Category: Yr3 Portfolio

Since the technical and creative process of ELR is identical to the creative process of TRW, I will practice the latter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2hS8kZSrTY&ab_channel=RaulRamos

When I received the film, it had a very distinct structure to the script, as the director decided to change the technical script. I felt that there were shots that didn’t square with each other and that some deep sound design work was needed to connect these lapses.

The first thing I suggested to the director was to add more music in the scenes of higher intensity, that is, to add dimensionality left over (Murch, 2000). After she agreed, I contacted my collaborator Harry Charlton to solve the problem. We spent the month of October around music composition, meeting after meeting until the music was finalised and closed.

Once the music composition was finished, the sound editorial would begin, the first stage being editing the dialogues. These were spotty – given a very severely executed shoot by the sound operator, many dialogues were stilted, inaudible and poorly recorded. A recurring problem was that there were 3 microphones on the shoot – one boom and two lavaliers – but the sound operator recorded in stereo. So November was entirely dedicated to cleaning up audio and noise. It was painful.

Then it was time for effects and ambience. Nothing to declare. It was quite a fun process. The environments have rural and traditionalist tinges – nature sounds, local radios, and distant church bells echoing in a river. In terms of sound effects, there was very little intensity. Just underwater shots. I think what fell shortest was the foley. Given the lack of time and money, the recordings were done on the spot.

Compare the reference version and the edited version without mixing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cyv8NKU2Hs8&ab_channel=RaulRamos

This semester has been challenging and complicated. I have poured much stress and anxiety on my body and mind that I never imagined I would have. However, it was all due to suffering through anticipation that resulted from the final coursework. With a sense filled with restlessness concerning the most derisory details of possible projects that would turn out poorly, I had difficulty reaching my goals.

Is my work so far sufficient for what is to come? Is my uncontrollable urge to keep researching and preparing justified, or is what I have at the moment good enough?

These are all questions that question me even as I write this publication. My most important fear centres, without a doubt, on the possibility of the painting project being too ambitious. Of the two projects, the project of synchretic painting is the riskiest and most likely to go wrong. However, I have learnt over these three months that failure is part of the whole learning and research process.

This condition of learning from mistakes, or instead learning by doing, has benefited me a lot, and I feel that it is in this way, whatever the outcome, that I will be able to achieve my goals and answers. This is called Practice as Research (PaR).

According to Robin Nelson, PaR is:

PaR involves a research project in which practice is a key method of inquiry and where, in respect of the arts, a practice (creative writing, dance, musical score/ performance, theatre/performance, visual exhibition, film or other cultural practice) is submitted as substantial evidence of a research inquiry.

It is a practice that antagonises the classic university research method, where theory and practice are distinct nuances of each other. In this case, and in this method, PaR is an asset in the arts. In my opinion, PaR enables the following factors:

1. It demystifies the pressure one has on both the creative process and the process of theoretical rationalisation. One absorbs mistakes and less favourable responses to research more lightly than the other way around.
2. It makes possible and credible the creation of more artistic content adequately contextualised. It embraces innumerable nuances and investigates new methods.

The philosophy of this method also lies in ideologies that are very posthumous to today’s date. It reminds me of David Hume’s theories of knowledge – a posteriori. The knowledge is only taken for granted after practice. Or, also Lev Vygotsky’s ideas about the Zone of Proximal Development – the distance between what a learner can do unsupported and what they can only do supported.

Robin Nelson reminds us of David Pears’ bicycle example:

I know how to ride a bicycle, but I cannot say how I balance because I have no method. I may know that certain muscles are involved, but that factual knowledge comes later, if at all, and it could hardly be used in instruction

This is a good example of practical knowledge and resembles the same method I’m using for painting. I do not know anything about it. But through documentation, trial and error experience, and practising, I will accomplish fundamental results.

I’m looking forwards to this next phase, and I will embrace the best way possible.

Many guest practitioners lectured this term have multidisciplinary frameworks and nuanced perspectives between sound and any other art form. One that mainly hit the same topics I’m dealing with – the dimensionality and hapticality of sound regarding audiovisual art – was Yolande Harris. Most of her works are related to sonic awareness, or as Harris puts it, sonic consciousness. However, she reflects a lot on the “expanding perception beyond the range of human senses”, which can be seen in an audiovisual installation entitled Light Entering My Room (2015, Utah).

“Light Entering My Room” fills a space in which the only sound was truly ‘ambient’—the noise of the adjacent shopping mall coming as close to silent as the gallery allows

This relates to what Harris mentions of the expansion of human sensations, which is precisely how I want to treat the sound ELR – a sound that works as textures and hues that stimulate haptic senses.

Alternatively, another artist that relates to my practice is Félix Blume and his works revolved around when he was a boom operator and recordist in film productions. On one of those shooting days, he found himself recording the sound of random objects rumbling in the ground and asked some of his shooting colleagues to film him while recording these sounds. Son Seul / Wildtrack is the result of those experiences, which later were conceptualised as poetic juxtapositions of different points of perception: the point of view and the point of the audition.

(Blume) realized he also produces images that are often absurd, poetic, crazy of even funny. While the point of view of the camera is static, the point of listening is moving.

From my point of view, sometimes these relations don’t add to the future interpretation of the visual content. Sometimes synchresis can’t happen and the nuances established by the common understanding of film break apart. Those moments are indeed unique.

After reading Jay Beck’s precise analysis of La Ciénaga, I was intrigued by how he described and catalogued its sound. Therefore I looked for other Film Sound analysis that wasn’t Chion’s. I stumbled upon an article written by Álvaro Barbosa from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Saint Joseph and Kristine Dizon from the Faculty of Human Sciences of Universidade Católica Portuguesa, entitled The Film Sound Analysis Framework: A conceptual tool to interpret the cinematic experience (2020) published on the Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts in 2020.

It’s another fantastic essay I had the privilege to read and absorb its ideas. According to Barbosa and Dizon, this tool is meant to:

(…) be used not only by scholar, but also by sound designers and practitioners (…)

And help the communication in the means of film production between musicians, directors, producers, sound designers, sound engineers, production assistants, and visual creators.

In fact, their “formula” is nonetheless a fusion between all the previously and well-known analytical listening frameworks:

• Michel Chion’s listening modes: casual, semantic and reduced listening.
• Pierre Schaeffer’s organized listening modes: ouir, écouter, entendre and comprendre.
• Pauline Olivero’s listening modalities: voluntary and involuntary.
• Rick Altman’s: semantic/syntactic approach to film genre.

The product of this fusion is entitled FSAF: Film Sound Analysis Framework, and it consists of the following analysis:

• Syntax Analysis vs Semantic Analysis: the perspective of the film’s sonic structure versus the meaning it conveys.
• Taxonomic Analysis vs Applied analysis: conceptual taxonomical perspective leading to understanding underlying sound strategies used in the film vs a perspective based on the stricter application of well-established techniques and methods.

Generally, one can analyse film sound from the following perspectives syntactic taxonomy, semantic taxonomy, applied syntax and applied semantics.

When I decided to do synchretic (and syncretic) paintings, I didn’t know how and where to start. I decided to look at some tutorials on the internet. However, I didn’t have the resources to replicate whatever teachings were on the internet. I didn’t know how and what I was going to paint. I didn’t know anything apart from the aesthetics – abstract. Therefore I contacted a fellow Fine Arts student in her third year at Camberwell College of Arts (UAL), Marta Paula. I explained my project to her briefly in a meeting at LCC. By that time, I explained differently: “implementing sound onto paintings”. One of the references I showed her was Juan Sorrentino‘s audiovisual painting installation SOUND CANVAS (2002):

In terms of concept, it derives from the syncretic relation between sound and image, but it definitely relates to implementing sound in painting. In Sorrentino’s work, the main difference is conceptual – the painting is experienced through listening to other people’s descriptions of a work that is not mentioned by either the creator or the painter.

Another idea I showed was alternating the painting surface – instead of a canvas, opting for different materials that could resonate through transducer implementation. Something that relates to Lucrecia Martel’s haptic experience of sound and image. This haptic relation can be found in Alessandro Perini‘s artwork. The Italian artist combines sound and tactile experience in his installation Tactile Headset (2014):

Paula enjoyed the project and was more than happy to help me out. She also suggested using found materials such as wood and burlap (a surface she is used to working with).

MY FIRST PAINTING SESSION

Marta Paula and I met at CCA in Peckham and spent the whole day at the painting studios working and playing around with different types of painting methods.

I didn’t know none of those materials. She later explained there are various methods and ways of painting and that it doesn’t really confine the usage of a singular format. For instance, one can merge different surfaces, oils, and inks. When painting, there’s this freedom of “speech” per se. Marta, for example, doesn’t necessarily start by painting. She explained that she once painted some pottery and later broke it to finally engrave it onto a frame. Marta knew the expertise I lacked regarding painting, so her induction worked more as a “beginners first painting class” than anything. But, as Dennis DeSantis says, the best of starting is by goalless exploration and experimentation, and that was precisely what Marta taught me that day. Apart from the overwhelming amount of resources, the most important is starting.

Final thoughts

My goal is not exclusively to work on a singular painting. I think that is limiting the possibilities. I intend to continue working with Marta and find a way of trialing and accomplishing more results. Alternatively, this project is aimed to work collaterally in both realms of sound and painting, whereas Marta inducts me into the world o painting, and I reversibly onto the world of creating sound pieces (musique concrete). A topic that I will further investigate. Practice as Research.

The remaining topics to breakdown are:

1. ADR & Foley: sound List & Notes
2. Sound Design: by character
3. Music: Ideas & References
4. Extra: Post prod. Planning – time schedules, workflows & other considerations

2. ADR & Foley: notes.

Initially, one of the ideas for the sound editorial of this film was the lack of body sound made by Javi and his voice, following the logic of non-existing dialogue. It was meant to be silent merely. However, after a first draft, we noticed that idea became obsolete.

AD & Foley will give extra life to the character. As well as a deeper understanding of who Javi is. Voice and Verbalization are two things exploited in this short film. There is a lack of comprehensive speech – Deu speaks an incomprehensible language, and Javi doesn’t talk.

Without Foley, moments like the Villager Scene wouldn’t have any effect. Foley will help emphasize differences between intervenients and give sound to objects. Without a profound sound, this short film won’t achieve its goal. What matters is the quality of the sound textures and how they work together to create an intricate soundscape.

3. Sound Design: Sound list, ideas, work in progress.

Entre Las Rocas is an audio-focused film, whereas it doesn’t live without a sound quality as good as the images. Sound design is crucial for Deu and the Villager.

DEU

Voice

Little by little, voices are heard speaking an inexplicable language that makes Javi cover his ears

Entre Las Rocas script written by Jesus F. Cruz (2020)

In this narrative, voice is essential: Javi doesn’t speak (and if so, it is not perceptible), and Deu can’t be understood when speaking. One of the primary references for his voice is Jocelyn Pook‘s concept for Masked Ball, a piece of music made for Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

Built around a recording of romanian priest singing orthodox liturgy – which is then played backwards – Pook’s score for the Masked Ball sequence is otherwordly , transporting viewers somehwere that sits between grandiose and hellish. It’s unforgetable. “Yeah, that music was menaning and unsettling”, she explains, “But I also wanted the strings to create this magic so that when the higher pitched voice of the priest comes in it transports you somewhere beautiful”

Jocelyn Pook for Dazed (2018)

MOVEMENT

In most of Deu’s scenes, apart from hearing him talking, we also listen to him move. When Walking, his footsteps resemble a quadruped like a lizard, and its breathing is heavy and slow. We can also hear his insides since some shots are under its perspective. Jesus Cruz suggested that his insides should sound the same when “a character dies in Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding (2020)“.

THE VILLAGER

The villager is a character that appears once walking backwards towards the opposite direction (probably) and gives recommendations to Javi. A practical solution for its sound design is reappropriating the ideas David Lynch developed for his characters when they were inside the white lodge on the TV show Twin Peaks (1990-2017). Everyone’s voice was backward, yet they were understandable. The same treatment happened to the rest of the movements.

4. Music: ideas and references.

Music will flow as a singular song; however, it could be divided into two pieces: one that resonates more with the mountain sequence and another that suits the dream aesthetics. The first 5 minutes is where the music takes a bigger role. However, there are other parts where the music might appear as well.

Mountains

Music opens the short film and defines what sort of register it has. By absorbing the nature of the images provided in the first sequence. The initial part of the song will undertake a music-concrete approach by using rocks and “raw elements” in the composition. One of the most discussed references was Pavel Milyakov’s Masse Métal (2020), where the Russian artist used recorded untreated sound as the main source of its production.

DREAM

The imagery for the dream is very psychedelic, and the music should follow the same register. For instance, after the title’s glitches, the composition would completely change to a more plunderphonics, repetitive, shoegaze piece synchronized with the sound design and later DEu’s voice. There were many references in consideration, but Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica (2011) was the one that matched best with the intentions needed, more precisely, the tracks Nassau and Andro.

This post will summarise the sound elements I’ve been planning for this film. These are the topics:

1. Film sound Analysis: Structure, Definition of Concepts & References
2. ADR & Foley: sound List & Notes
3. Sound Design: by character
4. Music: Ideas & References
5. Extra: Post prod. Planning – time schedules, workflows & other considerations

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyDHa0iEZs0&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=RaulRamos

This breakdown will be part of the Dossier which will function as my project prototype. This post will only discuss what I’ve written so far.

Film Sound Analysis: Structure, Definition of Concepts & References

Throughout the whole experience, I noted 4 different sonic worlds. These moments have different hues and textures and require special narrative attention. However, they are not at all antagonistic between them. My idea for the sound is to play a big cyclical dramatic irony. The spectator will be hinted through sound about what is going to happen. The 4 sonic worlds are:

1. Dream

The dream itself is also divided into two sections: The Mountains and The Dream. They are both parts of Javi’s Dream. In total, it corresponds to a 5-minute-long scene. The first section has long shots of the mountains that slowly transition from one shot to another. They reflect a harsh solitude that transmits eerieness and the unknown. The last section contracts with psychedelic imagery. It could be split into indistinguishable imagery and Deu‘s cameo and first appearance.

In The Mountains section, the film will begin with a natural ambience of mountains and wind, which will rest for a considerable period, while at the same time, the music progresses towards the title. In The Dream section, it is essential to find a way to transition from one scenario to another. The parts have antagonistic ideas, and we ought to make sure that music and ambience fuse smoothly or harshly, depending on how the VFX editor will develop the titles. The Sound design for the Indistinguishable Dream must be sounded under the premise of “Everything that moves must sound”. Deu’s part must have all his sound design characteristics, which will be discussed later.

2. Journey

The journey starts on Javi’s Awakening and ends before encountering the monster. This time we see Javi’s “real world” and understand him physically and psychologically. Most of the shots are slow and show the nature of his neighbourhood and surrounding areas.

There are, however, 2 moments with sonic relevancy: The Encounter with the Villager and The Headache. The first sequence is a small moment at the beginning of the journey. Javi asks for directions from one of the villagers. This one particular is wearing an Asmat suit and is walking backwards. There is no dialogue between the two characters. However, sonically speaking, the Villager’s movement has to sound different from Javi’s. In the second sequence, Javi has a headache. It could be seen as a memory or a sort of demonical possession. However, this scene is the first time Deu appears outside a dream. Sound will showcase small details that connect with Deu’s voice. There is no (depictable) dialogue.

3. Realisation

As a realisation, I mean when Javi finally understands there is no way back. He meets the creature and realises its power, who he is and what it is made of. The realisation process can be divided into two sonic subworlds: possession and consumption.

In the first subworld, we see Javi fighting Deu’s possession. It is a sequence with many sound elements: Deu’s Voice and Movement, Visual glitches, the separation of the 2 moons, the bells, and music. Deu is all over the place but not entirely in control of Javi. The second part has to determine symbolism: Javi is wholly consumed by Deu and Reaches the pinnacle of his realisation. He witnesses what he is looking which will destroy him as a consequence. The visuals are rather beautiful and gore. They’re supposed to represent Deu’s insides. The sound would play an essential role in assuming this chaotic amalgam of ideas. There has to be some balance between sound design and music.

Deu is not completely inside Javi’s body during the possession, but there are already some signs it is happening. Showcasing Deu’s Voice is one of the elements. The transition is followed by glitches, not related to the VHS tape but to Deu’s possession. Music can be introduced progressively till the sequence end, where it completely disappears. The transition is followed by glitches, not related to the VHS tape but to Deu’s Possession. Lastly, the last bit will assume a similar version to the one in the dream. However, it would be more intense.

4. Credits

The credits are only referred to as relevant sonic worlds because it still has valuable narrative information. It’s sonically an easy scene to edit. It is a rupture to everything that has happened before and gives expectations to the sector. A VHS tape is the only sound that would be heard, and other glitches.

A few months later, I decided to challenge my practice; I didn’t have the exact words to explain the ideas. I established my goals through the breakdown of the audiovisual. AUDIO + VISUAL. By Audio, it meant the use of sound; it didn’t have to be through audio. By Visual, it could mean any art form that relies on sight – sculpture, painting, or photography. The + meant all the possible merges sound can have with the above-mentioned formats.

Michel Chion is the perfect person to quote regarding this relationship between sound and image. Much of his writing is a fundamental understanding between sound art, visual art, and their crossovers. Chion was a Pierre Schaffer “follower” – composer of musique concrete, part of the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) – and also a nouvelle vague “influencer”- part of Cahiers du Cinéma, a french magazine dedicated to the curation of film, where mostly all the french new wave wrote (Goddard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette, Bazin, Daniel-Volcroze, Chabrol, and Lo Duca). His most famous publishing was:

• Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1993)
• The Voice in Cinema (1982)
• Music in Cinema (1995)
• Film: a Sound Art (2009)

His books probably catapulted Film Sound Studies to where it is nowadays. Interestingly, his figure stands at the same level as Walter Murch. However, both come from really different backgrounds. Walter Murch trusts in sound design as a vessel for dimensionality, and Michel Chion trusts in sound as a way of haptic perception. Walter Murch is an American affiliated with the Oscar Academy. Michel Chion is a European attached to arthouse cinema and experimental practices. I tend to understand their perspective by where they came from

In the post, I’m determined to find possible relations between sound/music and paintings and photography. The best way to do so is by analysing a term coined by Michel Chion:

Synchresis: The forging of an immediate and necessary relationship between something one sees and something one hears at the same time (from synchronism and synthesis). The psychological phenomenon of synchresis is what makes dubbing and much other postproduction sound mixing possible.

Michel Chion

This phenomenon can even happen with sounds and images that do not relate to each other, according to Chion. Synchresis doesn’t need to be obvious, but film directors rely on this characteristic of the audiovisual to build intricate experiences. Chion suggests the following exercise:

Play a strem of random audio and visual events, and you will find that certain ones will come together through synchresis and other combinations will not.

Michel Chion

This phenomenon could also be explained psychologically as apophenia, which is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. Another neuropsychological phenomenon that could be related is the filling-in phenomenon: a completion of missing information. In other words – expectation. The scholar Gillian McIver wrote an interesting essay about the relationship between sound and paintings. She coined the term cinematic painting to describe those paintings that induce our brains to think of sound.

The cinematic picture is the picture which through the above-mentioned manipulation of lighting, colour and tone, the suggestion or illusion of movement, the mise en scène, including the gestures demonstrated by the subjects and the suggestion or illusion of movement, manages to persuade the viewer to a similar kind of emotional engagement as cinema.

Gillian McIver in Sound and Image: diegetic sound in film and painting (2016)

McIver’s article exemplifies well-known paintings and how we can interpret sound from them. For instance, in Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819) by Theodore Gericault, McIver describes:

We can almost hear the creaking, salt-choked voices of the shipwrecked and desperate calling out in husky tones, excited at seeing on the far distant horizon a tiny dot, which is the ship which will eventually rescue them. We can imagine the crash of the waves which we see fall upon the disintegrating timbers of the raft. We know that after days and days lost at sea without fresh water how the men’s voices would sound. Gericault shows them shouting and talking to each other

Gillian McIver in Sound and Image: diegetic sound in film and painting (2016)

However, I disagree with McIver when she says that some paintings are “sonic” and others aren’t. I do think any image is sufficiently sonic, whether they are pictorial or not, filled with human presence or not. McIver kept referring to the implicit movement of characters or the environment, but the perception of movement doesn’t need to stem from realism. Even stillness has an implicit sound. This was trialled by Heather Gibson Moqtaderi, art collections manager and associate curator of the Penn Art Collection, and Eugene Lew, director of sound and music technology in the Department of Music in the School of Arts & Sciences of the University of Pennsylvania (USA), when they decided to “combine landscape photographs and sound art”. For every 10 photographs it was assigned a sound artist: Sarah Angliss, Michael Roy Barker, Olivia Block, Nadia Botello, La Cosa Preziosa, Marinna Guzy, Eugene Lew, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Christopher Sean Powell, and
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith.

I also read an article that wasn’t as optimistic as McIver and Chion towards the relation between sound and image. Maurício Dottori, the PhD composer from the University of Whales, states that “explaining music or sound using the idea of language was more than a metaphor” for eighteenth-century thinkers. Romantic thinkers wanted to link art with reasoning. Therefore there is no linkage between different forms of expression.

Music is not a language

Maurício Dottori in Translatting painting and sculpture into Sound (2008)

I disagree.

It would take a lot of work to explain the means beneath my appetite for painting. There’s a logical relation between it and my work as a sound designer – I want to broaden my knowledge and experience of working with visual art. At first, I thought of photography to be the ideal format. It is a painting that paints itself instantly. It also plays with film – film is a succession of many “photographies” at once. I derived from photography due to its logistical side. Either I would have to take these photos, or I would have to find someone who could take them from me. Photographic Sound, a term coined by the journalist Louisa Shepard, will be a format to be explored posthumous to my graduation. Painting is indeed the only solution viable enough to work. However, I need to learn how to paint or where to start.

To seek inspiration, I went to the Tate Modern to look at some paintings, and I found interest in abstract artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Sonia Delaunay, Fahrelnissa Zeid, and Mark Rothko. I’ve explored more deeply, and I found a particular interest in the following:

• The avant-garde Russian movement rayonism (Natalia Goncharova).
• Tachisme (Jean Dubuffet, Sam Francis).
• The British avant-garde movement objective abstractionism (Rodrigo Moynihan).
• Northern American abstract expressionism (Rothko, Pollock).

They all stem from the same intention – for some particular reason, these were the movements and artists that were the more “sonorous” for me.

While looking at paintings, I stumbled upon pictures of exciting minerals and rocks. And they are also very sonorous for me. Therefore I decided to visit the Natural History Museum in London and take photos of interesting minerals.

Why paint abstract art?

In an article written by Adem Genç entitled Social Function of Abstract Painting (not dated), he states:

“An artist can only be creative if he can transmit his rebellion to his work.”

To some extent, I’m against my practice. I’m trying to overcome the idea of audiovisual and broader it to new horizons, such as sound paintings (a term I coined myself) and photographic sound. Adem Genç also refers that:

“Many artists do not feel they belong to a group or a school. By definition, they are individuals, because there are always some artists who cannot be fitted neatly into any category or division.”

Indeed, I am not a painter, and I don’t know where I fit in the format. What motivates me is the effect of sound on paintings and how both can relate and provoke the development of synchresis – a topic I will later break down and research into my practice.

“The social function of non-representational painting is that Abstract images subordinate the conventional reality to the inner dictates of human consciousness, and thereby functions to create a new reality for the collective perception of society.”

What is abstract art?

While reading Lisa Tallano‘s Why Abstract Painting Now? (2019) explained the ontology of canvases yet to be painted as “something that will soon be covered in clichés”. These clichés are linked to how the artist feels and thinks. Therefore, when one paints abstractly, one get’s rid of these clichés that work as anchors for creativity. One often is obsessed with pictorial organisation, which could also be called social standards. 

Lisa Tallano often quoted Gilles Deleuze, a french philosopher who did remarkable curational work around Film and Fine Art. In regards to Jackson Pollock’s pieces of art, Deleuze stated:

“(…) Pollock’s pictorial space departs from the purely optical to discover more haptic forms of spatialisation.”

Interestingly, this is how Jay Beck describes Lucrecia Martel’s work regarding the use of sound in her films. In La Cienaga, the spectator is not invited into the characters’ minds but is welcome to feel the emotionality sound has towards the scene as aural objects (Metz, 1980). 

What’s next?

Now I have to find ways of learning how to paint. The most plausible is connecting with an artist inside UAL who can help me break down the project.

References

Tallano, L. (2019) Why Abstract Painting Now? New York.

If one goes through the history of Sound in Film, one will eventually come across Walter Murch – a film master who reigned in the 70s with his ideas of film editing, especially sound editing and mixing. He is most known for editing the Sound of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), The Godfather: Part II (1982 – won oscar), The Godfather: Part III (1990), The Conversation (1974), George Lucas‘s American Grafitti (1973), and THX 1138 (1971); and Anthony Minghella‘s The English Patient (1996 – won Oscar). All of these films and many other nominations. Murch is mainly appreciated for his contribution to Film Studies in Editing and Sound Editing, remaining one of the most influential figures in the field. The Blink of an Eye: A perspective on film editing (2005) is still a referent book for many filmmakers, where he encourages them to put aside film technicalities and enhance and value the emotionality of each scene and cut. 

For many years, Walter Murch published many articles about film sound, now available on filmsound.org – a website dedicated to analysing film sound design. He’s papers are quite enjoyable, not only by the romantic and expressive way of his writing, which exalts and puts Sound on a pedestal but also by the passionate way he talks about Sound. We must understand where Murch comes from when reading his book or articles. He is a two-time Academy Award winner who spent most of his life devoted solely to films, surrounded by filmmakers who are also very connected to the western American film scene. I’m talking about the million-dollar quartet of Film in the 70s and 80s: him, Francis Ford Coppola, and George Lucas (not a quartet, but close). They weren’t the million-dollar quartet, but the American Zoetrope, a privately run film production company based in San Francisco, California (currently owned by the Coppola’s – Sofia and Roman). They all went to the same school, The Southern California Film School, studied the same things, and most probably aspired to the same goals.

Stretching Sound to Help the Mind See works as an ode to his career and the history of Fim Sound throughout the XX century and as a request to all sound designers, editors, or in general, filmmakers to think more about Sound. Knowing his career means understanding that he spent more time working than researching. Therefore, his article comes more precisely from a sound enthusiast perspective rather than a scholar’s.

The article begins with a conversation between him and Richard Portman – a fellow mixer on The Godfather (1972), who later won an oscar for best Sound design in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter in 1978. 

“That! was when Sound! was King!”, he said, gesturing dramatically into the upper darknesses of Stage 7.

Stage 7 was where classic film director and owner of Goldwyn Studio Samuel Goldwyn would direct one of his musicals. Walter Murch refers specifically to Whoopee (1930), starring Eddie Cantor and choreographed by Busby Berkeley. He mentioned that back in the day, the man behind the window, Gordon Sawyer, the director of Sound, would be more important than Goldwyn. His “CUTS” were louder and more determinant. When films relied on Vitaphone’s discs – a sound-on-disc system developed by Bell – there was margin to edit. What was recorded on set was what the spectator would hear. Therefore, as Portman said, the Sound would be an authentic “King”. In contrast with contemporary filmmaking, the mand behind the window no longer exists. Instead, there’s hidden somewhere on set a guy tweaking knobs on a vertical sound cart, and his “CUTS” are miserable compared to the cinematographers or, of course, the directors. 

Forty-five years seemed to have turned (sound) from king to footman.

Murch mentions the technical evolution that Sound has undergone, from its appearance to nowadays. From the mid-1920s to the 1930s, many productions had the Vitaphone system, meaning that music, dialogue and sound effects would have to be recorded simultaneously. Vitaphone was later succeeded by analogue optical sound-on-film technologies, Fox’s Movietone. It allowed films to add sound effects in post-production, which back in 1936 was a max of 17 sounds. 

In the beginning of the sound era, it was so astonishing to hear people speak and move and sing and shoot one another in sync that almost any sound was more than acceptable.

Then Walter begins to contrast the human experience with sound recording, referring to the invention of the tinfoil phonograph by Thomas Edison. It was unthinkable to hear oneself till Edison’s apparatus appeared. In Congo, for example, King Ndombe consented to have his voice recorded in 1904 but later regretted it when people cried, “The King sits still, his lips are sealed, while the white man forces his soul to sing!” as his voice was being played back. Interesting contrast.

Optical film was an important invention for Film Sound. From 17 sound effects to thousands, from mono to stereo. However, the sound department needed to follow the speed of technology, which soon became obsolete and forgotten. Talkies dominated the screen and sound star. However, Walter Murch lived in an era where sound design was about the explode again. After a strict post-production that was “bogged down in the bureaucratic and technical inertia at the studios” in Finian’s Rainbow (1968), Francis Ford Coppola didn’t want to go through that sort of process again. That was why he, alongside George Lucas and Murch, moved to San Francisco, where they founded American Zoetrope.

With the invention of the transistor, Coppola went to Hamburg, Germany, to buy brand-new editing and mixing equipment from KEM Studiotechnik. Walter Murch was hired to use them. From Zoetrope, films like The Conversation or American Graffiti were produced with this new gear. However, they weren’t the only ones using the new kit. After the release of The Godfather, Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) topped it, and later after the success of Lucas’s American Grafitti, followed Star Wars (1977), which beat Jaws. Star Wars brought the 70-millimetre Dolby, allowing new developments in Dolby Cinema Sound. Then, in 1979, it came to Apocalypse Now, a new standard came to stay for many more years:

Three channels of sound behind the screen left and right surrounds behind the audience, and low-frequency enhancement.

Murch is talking about the 5.1 sound system. From that point onwards, the sound was set free and evolved ferociously. It now relied on the director’s ability to think of audiovisual depth. As Murch refers, sound can’t be used “flat”. A door closing must mean more than what it represents. The image of a door closing accompanied by the correct “slam” can indicate not only the material of the door and the space around it but also the emotional state of the person closing it.

We do not see and hear a film, we hear/see it”

Walter Murch finishes the article by mentioning the depth or the dimensionality of images and sounds when “stretched too far.” By stretching, he means the layers of juxtaposition and overlapping transients in a scene. When both cooperate, significant meaning and tension come out of it. He culminates with the greatest quote on the whole article:

The moment of greatest dimension is always the moment of greatest tension.

Lastly, Murch questions whether Sight will remain the king and Sounds the Queen. It was later proved wrong by Lucrecia martel, who inverted roles. 

References

Murch, W. (2001) Stretching the sound to help the mind see. San Francisco: filsound.org.