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WRI-101: Voice, Noise, Sound, Sense.

A section of Davidson College's Writing Program, exploring the intersections of sound-studies and writing instruction.

Schafer

by

Film as a Sonic Art

By James Shakow

Because the importance of sound in my life up until this class has been a rather colloquial thing, I think it is best to start off with a story. When I was a kid I was a listener. I listened more than I ever talked. I would generally speak in whispers, and would always get flak from my grandparents when talking to them on the phone because of it. However, my days of being a quiet kid quickly ended in middle school when I was able to find a voice in theater. Up on stage I grew to enjoy the funny sounds that people can make and learned how to control and use my voice. There was something so strange about the way people talked when they spoke in front of an audience. I’d even change myself, something deeper and stronger, but nothing quite natural. I wanted to be able to act in a real voice, to make sounds without straining so I moved into film. I learned to direct, and found myself in charge of my first movie by the end of high school. As someone who loves sound, I felt that it would be essential to the movie. Not just the characters speaking, but the music itself, the wind and the birds, the sounds of a car, a typewriter. I borrowed a microphone from a friend and a camera from the library to set out to record a movie and all the sounds I needed. On that first day my hatred for noise began.

Brigitte Wilson with her makeshift microphone at the Georgetown beach

It was a bright day, a little after noon, two actors and a co-director helping me out on a small beach beside the Potomac river. We’d gone over lines, set up the camera, taped the mic onto the end of a long stick and a cardboard tube, and set out to shoot our scene. About 20 seconds into the take a plane flew by overhead. It was understandable, Georgetown is right next to an airport, so we decided to reset the shoot and try again. For the first few times it was funny. It took all day to get the shots we needed. By the time we were able to get enough takes without aviatory interruption the sunlight had changed so much that we already knew the shadows had changed completely. The next morning we got up early to check the audio and video we had recorded. The wind had ruined every single shot. The good ones and the bad ones. We hadn’t used the right air filter. Unwanted noise had come in and ruined every shot, in one way or another.

Aligning microphone dialogue with camera audio in ‘Rules to Live by’

I have since learned the difference between sound and noise, and in a film, that difference is vitally important. First and foremost, the most important sound in a movie is typically the dialogue. The words the characters are speaking. Schafer would define that kind of sound as a ‘signal’ sound, or a “foreground sound”. A sound that “must be listened to” in order to advance the plot (Schafer, 101). In amateur filmmakinng, achieving this alone can be hard enough. Getting a clear audio recording on a windy day, or trying to record a whisper on a crowded street can be near impossible, so that is the first hurdle I sought to overcome. Michel Chion believes that the very presence of a human voice in a film “structures the sonic space around it”, that everything we think about in a film comes in context of the voice (5). I would argue the opposite. As important as speech is, the other sound in the soundscape affects the way we understand these signals. Though the plot of a movie is understood through signals like dialogue, the underlying ‘keynote’ sounds are more important to the telling of a story.

The Diner scene in ‘Perspective’ required half of the restaurant to shut down for a shoot

Schafer’s subconscious keynote sounds tell us more about the story than words ever could.  These are sounds that have “imprinted themselves so deeply on the people hearing them that life without them would be sensed as a distinct impoverishment”. They define landscapes, affect behavior of societies, and have a “deep and persuasive influence on our behaviors and moods”(Schafer, 101). If a scene is set on a beach, it is essential to hear the waves. If we are driving down a highway, the scene would feel strange without the sounds of passing cars. While these sounds are not as pertinent to the plot of the film, they create an environment for us to feel. Even in the first few movies I made, I realized that these keynotes would be essential to the process. I tried my best to fully capture the important pieces. The sounds of birds for instance could convey freedom, the sounds of a diner could make a scene feel homely. They rarely went farther than that, but I knew that they were essential to the character and plot of the film. Creating non-diegetic (not coming from on screen) soundscapes can make us recall certain emotions even without a direct connection to plot. These sounds behind the signals can tell us more about the way a character thinks than the words they are able to say.

When a film is near completion, sound files can become messy. Each blue box is a separate audio file.

Going into this class, I did not know I wanted to be a filmmaker. Taking ‘Voice, Noise, Sound and Sense’ alongside my film classes has given me a way to articulate my desires for sound in film. It has given me a language to speak in and a broader context to consider sound in film. For every sound scholar and listening activity, I could find a way to connect them with my life and film. In my first writing project (The Invisible Grain) I talked about how Jordan Scott’s poetic book ‘blert’ was intentionally unclear in order to send a particular message to an audience. It made me question if my storytelling methods were as unique in sound as they were visually. The concept of Ideophones, that some words and noises are universally understood across the barrier of language, piqued my curiosity for the second project (Universality in Language). I concluded that words inherently have more meaning associated behind them than you can find in a dictionary. The closest corollary is the music that I have put in my films. Specifically composed, it was made entirely to give off a certain feeling without any words. My third and final writing project (Noise Extremes; the Soundscapes of a Davidson Saturday Night) concluded that noise can be beautiful, and no matter how universally hated it can be, there is still reason for its existence. In film, every noise has a specific purpose to it. The soundscape is so carefully curated that nothing is wasted, every sound is there for a reason.

An actor in ‘Galveston’ attempts some creative mic placement in order to capture the sound of his voice

While my movies have only now begun to make sense, that is only the first step on the journey. I’m still not fully confident in getting a good recording. It’s still tough to set up the mics and do everything right, but someday I won’t have to worry about any of that. Through the painstaking reality of recording audio, my love for sound has faded. I have raged against drumming fingers and low summer breezes, passing cars and airplanes, I have sought to control the uncontrollable soundscapes that surround me. Sooner or later, I will realize how to do it right, how to embrace the little sounds in recordings and notice them in everyday life. At some point I want to focus on the sound more than anything else. I want be be able to create new sounds and eventually whole soundscapes to express my thought in film. When people think of a director’s style, they often consider it visually. It is easy to focus on Wes Anderson’s unique camera movement, or the way Tarantino makes his cuts, but even more unique to me now is the sound. The role sound plays in film is often greatly overshadowed by the visual. It seems counterintuitive, but one must go to great lengths to make a film sound natural. While the plot and genre of a movie can be expressed in words, greatness in film comes from sound.

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