The Alchemy of Sound
The Alchemy of Sound
While it is common to give credit to the composer for creating a films sonic spine with score, it is less common to credit the the sound designer, whose dark alchemy can enhance, propel and comment on a movies narrative in similar and sometimes devious ways. While one could argue that sound design may not have the potency to bring an audience to tears in the way that, say, Itzhak Perlman’s beautiful violin solo’s did in SCHINDLERS LIST, we might agree that successful sound design can and does have a similar effect, yet not in such direct or diegetic ways.
Take these three very simple emotions; anxiety, sadness, happiness. How can a sound designer work in mysterious ways that the composer works in to underscore these feelings in a scene with sound?
Start with anxiety. What's going on when you're anxious? Don't you find that everything in your environment irritates you? The smallest sounds tend to annoy you to no end. Of course the sound designer has complete control over how to highlight these elements to create a more anxious feeling.
Sadness is another one. How do we convey the idea of a world with no joy? Take a scene with the woman who is just lost her husband or perhaps is going through a change of life. Why not slow the world down, in the way that sadness does when you just can't escape it. Remove all “life affirming” sounds from the environment to augment this loss. This is a very simple and tried-and-true technique of environmental manipulation to create this slowing, languid dark world but the sad person lives in but the rest of us don't
And finally, how about happiness? Don’t you find that when you're happy, the world seems harmonious and everything works in concert with your every move. So why can we not create an environment with sound that mirrors that? Even the horn honks and the miscellaneous sound that you hear throughout the day seem to be tuned and pitched to each other as if to say you are conducting the world as your orchestra and making a beautiful piece of music.
Here's a small list of Emotional Sound Beats and ideas to further this discussion.
ISOLATION: Chasing the level of sound around a character (think POV) to enhance or diminish their participation or immersion (or lack there-of) in their surroundings.
FEAR: Heartbeat and rate is a common signal of fear but overused as a movie trope. Many other rhythmic environmental elements can be used to the same effect. It’s not so much the timbral “lub-dub” that defines the heartbeat as it’s predictable 60 beats a minute. Leverage these rhythms with other sounds to accelerate or slow down pace and tension to play with fear.
HAPPINESS: using sounds that evoke or represent calm, predictability, or familiarity. This can be quite subjective as a character raised in an orphanage might find being surrounded by voices comforting vs a character raised in a suburb would find the sound of a distant lawn mower.
OBSESSION: Obsession, at it’s core is exclusionary. To be obsessed with something means to be oblivious to all other choices. Explore the use of aural “selective focus” to inform/disinform the audiences point of view. Of course obsession is a wholly personal, hence internal state of mind. How can sound leverage one characters point of view to augment their focus?
POVERTY: Costume is often left to do the heavy lifting here but sound can help the costumer in subtle ways. Don’t we make a sub-conscious judgment when someone, walks and their shoes squeak. Don’t we think “They probably can’t afford new shoes”?
QUIETUDE: The interesting thing about quiet is that it’s hard to have it read without occasional sounds to interrupt it. I learned this from Joe Dante who told me that painters use a little bit of blue to make white seem more “white”. It’s this idea of contrast that draws attention to what’s missing. You don’t really know something is really quiet until another thing makes a sound that is louder than it. My young son would be terrified by how quiet the house was but it was really the very random ticks and creaks and sounds of the house cooling at night that drew his attention. The sounds that defined the silences. Try this to create atmosphere in empty rooms and spaces by making your own little interruptions.
SLOTH: I suppose that hearing excessive clothing noise, foley cloth-like sounds might indicate a person who doesn’t attend to how they dress themselves. Of course clatter underfoot when a person walks about their residence indicates someone sloppy or slovenly. I like playing with the rhythms of characters footsteps as one way to comment on either their “precision” or adding scuffles and shuffles to indicate a sloppy gate.
DANGER: Biologically, we are wired for all senses to go on high alert when sensing danger. That means that our auditory pathways become much keener at picking up sound than in their normal state. Use this kind of “amplification” idea to enhance sound when danger is present. What sounds is the audience (or the character) able to hear in higher fidelity or definition that it couldn’t before?
BLACK OUT: When a character has amnesia or a flashback or black-out moment, it’s exciting to do less than more. Work with the composer to remove ALL sound, literal digital 0’s, for a moment. We did this in FURY ROAD as Max mounts the war rig in the climactic chase. Takes all the air out of the room.
GEOGRAPHY: A favorite term of mine for this is “expanding the frame”. What sounds can you place off-camera that gives clues as to “where” a character is.
GODLINESS: Sound can impart an otherworldly quality to character . For Jafar in the first Aladdin film, we never used footsteps for him to imply that he floated a few inches above the ground. In THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, Obi Wan Kenobi’s voice from the beyond was put only in the surrounds to give a quality of lacking “presence” on screen.
ATUNEMENT/DISCORD: Doesn’t it seem that when your life is working in every way possible, the sound of the world is a song, a beautiful harmony of sounds written for your enjoyment? There is no dissonance in your life emotionally and, hence, aurally. Why not use sound to mirror these contrasting states with harmony and dissonance. When at one with the world all sound is major key, never flat or sharp and rhythmically balanced. When in conflict, sounds are harsh, dissonant and lacking in predictable rhythms.
PARANOID: In BLACK MASS, a film about Boston’s crime boss Whitey Bulger, we built atmospheres for the city that had oppressive amounts of police sirens wherever Whitey went. No matter how urban or suburban the location, there was a siren wailing somewhere in the distance, reminding he and the audience that the police weren’t far away, augmenting his paranoid state of mind.
POWERFUL: All manner of the sound designers armamentarium can be brought to bear to indicate power/strength vs submission/weakness. The first and most obvious is volume. We naturally ascribe power to the loudest sound and this includes the human voice. Use this tool in conversation as a subtle differentiation tool. Try, too, the use of pitch as we associate lower frequencies with greater strength. Try these techniques with other sounds including footsteps (heroes have deeper, stronger strides) or gunshots (heroes guns are louder and boomier) Even the reverb characteristics surrounding a characters voice can subtly imply power through “presence” and weakness through distance.
ANNOYING: We tend to recoil at predictable frequencies and sounds in our interaction with others. These include the frequency of a persons voice (higher is more annoying) and the articulation (or lack there of) in the manner of persons speech. EQ can be a handy tool, accentuating the fundamental frequencies of speech (around 2500Hz) to make a persons voice more annoying. Additionally, most of us are put off by a lisp, sibilance and the various watery, labial sounds of a person with bad diction. Why not add these elements back in to a characters voice?
PHYSICALITY: Again, foley can be a useful tool for things that we can’t see. In THE 5th ELEMENT, Gary Oldman’s character walked with a limp. We thought it would be interesting to comment on that by not only accenting the footfall of his limp leg but implying it was made of metal with a distinct resonant “tink” on each of those footfalls.
NERVOUSNESS: Becoming aware of a persons breathing is a valuable aural technique to draw attention to a characters emotional or physical state. Try emphasizing or adding breathing for a character to increase the audiences awareness. We also know that nervous people “fidget”. They literally “can’t stand still”. Try having the character jingle his keys in his pocket. What about having the character drum their fingers or tap their foot nervously off camera? These are actions not photographed yet can be implied with sound to indicate the characters emotional state.
Its interesting that we make unconscious or subconscious decisions through what we hear. These are no less powerful forces on the audience than the diegetic or direct narrative use of sound.
Tuesday, August 1, 2017