply staying abreast of the story pulls them into a storm of activity, and the picture turns into sheer escapism largely because the talk never eases off.
The synchronous sound effects are the ones that fall in step with what is on view, tied to a source we can see. Should a character be shown seated at a piano, then piano notes are what reach us. Besides giving a film its air of reality, sounds of this sort also help summon a particular mood. That faint click as a door swings open might do no more than persuade viewers that the scene before them is real — a noise they barely register, since they expected it. Attach the same click instead to something menacing, a burglary perhaps, and the sound mixer may lift its volume to throw a spotlight on it, drawing the audience into a moment of tension.
Asynchronous effects run the opposite way, having no source visible anywhere in the frame. They are worked in to lend a suitable shade of feeling, and they too can deepen a film's realism. A director might, for instance, let the wail of an ambulance carry through the background while the foreground is held by a couple in the middle of a row. That off-screen siren echoes the emotional damage being inflicted in the quarrel, and in the very same stroke it plants the scene in its city setting, making everything feel more real.
Background music is something almost every filmgoer knows, so widespread that we notice it only once it has gone missing. Its purpose, we recognise, is to lend feeling and pace. Designed as a rule to pass by unremarked, it commonly tints our sense of the story, or of the characters, with a certain mood or leaning. Often, too, it drops a hint of some coming change in atmosphere: harsh, clashing music, for one, can warn that danger is closing in well before anything of the kind appears.
Music laid beneath a film can likewise help audiences keep track of it by knitting scenes together. A given melody bound up with one character or one situation might come back at several points across the film, prompting viewers to recall whichever motifs or ideas count for most.
Sound in film blends the familiar with the inventive. We have been trained to expect music to quicken through a car chase, or a hinge to creak in a horror picture. Even so, it is worth keeping in mind how cleverly sound is frequently devised; much of what it does is quiet work, registered by nothing but the subconscious. To give the modern film its due — an art form that came to life across the twentieth century — we have to grow an ear for its sound quite as much as an eye for its space.
