I came to realise that my final project work functions almost like cinema scoring. When I create work it is often, if not always strictly linearly or coherently, soundtracking an imagined scene; the environmental qualities and emotional colour they bring. Often looking to weather as a principle condition, a reflective, material mapping of a soundscape, perhaps illuminates my exploration of wind as a character, as I noted previously. I think this can help my issues with expectations of structure in the composition, getting away from unsuccessfully attempting to pry an unsuitable idea into my work and instead continuing to ‘soundtrack’ the imagined scene with honesty and intuition. Some ideas may require more involved engineering to actualise to a higher standard.
As a learning exercise we improvised sound to the listening scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film ‘The Conversation’. It was challenging to assemble a palette of sound generation tools in Ableton while Gareth kept which film we were scoring from us. I mapped the controller’s knobs to the envelope of Wavetable, feeling that the chief concern should be adaptability and versatility of tone and attack, so that I would be able to pivot between base modes of atmospheric washes and immediate, responsive tension.
The scene in question, despite being stripped of its defining context, was very fragile in my opinion. It concerned the delicacies of reading the facial performances of unheard actors, straining to hear deeply. Gene Hackman’s movements and interaction with his equipment belied a fastidious, routine-engrained understanding of its use. The more we improvised, the more I felt the urge to do less, remove any large gestures that would distract from the quiet intensity and highly specific editing choices already present in the silenced scene. Anything that screamed ‘me’ felt like a disservice. I believe very much in the power of highly frontal, manipulative and direct sound work in film, but my own sensibilities skew toward allowing the visual moment room to breathe. Few things pull me out of the presented world than over-scoring. To a certain extent, I feel that my takes improved as I began to read the scene just from how cogently its edit was cut. Rather than imposition, adapting to how its visual language could suggest an aural language. The brevity of the exercise somewhat denies any traditional notions of success, but I learned a great deal about how I perceive this symbiotic relationship between audio and the visual.
Some of the greatest sound design work in all cinema is found in the films of Jaques Tati, in particular his 1967 perfectionist masterpiece ‘Playtime’. At the beginning of the film, when we hear a bang in a busy airport terminal, we, like the characters we are independently following, search the wide frame to find the source: Our protagonist Hulot dropped his umbrella, entering the film. Stereophonic sound is orchestrated to tell stories, and jokes, in a way quite unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. Distant fragments bob in and out of transparency, wonderful small audio-visual systems that unfold and snowball in incredibly unassuming, background detail. As Michel Chion (2019, pp. 75-76) states, ‘surprise: like the flipside of the image, another film appears that we now see with only our ears… it was all there in the sound and at the same time it wasn’t. Now if we give Bergman back his sounds and Tati his images, everything returns to normal.’ In this way, the painstakingly assembled, almost subliminal soundscape redefines what the audience assumes to be inconsequential action in narrative film. Observe and listen deeply enough, and ‘Playtime’ will reveal new, transcendently genius moments of tiny subtlety endlessly.
Bibliography:
Chion, M. (2019) Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia University Press.