After reading Thomas De Quincey essay “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” two topics appeared to me:
1 – The perspective of an academic friend of mine about sound effects
2- How his idea presented a flaw in sound nature.
De Quincey reflects on his essay a tremendous obsession with a particular sound event in the play. He talks about that sound in a very descriptive and analytic way, trying to relate every aspect of the story with that particular sound and how that influenced the spectator’s mood. This reflection threw me back to a year ago where I was amongst the most relevant “sound intellectuals” in Spain. One of them was my tutor Ricardo Steinberg, the one responsible for the sound of many of Pedro Almodovar and Alejandro Amenabar’s films and collector of one Goya for “Best Sound.”. Every week, I rested 3 hours inside of a sound studio with him and my colleagues discussing the qualities and approaches of our sound projects, non-stop. His perspective was solid for him, having constantly good responses to defend his ideas. He was pro-verisimilitude and anti-sensationalism (which he would refer to this last one as effectivism): being pro-verisimilitude means that he would only accept the paths the most follow the true-like events, refusing sound propositions that didn’t represent truthiness. If the spectator doesn’t believe, then the sound would be unacceptable. Being anti-effectivism signifies strong disbelief with exaggeration of sound effects to approach a particular mood. He believed these could be approached with plain sound, without having to recur to an excess of music or sound effects. One film that most characterizes this idea is “The Others” by Alejandro Amenabar, where he was a sound supervisor. The challenge for him in this film was “How can we reproduce the sound of the world of the dead?”, “How can we pursuit a dead atmosphere”. The solution was simple: “The world of the dead doesn’t have sound. You can only hear voices. There’s is no effects whatsoever.”, and amazingly, it worked. The sound is dead. No life. No nature.
However, Steinberg’s view of sound, in my eyes, has a flaw. He strongly believes in the capability of sound through an enclosed time and space. Sound has to be confined in order to produce verisimilitude. But sound has an immense range of time and also space: Imagine the following example: put on a film, select a scene, pause it. What do you see? You’re looking at a frame of a sequence, or more succinctly, a photograph: it is something planned, there’s a mise-en-scene, a choice of colors and character placement, and framing. Collaterally, the sound of that sequence was meant to be calm, soothing, with atmosphere, you can determine the acoustic qualities of what’s being seen, you can decipher somehow emotive intentionally, but what about the sound of that frame? What does it sound like? It could be similar to a click, a kick, it could now sound metallic, but it’s not metallic? Which materials does this click resemble? Now, compare both experiments: 1 minute of a shot in the image represents the same thing before and after the frame selection, but sound changes completely, showing us to different worlds. Sound can be timeless, Sound can be spaceless.