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

8. Body and Voice

257 Body and Voice 8 The transition from monophony to multitrack overhauls the rules of the game. The voice may be contained in a space that is no longer defined solely in visual terms, but also auditory ones. Its real positioning in a threedimensional auditory space, in the middle of other sounds, takes away its imaginary place. The voice wishing to dominate must do so in a changed kind of space, which voices can no longer “contain” in the same way. Michel Chion in the voice in cinema The relationship between body and voice is a fitting topic with which to begin exploring the ramifications of digital surround sound (DSS) for film theory and scholarship. After all, the ability to synchronize human voices with their onscreen images is perhaps the defining characteristic of sound cinema. Sound effects and music often accompanied silent films, but dialogue and voices directly associated with the onscreen characters could not. Lecturers offered verbal enhancement to some films, but it was clear in these cases that the voice heard and the bodies seen onscreen had two distinct sources. The triumph of sync sound technology was the ability to record voices and play them back matched to the bodies that created them. Cinema has changed much since the dawn of sync sound, but its reliance on codes of synchronization—particularly on the matching of body to voice—has not. To this day Hollywood works hard to ensure 258 · Theory that this pairing of image and sound is done correctly lest audiences note that the film has gone “out of sync.” Films may play with this convention—pairing a child’s body with a demonic voice in The Exorcist (1973) or switching the voice/body pairings of two stars when a movie premiere in Singin’ in the Rain (1952) runs into technical problems —but even these “false” pairings demonstrate the effectiveness of synchronization in asserting that a particular voice and a particular body belong together. Yet the cinema’s “synchronization” of voice and body has always remained incomplete. The two are temporally synchronized but occupy different spatial positions. Voices nearly always emanate from the screen while the bodies ostensibly tied to them freely wander the diegetic world, sometimes appearing in the image and sometimes leaving it even as their voices continue to come from the same onscreen place. Digital surround sound offers at least the possibility of rectifying this dichotomy. For the first time in cinema history, filmmakers have a standardized system in which voices not only can be placed in a variety of places around the theater but can actually be heard in that configuration in nearly all theaters and even in many homes. Indeed, this book has already noted a few films (Spider-Man, Kinsey, and Girl, Interrupted) that achieved specific aesthetic or emotional effects by violating the long-standing tradition of keeping all dialogue in the front center channel. Even in the digital surround era, deviations like these remain relatively unusual. Most films, most of the time, continue to mix dialogue front and center. But the mere possibility that voices can now move around the theater alters the dynamic of the voice and body pairing. Just as silence can exist only in relation to sound, mixing all voices to the center channel has a different connotation in a world where they could be placed elsewhere than in one where they can only reside in the center. This chapter will explore exactly how the relationship between voice and body changes once the former is no longer restricted to a single locale. The Voice The human voice has long been a, perhaps the, fundamental point of interest in film sound. At the dawn of synchronized sound the newly Body and Voice · 259 sync-sound-equipped movies were commonly labeled “talkies” or “talking pictures” rather than “sound films,” a signal that what really fascinated audiences was the opportunity to hear voices coupled with the onscreen images. As one scholar puts it, “In actual movies, for real spectators, there are not all the sounds including the human voice. There are voices, and then everything else.”1 Filmmakers follow the same principle: dialogue is always considered the key element of the soundtrack, with the primary concern of any mix being legible dialogue. Common production practices that in the abstract seem strange and intrusive—such as “dipping” the musical score down in the mix when characters are speaking—go...