Siren City: Sound and Source Music in Classic American Noir

Introduction: Sound and (Source) Music

1 Introduction SOUND AND (SOURCE) MUSIC Sound Despite the pervasive presence of musical numbers in classic film noir, not to mention the use of voice-over and hard-boiled dialogue, the genre—like the medium in general, motion pictures—has been viewed primarily in visual terms, whether it’s high-contrast lighting or night-for-night shooting, oblique angles or claustrophobic framing, “dissonant” deep-focus compositions or the “archetypal noir shot”: “the extreme high-angle long shot.”¹ While film noir has also been defined in terms of, among other things, its mood and motifs, plot and mode of narration, sociocultural significance and conditions of production, the emphasis on visual style, an emphasis that’s especially pronounced in Paul Schrader’s “Notes on Film Noir” (“the theme is hidden in the style”²), has resulted in a corresponding disregard of the sonic or acoustic register. One must therefore begin, to paraphrase Michel Chion in Audio-Vision, with the reality of “audiovisual illusion”: “we never see the same thing when we also hear; we don’t hear the same thing when we see as well.”³ One cannot perhaps emphasize this reciprocity between sound and image enough since, notwithstanding the advent of “talking pictures,” the discourse of classical Hollywood cinema has historically been posed in terms of viewers and spectators. Although the word audience, with its residual sense Miklitsch_pp001-052.indd 1 Miklitsch_pp001-052.indd 1 12/8/10 4:21:24 PM 12/8/10 4:21:24 PM Introduction 2 of hearing, is salient in the context (hence my frequent recourse to it in the course of this book), it is preferable when discussing forties films to speak, as Chion does, of “audio-spectators.”⁴ The value of this portmanteau term, despite or because of its lack of felicity, is that it accents what Sergei Eisenstein calls “audiovisual cinema.”⁵ Once one appreciates the fact that hearing or listening is the hidden key to what Eisenstein calls the “synchronization of the senses,”⁶ one can begin to entertain the subject of film sound as such. Alas, even when one makes this “revolutionary” turn, one is immediately confronted with the hierarchical, asymmetrical character of the classic-realist sound track. Simply put, the sound track is rigorously regulated by the following “auditory hierarchy”: dialogue music effects silence Chion’s term in Audio-Vision for the above valorization of dialogue as opposed to music and effects (in the industry, “M&E”) is vococentrism. In other words, the human voice is the center or sine qua non of classical cinema: “it is the voice that is isolated in the sound mix like a solo instrument . . . for which the other sounds (music and noise) are merely the accompaniment.”⁷ Chion’s metaphorical recourse to music is wonderfully deconstructive since music, as the second term in the above hierarchy (dialogue/music), is the sonic element that most negatively impacts the intelligibility of filmic speech. (Note that classical Hollywood cinema, adhering as it does to a telephonic as opposed to phonographic model of sound, prizes acoustic clarity even at the expense of perceptual fidelity.⁸) So, rehearsing this normative practice, David Sonnenschein issues this caveat for future filmmakers and sound designers, “The entrance of music . . . can drown out the voice and detract from the understanding of dialogue.”⁹ At the same time, the subtitle of Sonnenschein’s manual, The Expressive Power of Music, Voice, and Sound Effects in Cinema (note the primary placement of the word music) not only underscores the rhetorical force of Chion’s conceit about the voice in classical Hollywood cinema but points up the “expressive,” aesthetic ends to which music can be put. Miklitsch_pp001-052.indd 2 Miklitsch_pp001-052.indd 2 12/8/10 4:21:24 PM 12/8/10 4:21:24 PM Sound and (Source) Music 3 Indeed, precisely because of its ambiguous status in classical Hollywood film, music illuminates a crucial aspect of cinematic sound, space. Since sound in film, as Chion reminds us, compels the audience to ask, “Where does it come from?,” the answer typically involves locating its source.¹⁰ The fundamental distinction in this “regard” is between diegetic and nondiegetic sound, a distinction that can also be formulated in terms of another question , Is the sound or music internal or external to the fictional world? If the sound or music—say, a song on a car radio—is internal to the story, it’s diegetic; if it’s external—an orchestral score—it...