Explain how dialogue, sound effects, and music work individually and together in a film’s
Is a scene spooky? Funny? Violent? Sad? Whatever the feeling, a good film
matches sights with sounds to make the scene come alive.
—Geoffrey Horn
Still from The Hurt Locker (2008). ©Summit Entertainment/courtesy Everett Collection
What Does Sound Contribute to Movies? Chapter 8
Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following: • Describe how sound contributes to the overall impact of films. • Trace the history of sound from the Silent Era through talkies. • Describe the basic types of sound recording and playback technology used for films, past
and present. • Explain how dialogue, sound effects, and music work individually and together in a film’s
soundtrack, and understand the difference between a score and a soundtrack. • Identify and appreciate how various sound production techniques contribute to what you
experience in a finished film.
8.1 What Does Sound Contribute to Movies? At the beginning of Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope, we don’t see Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, or any of the other soon-to-be-iconic characters. No, instead, we see words. The backstory about the Empire and the resistance scrolls up the screen, telling us that we’re watching a story set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” It sounds like a rather dull start for what would become the most lucrative series of films in movie history. But it’s not. Instead, it’s exciting, making us anticipate what we’re about to see (that is certainly the case the first time we see it). It’s not the visuals, certainly. What is it, then?
It is the music. John Williams’s stirring score (the background music) grabs us by the collar and forces us to sit up in our seats; it demands our attention, drawing us in from practically the first note. Try watching the opening of Star Wars with the sound turned down, and you will be startled. Williams’s score is our introduction to the film, and it is a magnetic one.
Once the film starts, it’s not just the music that thrills us. The sound effects are also essential to our enjoyment of Star Wars—the mechanical, menacing breathing of Darth Vader; the electronic hum of the light sabers; the roar of the enormous space ships; even the silence of space. The same
applies to the dialogue, which includes any num- ber of memorable lines and helps to advance the plot, explain relationships, and establish charac- terizations. In fact, the personality of robot C3PO comes just as much from the dialogue and its delivery as from the movements of the actor in the distinctive costume.
As hard as it may be to fathom, movies were once silent, at least in the case of having no recorded dialogue or sound effects. There was always, however, a musical accompaniment to help inter- pret the moods for the audience, just as today’s movies often rely upon evocative music scores to intensify dramatic impact. But instead of being pre-recorded, the music was played live at each showing in the theater. Many of these so- called “silent” films are without question great— Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton are among
Courtesy Everett Collection
▲▲ Silent films such as Sherlock Jr. were accompanied by live music. Director and actor Buster Keaton was a mas- ter of deadpan reactions and physical comedy.
The History of Sound in Film Chapter 8
the geniuses who worked their comedy magic without the use of sound. Directors such as F. W. Murnau, Sergei Eisenstein, Abel Gance, and King Vidor created compelling visual dramatic mas- terpieces with no need for spoken dialogue or audible sound effects. But once the technology became available to marry sound with pictures, the medium of film was reborn. Audiences didn’t just expect sound; they demanded it. And yet, for such an essential part of a film, audiences today often take sound and even music for granted. Certainly, they miss it if it’s not there, but it is far too easy to overlook the important role sound, and especially music, plays in movies.
8.2 The History of Sound in Film Musical accompaniment that supports a film’s moods and actions is really just an artificial con- vention to help manipulate audience response. While heard by the viewers, it does not exist in the story world inhabited by the characters and thus is termed non-diegetic. Other non-diegetic ele- ments in a film might include superimposed titles, title cards, or voice-over narration by someone who is not a character in the story. By contrast, sounds of spoken dialogue (or narration by a char- acter in the story), natural sound effects matching sources seen on the screen, and any music that is being performed or heard by characters in the story is called diegetic. Today’s movies usually employ both sorts of sound, and filmmakers have the option of using only diegetic sounds, only non-diegetic sound, or a mix of both at once. Before the refinement of recording technology, it was much simpler for filmmakers to rely not only upon non-diegetic sound alone (a musical score and in certain theaters, especially in Asia, also a narrator), but also upon the exhibitors to supply it.
The Silent Era
We live in a world in which we can shoot and edit movies on our smartphones and email them to our friends. Moving pictures are an established part of our lives, a fact of our existence. But imag- ine a world in which images were stationary, in which pictures did not move. And then, one day, they did. This bit of magic alone was good enough for audiences, who at first were simply amazed at what they were seeing. When movies first moved from scientific experiment to entertainment product in the 1890s, it seemed like a miracle.
However, as with any art form, some people began to push further. Filmmakers began using the medium to tell stories. The invention of sound recording actually came well over a decade before the invention of motion pictures. However, during the first few decades of movies the technology to synchronize sound with the picture was too inconvenient to make films with recorded sound practical. Instead, filmmakers embraced the technical limitations of the medium to tell stories visually; where dialogue was necessary, title cards were used—a character would speak, those in the audience would see his or her mouth move, and a card with whatever the character said would appear in print on screen. Seen today, this practice seems quaint—funny, even—if one is unfamiliar with the convention. At the time, it was as cutting-edge as the medium allowed.
Today, lack of sound would be considered an almost insurmountable handicap; yet some of the filmmakers who worked during the Silent Era, when films didn’t have recorded sound (a time period that lasted from the invention of movies through approximately 1930), thought the lack of a need for carefully scripted dialogue was something of an opportunity. They enjoyed the free- dom. “The great advantage of silent films was that they didn’t have words, so not everything was literal,” said the director King Vidor, whose sound films include Duel in the Sun, The Champ, and War and Peace. “The audience could make up its own words and dialogue, and make up its own meaning” (as cited in Stevens, 2006).
The History of Sound in Film Chapter 8
Such an idea may seem inconceivable now, when studios go to great lengths to ensure that audiences do not have to work much at all to understand what is going on, leav- ing nothing to chance. Yet Vidor and others, working in a new medium, used this latitude to their advantage. It also permitted them to give the actors precise directions while the cameras were actually rolling, as no sound was being recorded. Some of the greatest films ever made were produced during the Silent Era, including Vidor’s The Big Parade and The Crowd, D. W. Griffith’s controversial The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, Keaton’s The General, and Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! (in which he famously dangles from the hands of a clock high above the street). F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh and Teinosuke Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness managed to tell their stories without even using title cards.
As noted previously, “silent” films were not typically shown in complete silence. Most theaters employed at least a piano player to accompany the film. Better theaters installed pipe organs or added another instrumentalist or two with the pianist (often a violinist and drummer, perhaps a few more) to have more of an orchestral sound. Large theaters in major cities had full pit orchestras of 20 or more players and a large music library of specially com- posed “photoplay music” to match various moods, situa-
tions, and nationalities. Important Hollywood releases sometimes had custom-commissioned scores composed for them, with the sheet music sent out to the theaters. Whether or not a new original score was composed for a film, the filmmakers expected that theaters would provide appropriate music, and many moviegoers decided where to spend their money as much by the reputation of a theater’s music quality as by what film was playing. At theaters with a single accompanist (piano or organ), the live interaction between the musician and both the screen and the audience was never exactly the same twice, more akin to a live theater performance. Music became not just an added attraction but an integral part of the filmmaking process and moviego- ing experience—which it remains to this day.
Acting Styles in Silent Films
Because audiences couldn’t hear what was said during films, actors often relied on overstated gestures and heightened mannerisms, especially early on, before filmmakers grew to trust the audience more and tone down theatrical-style performances for the more intimate camera. Thus, some dramatic silent films may seem almost comical today because of what appears to be overacting. Some of it was, even at the time these films were made. But all of it was a distinc- tive stylization, much of it following an accepted catalog of conventional gestures and move- ments—melodramatic facial expressions and more—that had been in use since the 19th century. Especially when coupled with an appropriate musical score, it is perhaps more akin to ballet or opera without words than to modern movie acting. It was all done with the knowledge that the audience would not hear what actors were saying but would instead rely on title cards, music, and long-established acting technique to follow the story.
Photo by Mary Evans/Ronald Grant/Everett Collection
▲▲ Shown here is Harold Lloyd in Safety Last! Of the three great silent clowns—Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd—Lloyd is the least known today. A great star and daredevil, he made more films than Chaplin and Keaton combined.
The History of Sound in Film Chapter 8
It must also be said that the speed at which silent films are projected today, typically fixed at an invariable 24 frames per second, with some projectors offering an alternate so-called “silent speed” of 16 or 18 frames per second, also has an impact on the modern audience’s reception of them. Because sound was performed live rather than pre-recorded, films could run at any speed. Camera operators would typically hand- crank the film relatively slower for action scenes (thus speeding up the motion when projected on screen) and faster for dramatic scenes (slowing down the motion) but there was no set speed. Projectionists in the theater would usually run the film at a speed that seemed appropriate on the screen, sometimes changing it from scene to scene, although sometimes orchestra conductors could adjust the speed during a show to fit the music they’d selected.
James Card, in his essay “Silent Film Speed” from Image, also points out that silent films were often shown at different speeds in the same theater on the same day. Theater managers would sometimes project the films more slowly during the afternoon when there were fewer customers, and speed it up at night so that they could work in an extra showing when the theater was more crowded.
When silent films are run on modern projectors without variable speed control, the action typi- cally looks sped up to various degrees, and occasionally too slow. When silent films are trans- ferred to video, they must run at the standard sound speed. Sometimes they are converted to 24 frames per second by duplicating every third or fourth frame, which results in a more normal speed of the action but also introduces an unnatural jerkiness that modern viewers mistakenly attribute to “poorer technology back then.” The variable silent speed issue, combined with the older stylized acting and today’s fascination with technological advances (digital CGI and 3-D, for example), often results in silent films not being given their due. But they were so unlike any- thing people had seen before that it is not overstating the case to call silent cinema a revolution- ary form of entertainment. And then, with the advent of sound, film would undergo a revolution of its own.
Talkies
Technology would eventually catch up with movies, and sound would become a part of them. But sound wasn’t exactly the foregone conclusion that we assume it to be now. Some believed silent film to be the purer art form and had no interest in making the change to sound (and some still believe this). Others had more businesslike interests. Wendy Ide, writing in the Sunday Times, reports that Jack Warner, the head of Warner Brothers Studios, declared in 1926 that talkies, as films with recorded dialogue were called, would never succeed. “Silent films,” he argued, had “an international appeal, a visual language that transcended the spoken word. They allowed the audi- ence to invest their own meanings, imagine their own dialogue” (Ide, 2008). Jack Warner recalled in his 1964 memoir My First Hundred Years in Hollywood that his brother Harry, when pitched
Courtesy Everett Collection
▲▲ A classic vampire film such as Nosferatu is a perfect vehicle for what today would be considered exagger- ated overacting.
The History of Sound in Film Chapter 8
the potential for sound films, retorted, “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” (Warner, 1965). Rarely would a studio executive be proven so wrong.
Studios had experimented with synchronized sound, which matched the dialogue with the movement of the characters’ mouths, in short films since the 1890s, and in the mid-1920s some feature-length films had rudimentary sound effects. Warner Brothers’ Vitaphone technology was introduced in 1926 as a way to allow small towns the chance to experience full orchestra accom- paniments with their movies, recorded on disks played in perfect synchronization with the film, and to present famous New York vaudeville acts as prologues before the feature, all much more affordably using film rather than hiring live performers. Audiences and theater owners weren’t so sure about it, as recorded sound at the time could not come close to replicating the experience of
live music. That is, until The Jazz Singer, released in October 1927—only a year after Warner made his mistaken pronouncement—finally managed to capture the public’s imagination and has inac- curately gained a reputation as the first true “talkie.”
The Jazz Singer is a sentimental story of a Jewish boy rising to fame as a Broadway entertainer after rejecting his religious father’s wishes that he become a cantor, and it is really just another silent film for the most part. It has a prerecorded soundtrack of music and a few sound effects, plus several songs and some brief segments with audible spoken words. The first bit of dialogue comes 17 minutes and 25 seconds into the film, when star Al Jolson as the title character utters the fitting words, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” Jolson performs six songs during the course of the movie, periodi- cally adding some ad-libbed lines, as he’d been accustomed to doing in his stage performances. Thanks in no small part to the charismatic per- sona Jolson was able to communicate on screen,
the film became a hit, and its unexpected success created a huge public demand for recorded sound. The death knell for silent films was not sounded immediately, but the end was coming soon. (Note: Some modern viewers find themselves uncomfortable with the use of blackface makeup in certain scenes of The Jazz Singer, and its central function in the plot, interpreting it as a racial slur. The “Wikipedia” article on the film discusses this in detail with references for further reading, as well as noting the film’s favorable reception in the African-American press of 1927.)
Throughout 1928, theaters rushed to install sound systems. Studios rushed to add sound to silents already in production, whether reshooting the entire picture or merely including dialogue or songs in a few scenes—“part-talkies,” as these hybrid films were called. By summer of 1928, the first 100 percent all-talking feature, The Lights of New York, was released. Sound now permit- ted faithful film versions of stage plays and created the brand-new genre of the movie musical, discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4. Viewers rushed to see films advertised as “all-singing, all- talking, all-dancing,” many of them with the added attraction of Technicolor for certain scenes or the entire films.
Courtesy Everett Collection
▲▲ The Jazz Singer included a title character whose stage act was derived from the traditional blackface minstrel show. In this silent melodrama with synchro- nized music and sound sequences, popular stage star Al Jolson brought his vaudeville dancing and singing to the silver screen.
The History of Sound in Film Chapter 8
After sound was introduced, the behavior of the audience had to change. Before, as the piano, organ, or orchestra played, people watched with rapt attention. Vidor, the famous director, has argued that the audience’s attention waned when sound came to pictures:
In silent pictures, you couldn’t turn away from the screen as much. When sound first came in, that’s when popcorn and all the drinks started, and necking in the theater, because you could turn away and do all sorts of things and still hear. You wouldn’t miss anything—the sound would take care of it. But in silent pictures you had to just sit there and try to figure it out. (Stevens, 2006)
Robert Sklar, in his book Movie-Made America, notes another interesting change. “During the silent era it was considered acceptable for members of the audience to express audibly their views about the action on the screen,” Sklar says. He explains further as he writes:
Sometimes this might cause disruption or annoyance, but it also had a potential for forging a rapport of shared responses, a sense of community with surrounding strangers. . . . With talkies, however, people who talked aloud were peremptorily hushed by others in the audi- ence who didn’t want to miss any spoken dialogue. The talking audience for silent pictures became a silent audience for talking pictures. (Sklar, 1975)
Despite the deep-seated love audiences had developed for silent movies, only two years after the release of The Jazz Singer the revolution was nearly complete in the United States, and a year or two later in much of Europe. In Asia and third-world countries, filmmakers continued making silent films into the mid-1930s. There were actually early 1930s silent films, by Japan’s Yasujiro Ozu for instance, that showed movie posters for American talking pictures. (It is also instructive as to just how widespread the influence of Hollywood movies became after World War I and remains to this day.) Although a few American films would be released with little or no dialogue (Chaplin’s City Lights in 1931 and Modern Times in 1936 being the most famous), the last year mainstream silent movies were produced by major Hollywood studios was 1929. For the next couple of years, many films produced with sound had silent versions prepared for theaters that had not yet con- verted to the new technology (especially for foreign export), but from here on, there would be no looking back. Sound was here to stay. Or so it seemed. In 2005, independent filmmakers Sean Branney and Andrew Leman made a low-budget but multiple award-winning version of the clas- sic H. P. Lovecraft horror story The Call of Cthulhu as a black-and-white silent movie, shot on digital video and shown primarily at film festivals. In 2011, French director Michel Hazanavicius made a comedy-drama homage to classic Hollywood studio moviemaking and the conversion to sound. To help capture the period flavor, he chose to make it as a silent movie in black and white using the classic 1.33:1 aspect ratio, with a brief talking sequence in the final minutes. The film he created, The Artist, found international distribution, went on to earn widespread critical acclaim, and won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The same year, Spanish director Pablo Berger made his own ambitious silent, black-and-white 1.33:1 feature called Blancanieves, a clever updating of the “Snow White” fairy tale to 1920s Spain and the culture of bullfighting. While it was well received by critics, Blancanieves had only limited theatrical distribution dur- ing 2012 and was largely unseen by the general public. In 2009, American director Gus Van Sant shot a silent version as well as the sound version of his quirky independent feature Restless, but he used the same color film and widescreen aspect ratio rather than imitating the fashion of the 1920s. The sound version was released theatrically in 2011, but both versions were included on the 2012 Blu-ray/DVD edition. These remain rare cases in today’s commercial cinema, however. In the rest of this chapter, we will explore the impact sound has on movies, both in production practices and in dramatic potential.
Sound Technology and Equipment Chapter 8
8.3 Sound Technology and Equipment It was the continually evolving technology of sound recording and reproduction that kept talking pictures in the experimental realm from the 1890s until the mid-1920s, as no system was com- patible with any other. Just as with digital technology many decades later, once quality reached a certain level and standards were finally agreed upon, it became much easier to commercial- ize talkies, and eventually to arrive at the movies filled with the digital surround sound that we expect today. It is useful to have a general familiarity with the most common recording processes used for movies in order to understand how various inherent byproducts of the technology can affect the sound you hear, especially with older films.
Acoustic and Electro-Mechanical Sound
Sound is perceived by the brain when the ear detects vibrations in the air. The earliest sound recording machines in the 1870s and 1880s used large cone-shaped horns to pick up those vibra- tions, connected to a needle creating ridges in a rotating wax cylinder or disk. Playback sim- ply reversed this completely mechanical process, reproducing a crude recording of the original sounds. Acoustic recordings required no electricity, but their fidelity and volume were limited. Electrical research during the first two decades of the 20th century led to microphones, ampli- fiers, loudspeakers, and radio. Adding sound to films became more feasible with electrically con- trolled higher-fidelity recordings that could fill a large auditorium.
Optical Sound
In the mid-1920s, Warner Brothers developed its Vitaphone sound system, which recorded sound electro-mechanically onto large 16-inch disks. At the same time, Fox Pictures was devel- oping a rival Movietone sound system that used optical recording and playback technology. Instead of using a mechanical disk as a recording medium, the electrical signals from a micro- phone recorded a photograph of the sound wave onto film. With only light shining through the soundtrack instead of a heavy needle resting in a record groove, a film soundtrack did not wear out nearly as fast as the disks did. Although a portion of the image area had to be sacrificed to make room for the optical soundtrack, having the sound on the same piece of film as the pic-
ture meant it could never go out of sync. Optical sound soon became the worldwide standard still in use today for theaters that still run 35 mm or 16 mm film. See Figure 8.1 for an illustration of this technology.
◀▲Photograph of a Vitaphone camera booth, with soundproofing, c. 1928. Early sound recording required isolated, locked-down cameras. Active, mobile camerawork gave way to static shots of actors speaking into microphones sometimes hidden among the props—for example, in a flower pot placed on a table.
Courtesy Everett Collection
Sound Technology and Equipment Chapter 8
Magnetic Sound
During the 1930s, scientists developed a means of using the electrical signals from a microphone to control a magnetic field that could magnetize particles on a moving metallic ribbon. This was able to record a wider frequency range of sounds from low to high than was possible with optical sound, and without the noticeable background hiss inherent in sound on disk. After World War II, higher-quality magnetic recordings of film dialogue, sound effects, and music would be used to master a standard optical sound negative that could be printed beside the picture so theaters would not need to install new sound equipment.
Nevertheless, the CinemaScope widescreen process introduced in 1953 included magnetic stripes coated onto the film that could record up to four separate soundtracks. Theaters that installed magnetic sound heads on their projectors were able to play back four-track stereophonic sound, with three channels located behind the screen (left, center, right). The fourth channel ran through speakers placed all around the auditorium walls for surround sound effects. (See Figure 8.2 for an illustration of stereophonic sound.) Because it was much more expensive, magnetic stereo sound soon became reserved for big-budget films, especially epics and musicals.
Figure 8.1: Traditional optical sound reproduction technology, the world standard from the 1920s to the 2000s
A very narrow beam of light focuses on the film’s soundtrack, and the solar cell behind the film turns the varying light into electrical signals that an amplifier sends to the theater’s loudspeakers. A misaligned lens might read the edge of the sprocket holes, resulting in a loud hum, or part of the image, resulting in noise. Any dirt or scratches on the film are read as noisy static, clicks, and pops with analog optical sound. Severe dirt or scratches on digital optical sound render the track unplayable, and the film defaults back to the analog audio. Most modern theaters now have a “reverse-scan” soundhead with a red LED where the solar cell had been, focusing a slit of red light onto the film that is picked up by a “red reader” located where the exciter lamp’s lens had been. This makes it easier to play films with the cyan-colored soundtracks used since the mid-2000s, and it may also allow for decoding digital soundtracks. Otherwise, a separate digital sound head with a red LED is also attached to the projector.
Solar cell
Sound drum
Film
Lens & slit
Exciter lamp
Sound Technology and Equipment Chapter 8
Figure 8.2: Stereophonic sound
Stereophonic sound is directional sound, with two or more individual audio recordings playing through different loudspeakers arranged behind the screen and throughout the auditorium. The “point one” in a digital stereo sound mix consists of low-frequency sounds amplified separately and sent to large subwoofer speakers. The original 1950s four-channel magnetic stereo and 1970s Dolby optical stereo had three speakers behind the screen, and the fourth channel, if used, went to all the surround speakers. The old 70 mm six-track magnetic stereo audio format, used from the 1950s through the 1990s, had five individual channels behind the screen, with the sixth used for all the surround speakers, rather than splitting the surrounds into two or four separate channels, as is done with modern digital formats and many modern home theater systems.
Screen (speakers behind)
Subwoofer x2
Le ft
w al
l s u
rr o
u n
d s
p ea
ke rs
R ig
h t w
all su rro
u n
d sp
eakers
Left rear speaker
Right rear speaker
Typical movie theater layout
Seating area
(equipped with 7.1-Channel
stereo sound)
Film platter 35 mm film projector
Digital projector
Audio & computer
entertainment
Left Center Right
Projection booth
Sound Technology and Equipment Chapter 8
The Dolby Corporation developed noise-reduction systems that greatly improved the quality of optical soundtracks and in the 1970s refined some late-1930s technology into a four-channel optical sound system that could be inexpensively printed on the film with the picture. (See Figure 8.3 for an illustration of an optical soundtrack on a modern filmstrip.) After its effectiveness was demonstrated by George Lucas’s Star Wars in 1977, studios and theaters alike started jumping back onto the stereophonic sound bandwagon. With optical stereo, any theater could still play a film in monaural sound, or sound that comes from a single (mono) source, if it didn’t have stereo equipment. The superior magnetic sound became reserved only for 70 mm film releases, and those were phased out as various digital sound systems for film became widespread during the 1990s.
Figure 8.3: Optical soundtrack
Shown here is the latest optical soundtrack variation on the film format standard, which has seen only minor modifications since 1894! An optical soundtrack is a photograph of the sound wave, printed onto the film beside the picture. The right and left stereo tracks are processed by a special electronic circuit to extract a center screen channel and a surround channel. By 2014, most commercial movie theaters had switched to digital projection, but a number are still capable of running 35 mm film prints.
DTS digital timecode (between standard optical soundtrack and picture) to sync audio on CD-ROM with film
Dolby digital audio data (between sprocket holes)
Variable-area optical stereo (left and right soundtracks decoded into 4-channel sound)
Sony’s SDDS digital audio data (on right and left edges)
Sound Technology and Equipment Chapter 8
Digital Sound
Digital recording systems convert the analog electrical signals from a microphone into an arbi- trary code of ones and zeroes that another converter can decode back into audible sound. The result is the elimination of all analog background noise, whether a faint hiss from magnetic media, periodic clicks and pops from flaws or dirt on optical film, or a needle scraping against a disk. Digital recordings’ dynamic range from dead silence to the loudest possible recording was drastically improved over analog systems. Filmmakers started to record digital audio in the 1980s and theaters started adding digital sound playback capability in the 1990s.
The increased abilities of digital audio often inspire filmmakers to exploit them for truly spectac- ular soundtracks that seem to put the audience in the center of the action and have them literally feel the rumbles of thunder or blasts of explosions. But there’s a downside to this: If the digital track becomes damaged or worn beyond the capacity of the system to recognize the ones and zeroes, there simply is no sound at all. Thus, all current digital film processes use the standard analog optical soundtrack as a backup. The shift toward digital cinema projection in the 2010s does away with film copies and puts the entire movie, both picture and sound, into a digital file played from a computer hard drive.
Modern Sound Technology and Consumer Demand
Recorded sound synchronized with movies began as a novelty, a gimmick to attract more ticket buyers, but once sound quality reached a certain point, audiences began to demand it. Hollywood added sound to its films in order to make more money, and the evolution of tech- nology to provide better sound continued apace. After sound became the norm, stereo sound became a promotional gimmick until eventually it was expected, first for major pictures and then for all movies. The 1974 film Earthquake was shown in some theaters with accompany- ing Sensurround, which is basically a pumping up of bass sounds so that they would be felt as vibrations in the theater. This technology was used for a handful of other films, but it faded quickly. The concept later returned with the advent of digital technology and a separate sub- woofer audio track that could create vibrations in the theater and more intense sound. This abil- ity to reproduce ultra-low-frequency sounds is now commonplace in consumer sound systems for homes and cars.
Surround sound involves placement of speakers all around the theater so that audiences get the impression that some sounds are coming from all around them. It was pioneered by Disney’s Fantasia in 1940, became an increasingly frequent option with CinemaScope’s magnetic stereo sound in the 1950s, was integral to Dolby’s optical stereo in the late 1970s, and remains an impor- tant part of our moviegoing experience. By the 1990s, stereo and surround sound became popu- lar enough that they soon were routinely used in home video systems, consequently motivating more theaters to install better sound to compete with the home experience.
Clearly, the careful use of sound is essential in modern films. Whether it is something as chal- lenging as creating the sound of space (and the silences that go along with that) or something as seemingly simple as footsteps on pavement, sound is one of the movie industry’s most expressive tools. Among the elements that make up the magic of movies, sound and its many varied uses is among the foremost.
Three Basic Categories of Film Sound Chapter 8
8.4 Three Basic Categories of Film Sound Once sound became an established part of moviemaking, individual elements of it became increasingly important. Indeed, sound production would become as important a part of making a movie as any other—if not as well known or well respected. During the Silent Era, the respon- sibility for adding music to films (and sometimes limited sound effects) lay with the theaters. Sound technology suddenly enabled the filmmakers to have control over these, as well as adding audible dialogue. The three basic categories of film sound—dialogue, sound effects, and music— require careful balancing to serve the story; because of this, each category is typically recorded separately and mixed together during the final editing process. We will discuss the importance of each of these three elements and the function that they each serve now.
Dialogue
Characters talking to one another in films, known as dialogue, is now so much a part of the movie experience that audiences take it for granted. But creating scenes in which characters talk to one another as they do in real life is no easy task. This was especially the case early on, when filmmakers often used the new technology basically as a way to show it off. For a couple of years, background music was considered an old-fashioned relic of the Silent Era. Films exploited natu- ral sound effects, but especially dialogue (hence the term “talking pictures”). Now that spoken dialogue could be heard, numerous films were quickly made of stage plays, but the results often looked more “stagey” than cinematic. Settings were generally limited to a few rooms instead of numerous indoor and outdoor locations as with silent films. The camera had to be confined within a soundproof booth so its mechanism wouldn’t be recorded, instead of free to move throughout the set like in silent films. Actors suddenly needed to stay close to the microphones instead of being free to move around.
As with most new art forms, the writing of dia- logue improved quickly. Instead of using a for- mal, theatrical style, many films more closely reflected the everyday speech of their times. This, of course, may make films appear dated within a few years, but it also makes them a valu- able record of cultural norms at the time they’re created. The popularity of films soon reached the point that films would eventually influence per- sonal communication, instead of the other way around. Countless phrases uttered in movies have become a part of our everyday conversation. How many times have you said things like, “Go ahead, make my day” or “Hasta la vista, baby” or “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” with the sure knowledge that the person you are talking to will recognize it and instantly know what you mean, no matter what the context? Dialogue from mov- ies has become so well known that it is used as a form of cultural shorthand.
Bryan Crable, the chairman of the communications department at Villanova University, said in an interview with The Arizona Republic,
©Warner Brothers/courtesy Everett Collection
▲▲ The film The Shining is perhaps best known for char- acter Jack Torrance and his phrase, “Here’s Johnny!” Sometimes a catch phrase and the character become interchangeable.
Three Basic Categories of Film Sound Chapter 8
When we cite bits of movie dialogue, we’re using a bit of shared culture to do the same thing. . . . [M]aybe something goes wrong unexpectedly . . . I can just turn to someone and say: “Houston, we have a problem.” If a movie moment is able to capture a situation or an emotion that really hits home, then a catch phrase is born. (Goodykoontz, 2010c)
There is no shortage of a desire among audiences to see action films; however, there have been and presumably always will be films in which dialogue is the most important element. Perhaps the most distilled example of this is My Dinner With Andre (1981). It basically consists of Wallace
Shawn and Andre Gregory playing ver- sions of themselves, talking for nearly two hours over dinner. It sounds as if it would be a horrible bore, yet many found it a fas- cinating film; critical reception was glow- ing. My Dinner With Andre may well stand as the purest argument for dialogue in film. “It should be unwatchable,” famed critic Roger Ebert wrote, “and yet those who love it return time and again, enchanted” (Ebert, 1999).
Although Andre is an extreme example, any number of films—you can practically name one at random—rely on dialogue to estab- lish character and advance the story. If well used, it can be a richer way to move the plot along than by simply showing what hap- pens. This doesn’t mean it is more impor-
tant than what we see—if that were true, we might as well read a book. But the dialogue and the visual action work together to create the entire film experience.
In film, there are three basic reasons to use dialogue:
1. to further the development of the plot 2. to enhance characterizations 3. to establish very quickly important information the audience needs to know to understand
the action (e.g., names, locations, dates, motivations, backstory)
The most effective dialogue often does two or all three of these simultaneously. Effective movie dialogue expands or elaborates upon what is visible on the screen and does not simply repeat in words what is already obvious in the action (which is what TV dialogue often does so viewers can easily follow programs while they’re doing something else).
Here is something to keep in mind about dialogue: What you hear coming out of the mouths of characters, which may appear to be perfectly synchronized with their lips, is often not what was recorded during filming. Instead, in a post-production process called automated dialogue replacement (ADR), or looping, actors often re-record their lines so that they can be heard more clearly. (Background noises during filming on location can make the originally recorded dialogue unusable.) The actor watches footage of the scene in a studio and re-creates the dialogue, a pro- cess that often requires multiple efforts. Thus, what we see and what we hear may actually have been created at different times.
Courtesy Everett Collection
▲▲ A theatrical, dialogue-heavy film like My Dinner With Andre owes much of its success to the writing and to Andre Gregory’s many years of experience as a theater director and actor.
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Besides traditional dialogue, the voice- over is used in some films. This is when a character’s voice narrates the action to help the audience understand what is going on. The technique is often criticized as a short- cut to avoid depicting something visually, a way of not trusting the audience’s intel- ligence, of spoon-feeding information that the film itself would make clear with time and thought. Among the most criticized examples is the 1982 theatrical release of Blade Runner, in which the protagonist, Deckard (Harrison Ford), provides narra- tion throughout the film.
Other films revel in using voice-over as part of their style, letting the viewer in on character thoughts that cannot easily be dramatized, or, as in Fight Club, providing information by the narrator that the viewer later realizes is not always trustworthy.
Sound Effects
In Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the hugely successful 2009 sequel to the first Transformers movie, in which cars and trucks are revealed to be aliens who have disguised themselves, the sounds of explosions might as well be a credited member of the cast, so ubiquitous are they. The bone-crunchingly loud, theater-rattling explosions serve one purpose only: to enhance the action. The sound of these explosions simply does not allow the audience to passively watch the film; it serves instead as a rush of adrenaline. The film received an Oscar nomination for Best Sound Editing (its only nomination); nevertheless, it was lambasted by critics.
The sound of explosions is also inte- gral to another 2009 film, The Hurt Locker. This critically acclaimed movie tells the story of a U.S. military bomb-disposal unit working in Iraq. Explosions here mean something far different than they do in an action- adventure movie. Here, they often mean death. The sound ratchets up the tension to an incredible degree, as the audience watches the soldiers do their work. One false move, one small mistake, and things can end in trag- edy—loud, violent tragedy. The Hurt Locker won the Academy Award for Best Sound Design, one of six Oscars it took home (including Best Picture). Both Hurt Locker and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen illustrate, in different ways, the importance of the use of sound effects in films. For all their varying quality, neither film would have been nearly as effective without the expert use of sound effects and sound editors. Films with explosions are
TM & ©20th Century Fox Film Corp./All rights reserved./courtesy Everett Collection
▲▲ The unreliable narrator in Fight Club uses voice-over to lead us through the story and to explain how Tyler Durden inspires him to abandon his old life.
©Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection
▲▲ In Wall-E, the first third of the movie is without dialogue. The story is told as much by the sound effects as by the images.
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only the most extreme and obvious examples of their importance. Films such as Master and Commander and the remake of 3:10 to Yuma include explosions, but they have other scenes full of subtle sounds that establish the environment, carefully placed in the stereophonic sound field to enhance the viewers’ identification with what they are seeing. Every film uses sound in some way to draw the audience into the movie and keep it there.
Foley Artists and Unconventional Sound Effects Recording natural sound in a usable way while filming a movie can prove almost impossible. Many movies are shot on large soundstages—vast warehouses in which sets are built—which are not exactly the place to find realistic sound. Additionally, often a clear recording might be impossible without a microphone in the shot. Thus, sound effects typically have to be recorded separately and added into the final film in post-production (as with ADR dialogue and voice- overs). Before their use in film, sound effects were used in radio for years to add realism to the broadcast. Crumpling cellophane may have been used to make the sound of fire, a doorbell in the studio might indicate the arrival of a visitor, and more. This process was adapted and used to add everyday sound to films and is now referred to as Foley, after Jack Foley, who developed a studio for creating appropriate sounds while watching the film projected on a screen. People who make these everyday sound effects are now called Foley artists.
Indeed, Foley artists and sound editors often go to unusual, sometimes humor- ous lengths to achieve the effects they are after. Producer Frank Spotnitz says that the sound of the boulder from which Indiana Jones flees in the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark is actually a recording of the sound editor’s Honda Civic rolling down his drive- way (Spotnitz, 1989). In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the T-1000 robot is made of a sort of liquid metal that allows it to change shapes and absorb blows and bullets and such. According to Tom Kenny, the sound of the T-1000 going through metal prison bars is actually dog food being sucked out of a can. “A lot of that I would play back- ward or do something to,” sound designer Gary Rydstrom said. “But those were the basic elements. What’s amazing to me is . . .
Industrial Light & Magic using millions of dollars of high-tech digital equipment and computers to come up with the visuals, and meanwhile I’m inverting a dog food can” (Kenny, 2000).
Popular Sound Effects There is also a need for more mundane effects, of course. What about the murmur of a crowd in the background of a scene, heard mostly as unintelligible sounds? That is known as walla, and it dates back to radio days. In films, background crowds are usually instructed to keep completely silent so that clear recordings of the actors’ dialogue can be made. The crowd noises are recorded separately and mixed in during post-production and the sound editing process.
In addition to sound recordings made for individual movies, there are certain stock sound effects that editors use over and over. These may be nature sounds, mechanical noises, door creaks,
©Lucasfilms/courtesy Everett Collection
▲▲ The sound of the light sabers in the Star Wars films was created by recording and processing the hum of a projector motor found at the University of Southern California, where director George Lucas had been a student.
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and many sounds that might otherwise require new Foley or ADR recordings. One of the more unusual, and most interesting, is the Wilhelm scream. Since its original recording in 1951, the Wilhelm scream has been used in more than 200 films, including Star Wars, Toy Story, Reservoir Dogs, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Iron Man, and Iron Man 2.
Music
At the end of Fight Club, director David Fincher’s 1999 film about an office drone (Edward Norton) who becomes friends with a soap salesman (Brad Pitt) through underground fighting, we learn that the protagonist’s friend is really the protagonist and is a creation of his own imagi- nation. Yet it is too late for him to stop his army of followers from bombing office buildings. After a suicide attempt, he sits in the dark with his girlfriend, holding her hand, as the explosives go off and skyscrapers all around them crumble. Simply by description, this scene is pretty creepy. However, Fincher ratchets up that feeling considerably by his choice of music for the final scene. As the protagonist and his girlfriend watch the destruction of the world around them, the atmo- spheric, almost drone-like “Where Is My Mind,” by the band the Pixies, plays. It is an unusual choice—the Pixies are more of a cult favorite than a mainstream band, and “Where Is My Mind” is far from their most popular song. Yet the selection is perfect, with the haunting vocal sounds, the cacophony of the drums, the repeated refrain, “Where is my mind.” It is, one might say, the perfect soundtrack for the end of the world.
Music has been a crucial part of the moviegoing experience since before the advent of recorded sound in films. So important was its use that over time directors began inserting indications for specific music to be played at specific times. After the conversion to talkies, music became a basic element of constructing a movie, as essential an element as lights and cameras. However, sometimes even the best directors have a hard time keeping that in mind. There is a famous story about the making of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 film Lifeboat, set at sea. Author Tony Thomas, in his book Music for the Movies, related the incident:
An intermediary informed the composer, “Mr. Hitchcock feels that since the entire action of the film takes place in a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean, where would the music come from?” Replied (composer David) Raksin, “Ask Mr. Hitchcock to explain where the cameras come from and I’ll tell him where the music comes from.” (Thomas, 1997)
Hitchcock knew, of course, the importance of music and would use it to brilliant effect in later films such as Psycho. Any good filmmaker knows how important music is to the success of a film. We will examine the use of score and soundtrack and their effects on moviemaking, and we will see how contemporary films could not exist without them.
Score Basically, the film’s music score is what plays in the background of a scene while action takes place. It is NOT the film’s soundtrack (which includes all dialogue, music, and sound effects), and it is not even the “soundtrack recording” or album, though the two are often confused. What is popularly known as the soundtrack, which we will discuss momentarily, is a collection of songs used in the film (or, sometimes, “inspired” by the film, if they are included on the soundtrack CD but not heard in the movie). The score is music usually written—though not always—specifically for a film. Most often it is played by a full symphonic orchestra, but it may be played on a synthe- sizer, by one solo instrumentalist, or by a small group of instrumentalists.
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Sometimes a film’s background music has a recognizable style; at other times it has an almost anonymous feel, perceived more on a subconscious level. David Bondelevitch, who teaches film at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, in an interview made scoring a film sound almost like refereeing a basketball game—if you do it right, no one notices. “Most composers would say if you notice the music, something is wrong,” Bondelevitch said. “And most people don’t think about what they’re hearing; we’re trained to notice what we’re seeing” (Nilsen, 2008).
At its root, film is a visual medium, after all. But scores are not just tossed-off dit- ties; some become classics in their own
right, and composers become important assets to interpreting the film. Some Blu-ray and DVD editions of movies include a listening option of an isolated music score without the dialogue or sound effects. These can be instructive in illustrating how a composer approaches a scene and how the music enhances the action. As noted earlier, background music was not used in many early sound films as it was considered unnatural and old-fashioned, but the success of Max Steiner’s evocative scores to The Most Dangerous Game (1932) and King Kong (1933) helped revive the tradition. Herbert Stothart, who wrote the Oscar-nominated score for Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), is quoted in Music and Cinema, by James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer, from his writings about that work:
I saw in the scope and magnitude of the story an opportunity for something new in music of the screen. I approached the task with the intention of having the score actually tell the story in psychological impressions. The listener can, without seeing the picture, mentally envision the brutalities at sea, the calm, the storms, the idyllic tropics, mutiny, clash of human wills, retribution. I drew on ancient ship chanteys, music of old England, carols, and other authen- tic sources, and used these as a pattern to weave together my musical narrative. (Altman, Jones, & Tatroe, 2000, p. 189)
Some scores actually prove so important to a film that they become well known themselves. That is certainly the case with Bernard Herrmann’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, released in 1960. The famous scene in which Marion Crane is stabbed to death in the shower—certainly one of the most famous murders ever committed on screen—could not be nearly as effective with- out Herrmann’s famous strings, which seem to stab at the air itself, the short, rhythmic notes of screeching high-pitched violins mimicking both the jabs of the knife and the screams of the vic- tim. So memorable was the music that it is used as a kind of pop-culture shorthand in other films and television shows, relating in just a few notes a feeling of terror. “The shrieking dissonance of ‘The Murder,’ surely the most imitated and instantly recognizable film cue, is the cinema’s primal scream,” Jack Sullivan writes in The Wall Street Journal (Sullivan, 2010).
Some scores contain music that was not written specifically for the film. Yet sometimes they work so perfectly with the movie that they become forever identified with it. This is certainly the case with Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. One well-known sequence
©Columbia Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection
▲▲ The Big Chill evokes the lost youth and idealism of baby boomer radicals with a soundtrack of “classic rock” and Motown hits.
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shows space ships docking set to the Johann Strauss waltz On the Beautiful Blue Danube, written in 1866. Even more famous, and forever after identified with the film, is Richard Strauss’s sym- phonic poem Thus Spake Zarathustra, written in 1896, which is used during the opening titles and then throughout the film during crucial scenes.
Soundtracks as Promotional Products The soundtrack, technically, is the band of optical, magnetic, or digital data containing the sound for the film. In this section, how- ever, we will discuss the more common musical genre definition. The soundtrack, as we discussed earlier, differs from the score in that it consists of a selection of songs (and sometimes dialogue) used in the film. And the films for which soundtrack recordings are released are not necessarily musicals, which obviously rely on songs. Soundtrack albums for non-musicals contain popular songs, usually not orchestral music; though, to confuse things further, selections from the score are sometimes included in soundtrack compilations. Again, as with scores, some are written specifically for films and some are previously existing songs used because the director believes that they fit the tone or mood of a particular scene. Occasionally the “soundtrack” includes music inspired by rather than included in a film, as with the extra songs by Madonna on the Dick Tracy soundtrack album.
This concept of commercializing a film’s music separately from the film itself goes as far back as the Silent Era. The love theme composed for D. W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation became a popular hit under the title “The Perfect Song,” and much later it was used as the theme song for the radio sitcom Amos and Andy. The song “Whistle While You Work” is an integral part of the 1937 Walt Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. For the 1942 classic Casablanca, rather than composing an original love theme for his Oscar-nominated score, Max Steiner used the 1931 show tune “As Time Goes By” that was indicated in the script (which suddenly became a huge hit after the film), as well as incorporating many other then-current pop songs. Motifs from “As Time Goes By” are interwoven throughout the entire score, and that song is now inextricably connected with Casablanca rather than the stage show it was originally written for. See Table 8.1 for a sample of films with hit songs throughout the decades.
Table 8.1 Movies with hit songs through the decades
The Birth of a Nation (1915) “The Perfect Song”
What Price Glory? (1926) “Charmaine”
The Wizard of Oz (1939) “Over the Rainbow”
Holiday Inn (1942) “White Christmas”
High Noon (1952) “Do Not Forsake Me”
The Graduate (1967) “Sounds of Silence”
Saturday Night Fever (1977) “Stayin’ Alive”
©Orion/courtesy Everett Collection
▲▲ A music bio like Amadeus has the luxury of creating a score directly from Mozart’s compositions, but choosing the best arrangements and editing music that is so well known presents its own challenges.
(continued)
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Rocky III (1982) “Eye of the Tiger”
Top Gun (1986) “Take My Breath Away”
The Little Mermaid (1989) “Under the Sea”
Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves (1991) “I Do It for You”
Dreamgirls (2006) “Love You I Do”
A more contemporary example is the film Garden State, written and directed by and starring Zach Braff. A single song sets the tone for the movie. Andrew, the main char- acter, played by Braff, is waiting in a doc- tor’s office when he sees a young woman, Sam (Natalie Portman) waiting also, lis- tening to headphones. She sees Andrew, hands him the headphones, and says, “You gotta hear this one song, it’ll change your life, I swear.” The song is “New Slang” by the Shins, and Braff lets it play as Andrew listens. It perfectly captures the sensibil- ity of the film—catchy, offbeat, different. The song was not written for the film, but thanks to its inclusion in it, it easily became the Shins’ bestselling song and made the band much more popular as well. At times, such a use of a song is done specifically to
cover holes in the plot and story, but in this case it set a tone that the movie would follow throughout.
Indeed, soundtracks are often closely identified with the movies they support, and vice versa. Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper’s seminal 1969 film about two hippie bikers riding from Los Angeles to New Orleans “looking for America,” makes the music heard on the soundtrack an essential part of the film. So important was the music to the film that securing rights to the songs used up more of the movie’s budget than anything else. It was also something of a happy accident. Laszlo Kovacs, the director of photography on Easy Rider, told MovieMaker:
The editor, Donn Cambern, . . . transferred contemporary rock and roll songs to magnetic tape, and synched it randomly to the film, so every shot had music behind it. Originally, he was just making it more interesting, but the music became inseparable from the pictures. When the film was cut there was a discussion about who was going to score it. They ended up licensing the music that Donn was using. They spent $1 million licensing music, which was about three times the budget for shooting the rest of the film. (Fisher, 2004)
Another influential soundtrack is the one for A Hard Day’s Night, the 1964 film loosely based on the crazy experience of living inside Beatlemania, starring the Beatles themselves and directed by Richard Lester. The John Lennon and Paul McCartney songs written for the film would become some of the band’s best-loved hits. The album’s popularity (it spent 14 weeks at No. 1 in the United States) as well as the quality went a long way toward establishing the soundtrack as an accepted
©Universal/courtesy Everett Collection
▲▲ Mamma Mia! is one of the highest-grossing movie musicals of all time. Its soundtrack, based on Abba songs, includes pre- viously released music as well as new compositions created for the film.
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musical endeavor for bands, not just a tossed-off side project. This was certainly the case by the time of The Graduate (1967), directed by Mike Nichols and starring Dustin Hoffman as a recent college graduate. Songs such as “Mrs. Robinson” and, especially, “The Sounds of Silence,” writ- ten by Paul Simon and performed by Simon & Garfunkel, were integral to the film. They helped to establish the feelings of confusion and dissatis- faction Hoffman’s character feels throughout the movie. They also became major hit records, which in turn promoted both the film and the band.
Saturday Night Fever, director John Badham’s 1977 film about a young, disaffected Brooklyn man whose only escape from his dead-end life is dancing in discos on the weekend, used its soundtrack to capture not only the film’s moods but also a moment in both music and society. Soon would-be dancers were wearing white suits with wide lapels in homage to Tony Manero, the character played by John Travolta in the film. The soundtrack would sell more than 15 million copies, and for a time was the bestselling soundtrack album of all time, besides immensely helping the emotional content of the film.
Soundtrack songs enjoy a unique place in popular culture, in that the best of them can stand alone as art in their own right, yet when a soundtrack fits with a movie just right, both the music and the film become better than they would be alone.
8.5 Sound Production Techniques Viewers may take for granted the use of sound with films, but all the sounds must first be recorded, and then added to accompany the picture. Unlike a home camcorder, all films do not record all sounds along with the picture. Next we will discuss some of the techniques that make sound in films possible.
Live Recording
The earliest experimental sound films either recorded everything live as it was filmed or filmed actors lip-synching to pre-recorded songs or dialogue scenes. Both techniques continued after sound technology became widely adopted, with live recording being the most common. This is one reason many early sound films avoided background music, because to get the best quality it had to be recorded during the scene with the orchestra off camera, with a perfectly balanced mix of the microphones recording the dialogue. Today, even though many filmmakers have actors record their lines in post-production, dialogue is still usually recorded live as the camera films the scene, using what is called double-system sound. This uses a separate audio recorder (tape or digital) connected by cable or wireless transmitter to a boom microphone held by a boom opera- tor just out of the camera range. The clapboard, a hinged board connected to the slate listing the film’s title, scene number, and take number, is used to synchronize the picture and sound later. The editor matches the first sound of the “clap” with the frame showing the clapboard making
Courtesy Everett Collection
▲▲ Elvis Presley updates a folk ballad, “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” in the romantic musical Viva Las Vegas.
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contact, and then the recording remains in sync. With digital pro- duction, however, sound and image are usually recorded on the same medium and transferred to computer together. Sometimes live sound is recorded when the camera is not filming. This is done for sounds such as traffic, crowd walla, and nature sounds that do not need to be perfectly synchronized with the picture but instead provide background ambience. This may also be done for lines of dialogue that will occur off screen. Sound recorded this way is called wild sound.
Post-Dubbing
Dubbing is the post-production process that records new sounds (dialogue or sound effects) to match the picture. If anything goes wrong with the live recording, rather than taking the time for retakes, individual lines or entire scenes will often be re-recorded using the ADR technique discussed earlier. Some directors use the live recordings as what they call a scratch track—to remind them of exactly what was said—but use ADR because of the greater con- trol it offers. ADR gives directors the ability to change lines or inter- pretations, or even to re-dub an entire actor’s performance with another actor. Director Blake Edwards did this with actor Claudia Cardinale in The Pink Panther because she did not yet speak English fluently, and Producer Ray Harryhausen notes it happened with the
two American leads on Jason and the Argonauts because their accents did not fit with the other- wise British cast. For many decades after sound was introduced, Italian films usually recorded the entire soundtracks after the fact, partly so international casts could speak their own languages on set, and partly so there would be no need to deal with hiding microphones while shooting.
Even when recording live sound, many of the sound effects a director may want are simply not picked up by microphones positioned specifically to record the dialogue. These are added later through the Foley technique or mixing in stock sound effects or wild recordings as described previously. The background musical score is almost always recorded after the film is edited, and then mixed in with the dialogue and sound effects. Dialogue tracks for foreign countries are often post-dubbed (added after a film is shot and edited) in the appropriate language. For this reason, filmmakers are careful to prepare separate master recordings for the music scores, the sound effects, and the dialogue, to simplify the process of making alternate versions. For instance, occa- sionally the music rights cannot be cleared for TV or home video versions of theatrical films without great expense, so studios simply replace parts of the music track with different songs.
Prerecorded Playback
While music scores are typically played in front of a screen running the finished movie (just as silent films were performed) and recorded for later post-dubbing, songs that characters perform on screen are more often pre-recorded in a sound studio to get the best quality sound. Actors then lip-synch the song as the director shoots it numerous times from different angles. This eliminates not only the need to hide microphones but also the need for multiple cameras (as required to film a live concert), keeping a consistency to the sound from shot to shot that would be impossible with a single camera shooting multiple performances recorded live each time. It
Photo by Ray Tamarra/courtesy Everett Collection
▲▲ Electronic clapboards use digital readouts, which are useful in syn- chronizing the different frame rates of film and video.
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also permits actors with mediocre singing ability to appear to have the voices of professional singers. Rare exceptions to this standard practice include the 2012 film version of Les Miserables and Peter Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love (1975), which recorded actors singing live while the film was shot.
Multitrack Mixing (Mono and Stereo)
After all the film has been shot and sounds have been recorded, the sound editor first builds layers of different sounds to get the desired effect, combining many different audio tracks each containing individual sound effects, dialogue recordings, or pieces of music that play back simul- taneously while the volume of each can be adjusted separately. He or she then must mix these multiple tracks (known as multitrack mixing) into a finished soundtrack of either a single audio recording (in the case of mono sound), or more typically today to a carefully designed and bal- anced stereo track of six or eight separate channels, each intended to be played back through a different speaker. Often dozens of individual sound effects tracks must be adjusted so each effect has just the right volume at just the right time and comes out of just the right speakers behind the screen or around the auditorium. Music is seamlessly combined with the rest of the sound so audiences are often unaware of when it starts and finishes. Sound effects and music must not obscure important dialogue, an easier task when dialogue, music, and effects are all recorded separately. Dialogue can have its volume, tonal effects, and apparent screen position manipulated in the mixing process so that the soundtrack becomes an organic blend of sounds that expresses just what the director wants the audience to hear at any given moment.
Skillful use of the soundtrack adds immensely to the power of a film, support- ing and enhancing the visual elements. The control of volumes and stereo placements can greatly affect how an audience per- ceives the screen space. Special audio effects might suggest characters’ subjective points of view, flashbacks, dreams, or intoxica- tion, or a scene may have completely real- istic sounds. Some scenes may fade out all dialogue to emphasize sound effects, such as a beating heart or a noisy environment, while other scenes will use only music to carry the action, just as with silent films. Sound can be edited independently from the picture, so that the sound for one scene can begin slightly before the previous scene has finished, or continue after the next scene has started. Repetition of sounds may give the audience audio flashbacks, reminding them of scenes that already happened, or audio flash-forwards, which may be confus- ing until the scene they match finally appears.
When analyzing the impact of a film, it is important to consider how the director’s use of sound (or lack of it) intensifies, manipulates, and possibly even defines the film’s overall content. Brian DePalma’s Blow Out showcases how movies use sound creatively with a plot about a film sound technician (John Travolta) who believes he has accidentally recorded a murder while recording wild location sounds. Films such as Twister might almost be considered demonstration films for spectacular digital stereo sound mixes, and if seen on a TV set or computer with a single tiny speaker, the entire intent of the film may be lost.
©Warner Bros. Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection
▲▲ Gravity takes place in outer space. Sound plays an important role in shaping our perceptions of a world that is alien, unfa- miliar, and actually mostly silent.
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Summary and Resources Chapter Summary
Sound is one of the most overlooked elements of making a movie—and one of the most important. Filmmakers can control the sounds audiences hear while they’re watching the picture, using only natural diegetic sounds such as dialogue and sound effects, using complementary non-diegetic sounds such as background music or enhanced sound effects to intensify the moods, or using unrealistic sounds for dramatic or comic counterpoint to the image.
Even during the Silent Era, films were not truly silent. Acting and filmmaking styles took into account the absence of audible dialogue and sound effects, but a musical accompaniment was always expected. Theater musicians played scores that helped audiences become emotionally involved in the story. When recorded sound was finally introduced, the spoken word and sound effects would become central to the story of almost every movie. Audience demand for “talk- ies” was so great that silent film production was abandoned by about 1930 (with a few notable exceptions).
Sound recording technology evolved quickly from acoustic and electro-mechanical processes to optical and magnetic analog processes, to digital processes. Theaters initially played sound through a single speaker (mono sound), but later multi-track stereophonic sound allowed film- makers to exploit directional audio in telling their stories. First used as a gimmick, stereo sur- round sound with low-frequency subwoofers eventually became the norm, and the impact of movie sound technology would become so great that it would carry over into homes.
The three categories of movie sound—dialogue, sound effects, and music—work together with the picture but are treated separately during production. Good movie dialogue may become so popular that it enters everyday conversation as a cultural shorthand. While dialogue conveys much story information, the best dialogue enhances the image rather than replacing it. Sound effects, likewise, can be used merely to intensify action or to enhance the sense of environment. Music, as it has since the Silent Era, pulls viewers into the mood of scenes, but it may also be used to identify characters and situations with popular songs. Movie soundtrack recordings, the music used in or inspired by a film, would become key marketing elements; soundtracks would often become bestselling albums, CDs, and, eventually, downloads.
Dialogue is usually recorded live while a film is shot; however, most sounds heard in films are added later (often including dialogue) using post-dubbing processes such as ADR and Foley recording. Background music is usually recorded after the film is edited, while songs performed on screen are typically pre-recorded for actors to lip-synch to while filming. All of a film’s indi- vidually recorded sounds are mixed together into its final soundtrack. Sounds may be added, subtracted, and manipulated to suggest states of mind, to anticipate or recall other events of the story, or any other reason a filmmaker decides upon.
In sum, it is almost impossible to overstate the importance of sound in film—and equally dif- ficult to explain why it is so rarely given its proper due. The contemporary film is inconceivable without it.
Questions to Ask Yourself About Sound and Music When Viewing a Film
• What kind of sound is present in the film? (dialogue, sound effects, music) • Whose dialogue do you hear in the film?
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• When and where do sound effects appear? • What kind of music is present? When does it appear? • Is there a voice-over narrator, and if so, is it one of the film’s characters or some omniscient
storyteller? What effect does this have on your understanding of the film?
You Try It
1. Watch a silent film, such as Buster Keaton’s The General, Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, William Wellman’s Wings, or F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, and compare the acting styles, camera movement, and overall style of the filmmaking with a contemporary film. With The General, Wings, or Nosferatu, watch it with two or more of the alternate music scores included on the DVD (or get multiple DVDs with different scores) and compare the differ- ences in its effect.
2. Using an action film of your choice, cue up an intense action sequence—but do not watch the screen. Instead, listen only to the sound, and discuss the experience of how it shapes the scene. Then play it again with the sound turned off, and again with both sound and picture, and compare the three. Does the version without sound have the same impact as the version with it? Could you tell what was occurring in the sequence when you could hear the sound only and not see the picture? Go to www.movieclips.com and search for the following clip from the film Jaws to view an effective scene for testing this:
“Predator in the Pond” 3. Watch a scene from a film made before 1960 and listen to the score—the orchestrated
music that accompanies the action in the film. Now do the same for a scene in a film made after 1980. Are the scores produced any differently? What differences do you notice? For examples, go to www.movieclips.com and search for the following clips in order:
“Leaving for Battle” (from Gone With the Wind, 1939) “Across the Moon” (from E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, 1982) “Dream a Little Bigger” (from Inception, 2010)
4. Try to think of five films that use popular (contemporary) songs to help tell their stories. Do they rely too much on the music as a narrative device? Or do the songs legitimately help advance the plot?
5. Try to recall a scene in a film that uses sound effects in some unrealistic way—either raising one or more sounds to a much louder volume than you’d expect from the camera position (e.g., a loud clock ticking in a long shot, heartbeats, or breathing) or completely eliminating sounds you’d expect to hear. For example, in Saving Private Ryan, much of the invasion of Normandy is conducted in silence. What effect does it have on the scene, and why do you think the director did it? Go to www.movieclips.com and search for the following clip to view a sequence from the scene:
“Omaha Beach”
Key Terms
automated dialogue replacement (ADR) Computer-based post-production process for re- recording dialogue that for some reason is unsatisfactory.
Summary and Resources Chapter 8
clapboard A device that can make a loud sound used for synchronizing separately recorded sound and picture and that has an attached slate to note which scene and take is being recorded.
dialogue Spoken words by two or more characters in a scene.
diegetic Existing within a film’s story world; its opposite is non-diegetic, which refers to some- thing experienced by the audience but not the characters (such as background mood music or title cards).
dubbing See post-dubbing.
Foley artist Someone who watches a scene and makes appropriate noises that are recorded close up, permitting better clarity than possible with live recordings when microphones are out of range.
monaural sound Sound that comes from a single (mono) source, although it is often mixed from multiple sources.
multitrack mixing Post-production process of combining multiple recorded sounds into one finished soundtrack.
non-diegetic Not existing within a film’s story world; experienced by the audience but not the characters (such as background mood music or title cards). Its opposite is diegetic, which refers to something experienced by both the audience and the characters.
post-dubbing The process of adding sound to a film after the picture has already been shot and edited.
score The background mood music that accompanies the action on the screen, usually com- posed specifically for a film but sometimes partly or entirely compiled from existing music.
scratch track A temporary soundtrack used during editing, consisting of the live recorded location sound before any ADR or Foley has been added, and generic background mood music to indicate where music will be after the composer has finished the score.
Sensurround Short-lived technical process for providing extra-loud low-frequency sound effects to movies.
Silent Era A period from approximately 1893 to 1929, when commercial movies did not include recorded sound. Music scores and sometimes limited sound effects were performed live in the theaters at each showing.
soundstage A large, soundproof, warehouse-like building used for building movie sets that require live sound recording.
soundtrack The part of the film containing all the recorded sound (music, dialogue, and sound effects), typically recorded to a digital, analog optical, or magnetic format that may be on the film itself or played in synchronization with the picture. Also used as a term for a separate com- pilation of songs and music selections used in the film and sold as a promotional tool for both the film and the songs.
stereophonic sound Sound that comes from two or more sources, creating a more realistic sound field in which the ears can locate the direction from which sounds are coming. Stereo
Summary and Resources Chapter 8
sound for films typically has three speakers behind the screen (left, center, right) and two or more surround speakers on the auditorium walls.
surround sound Movie sound that comes from speakers throughout the auditorium rather than from behind the screen.
synchronized sound Sound played back in perfect synchronization with the picture, whether or not it was recorded at the same time.
talkies The first movies with recorded sound. Silent movies had always had music scores and sometimes sound effects (performed live), but talkies introduced audible dialogue. Short for “talking pictures.”
title cards Printed words that appear on the screen between shots of the action, often used to introduce scenes and in the case of Silent Era films to display critical lines of dialogue; also called subtitles or inter-titles.
voice-over Words spoken by a narrator not seen on the screen, who may or may not be a char- acter in the film.
walla Generic crowd noises.
wild sound Sound recorded when no picture is being photographed and for which precise synchronization is unnecessary (e.g., crowd noises, wind, traffic), added to the film during post-production.
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