As I began
thinking about my dissertation topic for this year’s Honours Project, I kept
thinking about last year’s Audio Production Methods module. As I have a very
big interest in film sound design and how sound works in films, it was easily
my favourite module of the whole Year 3. With last year’s blog, I have done
tremendous amount of work on trying to analyse different movies as best as I
could, with the still limited knowledge and there were some very interesting
findings. But, in order to analyse the sound in those movies I had to learn a
bit about the concepts and theories behind how sound works in films. In order
to do that, I have read two books: “Audio-vision” by Michel Chion and
“Analysing Popular Music” by David Machin.
Chion’s book is widely regarded as
one of the best publications on film sound theories. It took me a good time to
finish it though, as it is written in a sometimes difficult to understand
language and also the author keeps introducing new concepts and theories (that
names of are sometimes in original French) that it was really hard to grasp
everything easily, so I ended up re-reading some chapters to make sure I really
understood everything. Chion’s book really opened my eyes (or ears, rather) onto
how much really goes into a film soundtrack. He defines a lot of different
concepts according to which we can analyse sound in film. Something completely
new at that time for me was the concept of Point of View, or Point of Audition
(POA) in this case. According to this principle sound, like image, can
represent someone’s point of audition, i.e. what that person is hearing. That
opens up interesting sound design opportunities as we can tell a lot about what
that person is feeling, for example, just by using sound. This has got
tremendous potential for interesting sound design and used well is a great tool
for enhancing the storytelling.
Machin’s
book is not exactly a book strictly on film sound, but it features a very
fascinating chapter on analysing a sequence from a film. Machin does so using
the opening to 1992 ‘The Cliffhanger’ as an example. What I found even more
intriguing about Machin’s book however is that he introduces a concept of
‘sound modality’. Modality is a term usually related to images and describes
how real or exaggerated something is. In relation to sound, modality can mean
that a soundtrack is realistic or stylized. Machin introduces this concept as a
criteria with which to analyse film soundtracks. I found this very interesting
and have analysed several film soundtracks according to their ‘modality’ and
‘soundscape fidelity’ (another concept introduced in Machin’s book) during last
year’s Audio Production Methods module.
I have
speculated in one of the posts in last year’s blog that I could possibly expand
those concepts further in the Honours Project. Doing all the film analysis last
year was really interesting and a valuable learning experience and doing
something like that, but on a bigger scale, would definitely be something that
I would like to try. Also, by doing all the legwork of analysing the films last
year it could help greatly this year in preparation for the dissertation.
Therefore,
at this moment in time my very rough idea for the dissertation project is:
“Modality in film sound.”
