a statement on sound studies

A Statement on Sound Studies: (with apologies to Sergei Eisenstein,Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Alexandrov)

Mark Kerins

Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, Volume 2, Issue 2, Autumn 2008,pp. 115-119 (Article)

Published by Liverpool University PressDOI: 10.1353/msm.0.0046

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Our cherished dreams of a robust field of sound studies are beingrealised. Musicology, having developed some of the earliest techniquesfor studying audio material, is now broadening its reach, applying itsexpertise to aural issues in film, pop music, television, and elsewhere.Cultural studies, likewise, is bringing its insights on reception, use, andaudiences to sound-based concerns. With new journals (including thisone) training their focus on sound, academic publishers releasing moreaudio-oriented research, and a burgeoning group of scholars from previ-ously distinct fields mingling and sharing insights, sound studies may atlast have found its voice.

Those of us who work in film sound studies recognise that, given thelong history of visually-oriented film scholarship, it is necessary andappropriate that much recent work in film sound has drawn as much (ormore) on models originating outside cinema studies as it has on film-specific theory. Historically, academic institutions have tended toprivilege work from established fields; in the case of cinema sound, thishas meant that approaches drawn from music, cultural studies, andelsewhere have provided the predominant analytical models. Indeed, weowe a great debt to the many scholars who have productively deployedthe approaches from their own disciplines onto cinematic sound.

At the same time, this is an opportune moment to make a statement ona number of theoretical principles about film sound, particularly ascurrent scholarly work that relies solely on models from outside cinemamay be hindering the development and improvement of a truly filmicmodel of sound studies.

Here I offer four areas deserving consideration by scholars whatevertheir nominal discipline engaging with cinema and cinema sound. All ofthese issues would benefit greatly from the attention of researchers inmusicology and/or cultural studies, but fall far enough outside the usualboundaries of those fields to be frequently left out of work addressing film

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A Statement on SoundStudies(with apologies to Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Alexandrov)

MARK KERINS

sound from these perspectives, potentially limiting that works reach.These areas concern surround sound, production practices, the relation-ship between sound and music, and the soundtrack as a unified object.

Multi-channel Sound

While 35mm film has remained a constant in the visual aspect of motionpicture distribution, sound exhibition technologies have evolved signifi-cantly since the 1920s. Probably most noticeable among these is the intro-duction of the multi-channel soundtrack, which first appeared in the1940s and has gone through several incarnations since then. Much workon film sound has treated the soundtrack as a single element emanatingfrom the screen, yet this approach has its limitations, particularly whenstudying movies with carefully constructed multi-channel soundscapes.Modern film soundtracks increasingly rely on multi-channel techniquesto convey important spatial information, and on some occasionssurround mixing strategies are even used to convey important plot infor-mation that goes unnoticed when played back in a monophonic or two-channel stereo environment. Just as it would be difficult to write aboutcinematography in The Wizard of Oz after watching it on a black-and-white television, any analysis of a recent film soundtrack based onhearing the movie on a non-surround-equipped system will necessarilyremain incomplete.

This avenue of study offers huge potential, including researchquestions such as how the various audio channels work together and/orin conflict within the same movie; how surround sound changes theaudiences experience of a movie; and why some people concern them-selves with hearing movies in their intended soundtrack configurationwhile others do not (just as customer preferences differ on widescreenversus fullscreen image presentation). These last two questions, inparticular, ought to be examined from a cultural studies perspective.Moreover, multi-channel sound is just one of several technologicalelements of film sound deserving study; other innovations includingrecent changes like the rise of home theatre and increased viewing ofmovies on computers and portable media players also beg analysisthrough lenses that incorporate both film theory and cultural studies.

Production Practices

Many of those who write on film sound, whether from inside or outsidecinema studies, display only a limited understanding of the various

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Mark Kerins A Statement on Sound Studies

processes and people involved in the creation of motion picture sound-tracks. As one common example, there is still a frequent assumption thatonscreen dialogue is recorded on set, despite the pervasiveness ofAutomated Dialogue Replacement (ADR) in modern filmmaking. Thislevel of ignorance about actual production strategies and techniquesresults in incomplete, and possibly inaccurate, analyses; indeed, evenusing such a seemingly fundamental term as sound design is historicallyproblematic, as that designation did not appear until the 1970s, andremains a subject of debate among film sound professionals. More workthat combines primary research (including interviews with film soundprofessionals and study of archival records where available) with a basicunderstanding of common production practices would provide usefulcontext about the ways film soundtracks are made, the possible limita-tions (both technical and aesthetic) filmmakers confront at various times,and why moviemakers arrive at particular decisions.

Awareness of industrial realities can proffer additional insights, espe-cially as the soundtrack is frequently the last part of a movie to becompleted, often on a tight deadline and a tighter budget. One examplefrom my own work: after I noticed that the mixing of one musical themein a film felt at odds with the rest of the soundtrack, a discussion with thefilms sound designer revealed that the cue in question had been addedat the last minute and the crew simply had not had time to situate itproperly in the mix. Even where industrial concerns are not this cut-and-dried, it is worth remembering that decisions about soundtracks likethose about most elements of filmmaking are hybrids of creativeimpulses, technical limitations, and cultural preferences. The text itselfremains of paramount importance, but an understanding of the practicalconcerns of film sound production, and post-production in general, iscrucial to valid and productive analyses.

The Relationship between Sound and Music

Film sound scholarship has frequently and productively borrowed vocab-ulary and methods from music, and this makes sense; pitch, rhythm,harmony, tempo, and other musical terms are often useful ways todescribe sound. Musicologists have also themselves tackled the analysis ofmotion picture scores and other movie music. Music, though, is only oneelement of motion picture sound. The soundtrack also includes voicesand dialogue, ambient sounds, sound effects, and processed elements(like reverb), often all at the same time; musical concepts and termi-nology thus go only so far in analysing the many extra-musical sonic



elements, just as terms from visual art are helpful but ultimately limitedin discussing cinematography. Spatiality and presence, for instance, arecrucial considerations in cinematic soundtracks, yet difficult to discuss inmusical terms.

To date, much cinema sound scholarship whether from scholarsbased in music, cultural studies, or film studies has tended to privilegethe music-driven elements of the soundtrack. Though this work has beenfruitful, as sound studies moves forward it must find ways to expandanalysis beyond music and musicality, in establishing a collective vocabu-lary that moves beyond the classical terms of music to encompass the richvariety and texture of sounds used in the cinema and other audiovisualmedia.

The Complete Soundtrack

Even with a more comprehensive analytic vocabulary, the challenge ofdeveloping a truly integrated sonic analysis model would remain. To drawa further comparison with cinematography, describing the look of a filmsolely in terms of colour, contrast, or lighting, for example, is a futileexercise the overall visual aesthetic is more than, and different from,the sum of its parts. Sound works similarly: much time and effort is spentin post-production melding the diverse elements of the soundtrack intoa coherent whole, and scholars must likewise find ways to analyse sound-tracks in their entirety rather than focusing on each element individually.

Here cinema studies could again profitably learn from researchoutside its traditional purview. Experimental work in psychoacousticsand perception, for instance, might provide a powerful foundation indeveloping a unified approach to soundtrack analysis, given its existingbodies of research on auditory scene analysis (how the brain groups andseparates sounds) and on how audiences decide whether a musical scoregoes with a movie clip. One of the great virtues of the current momentin sound studies is that researchers from disparate areas are applyingmethodologies from their own areas of expertise to new fields this is acrucial first step toward an integrated approach to studying soundtracks,but we must move forward by building on and combining extant strate-gies, not just applying them as is to a different medium.

On the one hand, the explosion of interdisciplinary work on soundfrom a range of scholarly approaches has vigorously rekindled interest insound within cinema studies, pushing the soundtrack to the forefront ofimportant scholarly concerns. On the other, this same breadth ofapproach and desire for interdisciplinary study has pushed the field

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away from medium-specific work to a more generalised sound studieswhich at times neglects evidence, arguments, and theories crucial tocinema studies. This essay, I hope, offers those approaching film soundfrom cultural studies or musicology, for example, a few productivesuggestions; its goal is not to admonish or restrict these scholars, butrather to suggest issues particular to the cinematic medium that mightbenefit from their expertise. As noted at a recent conference, soundstudies is inherently multiple, and film sound studies should continue tocommune with and benefit from non-cinema-specific work.Consideration of the areas explored here should not only strengthen thespecifics of a particular research investigation, grounding it in the tech-nologies and techniques of filmmaking, but should also help expand thefield of sound studies, demonstrating how it can be simultaneously bothmultiple and medium-appropriate.



a statement on sound studies

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