"Film Sound: Theory and Practice" is a collection of editorials, articles and essays that broadly talk about different concepts around film sound design. The editors of the book complain that film sound design is vastly under researched subject and claim that simply not enough have been written about the subject, especially compared to film msuci scoring. This general consensus seems to repeat itself in other publications on film sound as well. This makes a very interesting point, because it provides me a very strong rationale on why to do a film sound specific Dissertation Project!
There are many great texts in this book, but possibly the next biggest breakthrough came after reading a chapter entitled "Fundamental Aesthetics of Sound in the Cinema". This is the exact idea that I want my Dissertation to be! In this chapter David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson present us with some very engaging writing. They claim that sound can actively shape the way we interpret images in film. They give an example of an obscure film 'Letter from Siberia' from 1957. The director Chris Maker demonstrates how powerful sound can be and he it affects the way we interpret scenes in the movie. In the film, we see a sequence of scene that repeats three times, each time with a different sound accompanying the picture. A full detailed analysis per-scene is presented in the book and provides a very interesting concept to explore further in the Dissertation.
Furthermore, in ths chapter, there are presented criteria according to which we can analyse sound in films. Authors make a classification of properties of sound, like Acoustic (loudness, pitch & timbre), and also Rhytm, Fidelity and Space. They also talk about sound diegesis, which is explored in an even more detail in "Audio-vision" by Chion.
All in all, I am very happy that I started reading this book. This is the first time all semester that I really feel like I am making some progress!
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