Sound Design
How to control sound, and how you can never control sound.
Written by Graeme Cole for Unfound Peoples Videotechnic.
An abridged assemblage of 111 microessays on the subject of sound design, and in particular:
Breeds of silence and their cultivation.
The transdimensional tendencies of film sound.
Evergreen, esoteric knowledge, originally published in the summer of 2023.
Read in any order.
Index
◡◶▿ Sound: a silent killer
Sound is a silent killer. Like a gas, audiences don’t notice sound ‘getting around.’ It gets into everybody’s ears. Imagine what you could do with that kind of access. Sound begins as vibration and travels as a wave to the ear. On its way through the head, it wobbles around the corridors, takes a short bath, and dances through fields of deep inner hair b…
◡◶▿ The loneliness of the sound recordist
The sound recordist on a film set has the same social status as the drummer in a beat band or the goalkeeper of a football team. She is neither understood nor envied. People like to make jokes about the sound recordist, the drummer, and the goalkeeper. Like all cruel jokes, these jokes come from fear.
◡◶▿ No silence
Films usually come packaged with their own soundtrack. Either as a recording (of talking, crying, footsteps, beat music, dogs barking etc.) or as guidelines for a live accompaniment. The audience connects the soundtrack (which is loose) to the image (which is anchored) without being directly instructed to do so.
◡◶▿ Silences
There has never been a silent film - there’s always something. But we know that films contain a lot of silences. These silences are not the absence of sound. A silence in a film is the sound or sounds of silence. (It is also the look, the rhythm, and the smell of silence.)
◡◶▿ Room tone
When filming on location, the moment that each shot is finished, the sound recordist will tell everyone to “shut up” for five minutes while she records the sound of the room just being a room. !. This ritual has a purpose. This sound is called “room tone.” Most often, the sound recordist is lucky if her colleagues give her 60 seconds of fidgeting and che…
◡◶▿ Music of the sphere
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 tone…
◡◶▿ Small sounds
Think of the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Quiet, aren’t they? And yet, very noisy. Can you hear all those crickets? Weerasethakul’s films are filled with spirituality and mythology. However, this filling is mostly embodied in very physical natural forms. The feeling of a Weerasethakul film is weightless, like thought. But the substance is earthly…
◡◶▿ The diegetic membrane
Any sound, object, or atmospheric condition that occurs within a movie’s story world is called ‘diegetic.’ Most sounds in most story movies are diegetic without the audience ever seeing their diegetic source. The hum of traffic outside an office window. A dog barking somewhere in the woods.
◡◶▿ Rhubarb
The common convention, in live action narrative filmmaking, is to record dialogue as it comes out of the actors’ mouths during the filming of the exact matching shots. “Synchronised sound,” if you will. But Italian filmmakers have never been big on recording synchronised sound. The shots of Fellini and Antonioni, meticulously prepared for the camera but …
◡◶▿ A mutant garden
A plant or sound that you think you know and trust changes form under new conditions. The condition of the ground, the condition of the air, the condition of the mind. Its flower evolves extraordinary new traits. Or traits that are crafty in their ordinariness. Meanwhile, the roots spread, expand, tangle, graft, choke, absorb, anchor, and freight, unseen…
Spread across 11 posts.