Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age

6. Studying Multi-channel Soundtracks

201 Studying Multi-channel Soundtracks Textual analysis has been remarkably impervious to all things sound. Gianluca Sergi in the dolby era Formal analysis is one of the fundamental tools of cinema scholarship. Meticulous examination of a film’s images, sound, and story reveal how it functions and can even suggest more universal truths about cinema in general. The analysis process is detail oriented, requiring close attention to the intricacies of a film’s construction. Prior to the advent of home video, such in-depth study was difficult; scholars needed either to rely on memory and the rare screenings of classic films or to obtain a print of a film and study it on a flatbed. The former approach had obvious shortcomings in terms of the level of detailed study possible; the latter required access to expensive equipment and film prints. The introduction of videotape made the analysis process much easier; although tape contained only a fraction of the visual detail of a film print, its visual shortcomings were offset by its ability to easily pause, rewind, and fast-forward movies, all while watching them on a home television. Laserdisc and then DVD improved upon the VHS format (not least by accustoming audiences to presentation of films in their original aspect ratio), and today Blu-Ray and downloadable movies continue to push forward the quality and/or accessibility of home for6 202 · Analysis mats. Today scholars may write on movies without ever seeing them in a theater, relying instead on details gleaned from repeated screenings on a home television set or a laptop. For exploring many aspects of cinema—editing patterns, production design, and performance, for example—this methodology is generally effective, and the ready availability of all sorts of movies (Hollywood and otherwise) on home formats has unquestionably benefited film scholarship. In terms of film sound, though, analyzing films based on television or laptop screenings rather than theatrical exhibitions is problematic. Without a good home theater system, any multi-channel effects go completely unheard and unremarked upon. To revisit an example from the previous chapter, a scholar examining Juno’s (2007) abortion clinic scene this way might notice the soundtrack get louder or more dense but would miss the way the sonic environment gradually envelops the audience with annoying noises. Any television- or computer-based analysis would therefore have a difficult time explicating this scene; its multi-channel mixing plays a crucial role in conveying Juno’s thought process, helping the audience empathize with her feeling of being hemmed in with no escape from the problem facing her. Those scholars who do employ a 5.1-channel setup when conducting close analyses face a different problem: film scholarship to date offers little guidance about how to incorporate multi-channel concerns into their work. Virtually all published analyses, as Sergi’s epigraph suggests, focus on the image—and even those that incorporate the soundtrack generally ignore issues related to stereo or surround sound. The goal of this chapter is to address that gap in scholarship by providing guidelines for determining where over the course of a film multi-channel effects might require closer investigation, strategies for listening to these sequences, and suggestions for analyzing the results. Lest this analytic approach seem abstract, divorced from the reality of film practice, the chapter will conclude with a case study demonstrating its methodology in action. Criteria for an Analytic Model Aural analysis is an inherently more difficult and more subjective endeavor than image-based analysis. The transient nature of sound itself, Studying Multi-channel Soundtr acks · 203 the fact that a soundtrack can include multiple elements at one time, and the lack of standard vocabulary for describing sounds all make it impossible to neatly break down soundtracks into the aural equivalent of the shot lists common to image-based analysis. Due to this complexity , designing a comprehensive model for soundtrack analysis is too large a task to tackle here. Instead, this chapter will focus on the particular component of aural analysis that is of the most importance to the current project and least studied elsewhere: use of the multi-channel soundscape. The digital surround style is ultimately built on DSS’s multi-channel capabilities; even its visual traits (quick cuts, fragmented space, disregard for traditional continuity) derive largely from the ultrafield ’s placement of important sounds all throughout the soundscape. Enabling textual analysis to handle diegetic immersion-driven films therefore necessitates developing...