Importance Of Sound In Film Film Studies Essay

Importance Of Sound In Film Film Studies Essay all told individual who watches a film knows too well that the choice of medication, survive track and any nigh new(prenominal) voice that allow for be present in the film affect the viewers perception of that specific film. on that point argon quiet films and sound films. Silent films atomic number 18 those that are dominated by perspectives and other contents in the film, where in that respect is less dialogue between the film characters and even the choice of medical supernumeraryty is very specific, slow, moving almost playing mildly form the cover chargeground. The sound in the film excessively dictates the viewers opinion of the film, how they feel considering the emotions that the music or the sound effect impact in them.Considering these cardinal films, 2001 space odyssey by Stanley Kubrick and the hushings by Alfred Hitchcock 1963, they totally contradicting. The shits are full of sound and music where every scene is accompanied by corresponding music while 2001 is full of silence. Although different viewers have different views on films depending on mavins taste, preference and choice, most people find sound films more thrilling and enkindle to watch while quite a majority claim to get bored by silent films.The opening sequence to The Birds serves as an entry to the non-musical, solely-sonic domain of its soundtrack. High contrast visual abstractions of birds move crosswise the frame, half-photographed, half-animated. Concurrently, squeals and squawks attack the viewers ears. These sounds have a bird resembling quality about them, but it soon becomes apparent that the sounds are more alien than avian, more artificial than natural. Produced by electronic music, the processing of the sounds utilizes many stylistic traits completed in the field of musique concrete. In this case, taped sounds of birds are altered in pitch, tone, duration and shape, and then confused into a multi-laye red cacophony of screeches and flapping sounds in sync with the animated silhouettes of bird shapes. Having been cued to read a mimetic representation of birds with the title The Birds, we are jettisoned into experiencing a sensation of birdness. At points the sounds of birds will be the symbolic conveyance of invisible panic at moments their silence will mark their deathly presence. In short, all modes of audio-visual icon exude dread as they carry the potential to be diametrically inverted. This is nothing short of a terror of illusion a specifically audio-visual illusion central to The Birds psychological horror.The psycho-acoustic manipulations which characterize the memorial determination of The Birds come into play immediately. The first scene set in the bird shop is a outstandingly long one where slight plot and character information is imparted. Melanie (Tippi Hedren) orders a bird she meets and plays a high on Mitch (Rod Taylor) he uncovers her pose as a saleslady after a heated substitution she decides to buy him the birds he was after. Throughout this scene one of many well-worn, domestic exchanges a wall of bird mental disturbance blankets all dialogue, forcing the audience to selectively mask out the high frequency information of bird noise from the mid-range tones of the actors voices. While one can readily perform this complex perceptual manoeuvre in reality, many films will selectively reduce the volume of background noise to privilege on-screen dialogue. The fact that The Birds refrains from this indicates that the noise level is deliberately maintained to build auditory stress within the viewer as a means of destabilization. You are subtly yet fundamentally being introduced to the unsettled psychological state which will eventually befall all the characters of the film as they are terrorized by bird noise.Just as bird noise has already been subliminally ear-marked to trigger anxiety whenever it recurs, so is extended silence now signposted as an aural appendage to telescoped viewpoints. A lack of sound will mean someone (or something) is watching. There is much that is pregnant in The Birds due to a distribution of radical imbalances between the audio and propose tracks. The highest degree of this is to be found in the absence seizure of music. Save for a piano, a radio and some children singing (all which occur within the visual diegesis) in that location is not a single note of orchestrate music sounded for the films duration. The soundtrack of The Birds is literally that voices, sounds, atmospheres. No violins. It rejects all musical coding traditionally employed to inform us of how we should care/think/feel/project at any point in the film. The absence of music is a specific sound of silence which capaciously enhances the Birds peculiarly perverse dramatic tone. Picture one of many silent Melanies locked into a seductive gravitational sway with her birds as she navigates the winding road up to Bodeg a Bay. She resembles an entranced conductor orchestrating her droning car engine. No purpose. No reason. No emotion. No music.The birds themselves narratively thrive in non-musical silence. Rather than embodying or transmitting a superimposed musical logic which tags them as monstrous, malicious and maniacal, they accost in their own voice to their own kind. Their language is foreign, alien, avian, excluding us from the inner mechanisms of their motives and operations. In sync with a decultured slant on nature, these birds simply have no concept of the human. Accordingly, human musical codes do not stick. No JAWS-style orchestral throbbing salaciously trumpets their arrival. As in their attack of the children playing cunning Mans Bluff at a birthday party, the birds orchestrate and enact a cacophony upon their arrival. Balloons burst, children scream, feathers flutter and beaks peck, all played against a continual delivery of bird squawks. In the absence of music, all sound become s terror gulls and children scream alike (Schwam 1).A peculiar type of silencing occurs when Melanie waits for Cathy a silencing through music. Most of the following incidents are covered by an irritating cannon voiced by the lacksadasical tones of children singing in school. After the cackly climax of the Brenner attack, Melanie cautiously checks the attic. All is still and quiet until she unwittingly shines a torch on the massed birds roosted there like a cancer within the household. They swoop on her as she flails her arms desperately like a man trying to fly. Her cries for help slowly disintegrate into a field of whimpers and gasps. The birds terrorize us from above with sophistication and precision dreamed of in military aviation. They feed off our cadavers in scornful piecemeal fashion. And in a fitful triumph of the sonic, they peck out our eyes. As we die and dethaw to black, so does the films sun set, blurring the calm chattering of all those gathered birds into an agit ated chorus that reverberates deep in the caves of the hollow sockets which were once our eyes (2-3).Stanley Kubricks 2001 space odyssey is a profound, visionary and astounding film (a mysterious inkblot test film-blot) and a tremendous visual experience. This epic film contained more spectacular imagery (about what space looked like) and special effects than verbal dialogue. Viewers are left to experience the non-verbal, mystical vastness of the film, and to subjectively return into their own subconscious and into the films pure imagery to speculate about its meaning. Many consider the masterpiece bewildering, boring, slow or annoying, but are still inspired by its story of how man is dwarfed by applied science and space.The first spoken word is almost a half hour into the film, and theres less than 40 proceedings of dialogue in the entire film. Much of the film is in dead silence (accurately depicting the absence of sound in space), or with the sound of human breathing within a spacesuit. Kubricks sci-fi experiment think to present its story almost purely with visual imagery and auditory signals with very little communicative human dialogue (similar to what was attempted in the surreal, fragmented, non-narrative imagery of the Qatsi trilogy. All scenes in the film have both dialogue or music (or silence), but never both together. They hypnotically circle around the black mark Floyd bashfully touches it with his thick glove. A photographer prepares a group of them to line up and pose onward the totem-like monolith like typical tourists, recording the moment of their visit. Just as their picture is taken, a ray of sunshine strikes the monolith signalling the end of the dark, 14-day lunar night. It is the Dawn of the Moon. Again, the glowing Sun, Moon and Earth have formed a copulative orbital configuration. And then suddenly, the object emits an ear-piercing, electronic screeching noise. The group is stunned and staggers reeling helplessly back as their helmet headphones are filled with the blasted signal.Music plays a crucial part in 2001, and not only because of the relatively sparse dialogue. From very early on in production, Kubrick decided that he cute the film to be a primarily non-verbal experience, one that did not rely on the traditional techniques of narrative cinema, and in which music would play a vital role in evoking particular moods. In this respect, 2001 harks back to the central power that music had in the era of silent film (Allison 1-2).The film is remarkable for its modern use of unadulterated music taken from existing commercial records. Major feature films were (and still are) typically accompanied by elaborate film scores and/or songs written especially for them by headmaster composers. But although Kubrick started out by commissioning an original orchestral score from composer Alex North, he after discard this, opting instead for pre-recorded tracks sourced from existing recordings, becoming o ne of the first major movie directors to do so, and beginning a trend that has now become commonplace (3-4).On 2001 Kubrick did much of the filming and editing, using as his guides the classical recordings which eventually became the music track. In March of 1966 MGM became concerned about 2001s progress and Kubrick put together a show reel of footage to the ad hoc soundtrack of classical recordings. The studio bosses were delighted with the results and Kubrick decided to use these guide pieces as the final musical soundtrack, and he abandoned Norths score. Unfortunately Kubrick failed to inform North that his music had not been used, and to his great dismay, North did not discover this until he saw the movie at the premire. Norths soundtrack has since been recorded commercially and was released presently before his death. Similarly, Ligeti was unaware that his music was in the film until alerted by friends. He was at first cheerless about some of the music used, and threatened le gal action over Kubricks use of an electronically enured recording of Aventures in the interstellar hotel scene near the end of the film (Kolker 5-7).HALs haunting version of the common song Daisy Daisy (Daisy Bell) was inspired by a computer synthesised arrangement by Max Mathews, which Arthur C. Clarke had heard in 1962 at the Bell Laboratories Murray Hill facility when he was coincidentally visiting friend and colleague joke Pierce. At that time, a remarkable speech synthesis demonstration was being performed by physicist John Larry Kelly, junior who created one of the most famous moments in the history of Bell Labs by using an IBM 704 computer to synthesize speech. Kellys voice recorder synthesizer vocoder recreated the song Daisy Bell, with Max Mathews providing the musical accompaniment. Arthur C. Clarke was so impressed that he later told Kubrick to use it in the film. When HAL disconnects the life support systems, we see a flashing warning sign, COMPUTER MALFUNCTION, sho wn full-screen and accompanied only by the sound of a shrill alarm beep this is intercut with static shots of the hibernating astronauts, encased in their sarcophagus-like pods, and close-up full-screen shots of the life-signs monitor of each astronaut. As the astronauts begin to die, the warning changes to LIFE FUNCTIONS CRITICAL and we see the vital signs on the monitors beginning to level out. Finally, when the three sleeping astronauts are dead, there is only silence and the ominously banal flashing sign, LIFE FUNCTIONS TERMINATED (Fiona 6-8).The film industry has made a tremendous progress when it comes to sound films. Film producers have modern and special gadgets that can incorporate any tripe of music or track any sound that the movie producer desires. It does not matter what the genre of the film is, there are all types of sounds and music to accompany the theme, environment and character traits of the actors and basically capture the desired mise en scene of the film.