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

Conclusion: Media and Media Studiesin the Digital Surround Age

316 This book began with a simple question: how has 5.1 surround sound impacted the cinema? That seemingly straightforward starting point blossomed into a wide-ranging exploration. Examination of the formal traits—aural and visual—encouraged by cinema’s adoption of digital surround sound led to recognition of a specific style centered on diegetic immersion. This, in turn, established the need to develop new textual analysis methodologies capable of explicating multi-channel soundtracks and the complex relationships between sound and image employed by the digital surround style. And these analytic strategies were then used to investigate the way DSS and diegetic immersion relate to conceptions of how the cinema fundamentally works. In short, this project has covered a lot of ground, including audiovisual aesthetics, textual analysis practices, and film theory. Yet in the end it presents a necessarily incomplete perspective on DSS’s implications . Its final section, for instance, established the importance of reconsidering film theory in the light of DSS. But it limited its scrutiny to three select theoretical concepts, even though semiotics, authorship , realism, ideology, and other concerns are equally deserving of examination through the lens of 5.1 digital surround. Additionally, the current work has forgone the massive task of covering all DSS’s effects on all media in favor of demonstrating its importance to both media production and media scholarship through the particular example of Hollywood feature film. Conclusion: Media and Media Studies in the Digital Surround Age Conclusion · 317 Ultimately the in-depth—but not comprehensive—exploration of DSS’s consequences for the film industry and film scholarship offered by this book was designed not only to open its readers’ eyes and ears to digital surround’s importance in contemporary cinema but also to provide a foundation for further work on digital surround and multichannel sound, both in the cinema and outside it. It is in the nature of scholarly projects to suggest avenues for exploration beyond those that they themselves pursue—in that spirit, these last few pages outline some of the paths opened up by the current work. DSS and Specific Cinematic Forms Mainstream narrative cinema has to date been the largest exploiter of 5.1-channel surround’s unique capabilities, which is why this book has relied primarily on Hollywood feature films for its examples. As digital surround has grown more prevalent, though, it has increasingly come within reach of filmmakers at all levels working on all types of projects. A college student with a laptop and a few hundred dollars worth of software can now create a 5.1 soundtrack, marry it to video shot on a cheap camcorder, burn it to a DVD, and send the finished product to friends, relatives, and festivals. Today, a 5.1 surround mix is increasingly an expectation, not a luxury, for any film seeking distribution. This does not mean that the aesthetic effects of DSS are necessarily the same across all types of movies. Independent filmmakers often do not have the time, money, or expertise to create theater-quality surround mixes, and they may not even hear their movies on anything other than their computer speakers before sending those films off to festivals. Sound designer Glenn Morgan offers first-hand experience with this scenario, recalling that after an indie feature was picked up for distribution, “the studio called and said, ‘We just bought this project, we would like for you to take a look at it and see if you can expand upon it and make it bigger.’”1 The point, Morgan notes, was not that they wanted to “Hollywoodize” the movie, but that the sound design was too “thin” to work in a large theatrical space, as the film’s director and producer themselves acknowledged after hearing their movie played in an actual cinema. In a scenario like this, the final movie may employ 318 · Conclusion a mix of DSS-based and more traditional characteristics, depending on what changes are made at this stage, how much time and money is spent reworking the soundtrack, and how surround-aware the original filmmakers were in terms of their visual compositions and editing. Budget and expertise are not the only factors at play in determining how a film uses DSS. Experimental and documentary films often adopt styles different from narrative features, and their use of 5.1 surround may likewise diverge in some ways from the narrative feature–oriented model outlined in this...