◡◶▿ Music of the sphere
🌎 How wide should the sound designer frame the shot? Plus: Edinburgh Film Fest, London deadline, Kelemen cinematography workshop 📅 | Summer sound letter #6
It is a little-known fact that every filmmaker has their own signature sound of the Earth turning.
In an ideal world, every movie would regularly cut back to an establishing shot of our home planet rolling through space, with the director’s signature Earth sound amplified. Grounding the audience and reminding everyone where they are. Instead, these tones remain unperceived by the human ear, much like a quite separate phenomenon: Pythagoras’ music of the spheres.
Pythagoras voiced a theory that the vibrations of each planet in motion must make a sound. And that the tones of the planets heard together must be harmonic. They must be harmonic since the spatial intervals between the planets correspond to the frequency intervals in a musical octave. Do, re, mi, and so on and so forth.
But Pythagoras also acknowledged that nobody can hear this music. Neither the collective harmonies nor even the Earth’s rumble.
Perhaps we don’t hear this celestial music because it is a constant. Humans have absorbed it into our category of silence.
Or maybe, like an alarm bell or a tumble drier, each human hears the Earth humming at first (at birth), but it fades1 as they become accustomed to it. (What would it feel like if this forgotten sound were to stop?)
The filmmaker has no control over her personal Earth sound. She cannot isolate or amplify it. Neither can she silence it by muting the soundtrack, since it is already inaudible. It just is: out there with Pythagoras’s sphere music in the sonic unconscious.
But the filmmaker need not worry. For better or worse, planet Earth is the unofficial default. There’s really no need for a celestial establishing shot or expository dialogue unless we’re somewhere else. “Jack, you have to save the planet, on which the audience are currently sitting (Earth).” No.
Of course, sound is still used to orientate the audience on Earth. Since the advent of the synchronised soundtrack, sound has taken much of the heavy lifting from the image. The filmmaker no longer needs to use images to give the audience a sense of where they are on the planet. Instead, she feeds borrowed or engineered noises through her personal sound filters to locate each moment in its landscape, building, room, corner, and metaphysical space.
Sound is architecture: it has relieved the image of the responsibility of identifying space. However, when identifying a broader location in the context of outer space the filmmaker cannot rely on the natural groans of their personal or shared (Pythagorean) universe. She must instead imagine an artificial sound, sounds, or physics of sound, if she wishes to refer to a music of the spheres: personal, Pythagorean, or otherwise. A sound design challenge of interplanetary and deep inner cosmic proportions.
Hello! We’re just past midway through UPV’s summer break. But I have so much to tell you about! Let’s save some for later and focus on these three to-dos:
Most urgently, take yourself to Edinburgh Int. Film Festival, which closes on Wednesday. It has risen from the ashes with a fresher, punkier, outlook helmed by festival programmer royalty. Great.
Next, the deadline for London’s Swedenborg Film Festival is this Friday, 25th August. SFF “supports all genres and encourages submissions that draw upon the diverse and radical traditions influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772)… William Blake, Charles Baudelaire, Hilma af Klint, Jorge Luis Borges, Ingmar Bergman… Films featured previously in the SFF have explored ideas of transcendence and symbolism, and themes have ranged from social reform to psychogeography.” Well, doesn’t that sound like you?
Finally for now, the accomplished cinematographer, director, and human Fred Kelemen is back in Croatia. He will hold a course in September at Kino Klub Split in Croatia and it costs just €25. The deadline is 10th September, but it’s worth applying now. Or at least when you get back from Edinburgh. - GC
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In truth, the sound of the Earth would follow a crescendo-diminuendo pattern. Getting louder as the mechanisms of the foetal hearing system develop, and fading to nothing as the human becomes indifferent to the background noise - shortly before or after the birth event, depending on their disposition.