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5. Background Tracks in Recent Cinema
- Southern Illinois University Press
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70 5 Background Tracks in Recent Cinema Charles Eidsvik We do not see and hear a film, we hear/see it. —Walter Murch, 01 October 2000 WHAT WE HEAR affects what we see. Each of the three kinds of movie sound—voice, background sounds, and music—has important functions in our experience of film narratives . Though background sound was used only sparingly until the late 1960s—notable exceptions occur in films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s RearWindow—in the last three decades, new technologies have made it central to how narratives function. Sound editors combine location sound with sound recorded in postproduction to create specific audio identities for each scene; the resulting sound cements the visual and other audio elements of the scene into what feels like a continuous whole that feels real and reinforces the scene’s mood. Background sound, like music, also alters the thresholds of our awareness both of the visual and of larger narrative and emotional processes, altering how we experience visuals and narrative rhythms. Meant to be unnoticed, it is a catalyst for our reactions to nearly every element of our experience of films. What we know about sound in cinema is not solely the product of academics but also of practitioners. Sound studies is among the few areas in cinema studies in which scholars and artists often turn up at the same conferences, contribute to the same Internet list-serves, and seem to respect one another’s views.1 Among the practitioner-theorists, the most prominent is the sound designer and film editor Walter Murch. Murch has evolved a pragmatic esthetic based on the limits and potentials of aural perception, with close attention to the ways in which sound and sight work together. His theories (and the example of his sound tracks) augmented by the work of close collaborators such as Randy Thom (sound designer and mixer for Skywalker sound facility, George Lucas’s postproduction center) provide a basis for approaching sound in the cinema. Some Basics: The Five Functions of Background Sound For those unfamiliar with sound usage in cinema, it may help to review basics. Dialogue and some background sound are recorded during shooting. The film is edited using location sound. Once the film is edited using location materials, additional or replacement dialogue is “looped” in, and background sound and music are added. Filmmakers divide sound into three general categories: voice (usually dialogue); background sound (comprised of location “presence” and specific effects (most of which are created by Foley artists, who are specialists in creating sound effects); and music. From the beginning of sound movies in the 1920s, clear and comprehensible dialogue has been central to main- BACKGROUND TRACKS IN RECENT CINEMA / 71 stream film esthetics. The scripts that serve as the organizational basis for most film productions are mostly dialogue. If on-location recording is not optimal, voices are rerecorded in postproduction so that every important syllable can be heard clearly. The dialogue, even if spoken in a whisper, is usually boosted to above seventy decibels in the movie theater (about twice as loud as normal business conversation), to make sure everyone can hear it, even in large theaters, which absorb speech more than they do music . Usually stylized and simplified speech, movie dialogue is meant to be noticed. Most other sounds are not. Extending a tradition from silent film, music tracks cue the audience to emotional or associative responses to the film stories. Unless previously recorded music is used to establish the time period of the film’s action or to provide significant associations, music is specifically composed and recorded for each film. Most is non-diegetic, outside the world of the film story. Until the 1970s, unless it was needed to serve a clear narrative function—a gunshot or a train locomotive, for example—background sound tended to be suppressed. Over the last thirty years, however, background sound, comprised of location ambience (often called presence) as well as rhythmic effects such as footsteps, has joined music as a manipulator of mood and has come to have numerous additional uses. Background sound fills at least five distinct functions, four of which are adaptations of the ways in which background sounds function in everyday life. The fifth function is as a metaphoric extension of a character’s consciousness. Sound teams use the functions of background sound in everyday life but rebuild them to reinforce and give presence to the film’s fictional world. In Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1994), Michel...