III. Sound as Media

3. Film Sound

1. Film sound theories (Chion & Altman)

2. Voice and recording (Lastra & Doane)

3. Sound in new media (Whittington)

4. Sound in experimental media narratives (Chion & Toop on the work of Hill & Cardiff)

• Added Value• Synchresis• Vococentrism• Verbocentrism• Music: empathetic / anempathetic• Spotting

Chion’s Key Concepts:

Fallacies In Film Sound Theory:

1. Historical

Fallacies In Film Sound Theory:

1. Historical

2. Ontological

Fallacies In Film Sound Theory:

1. Historical

2. Ontological

3. Reproduction

Fallacies In Film Sound Theory:

1. Historical

2. Ontological

3. Reproduction

4. Nominalism

Fallacies In Film Sound Theory:

1. Historical

2. Ontological

3. Reproduction

4. Nominalism

4.5 Cinema as index

Fallacies In Film Sound Theory:

• The body in cinema is a fantasmatic body, it offers up a support and point of identification for the subject. (unity and presence)

• The “addition” of sound (synchronous

dialogue) offers the opportunity of representing a fuller and more organically unified body

The Voice in the Cinema:

• Voice must be anchored by a given body, and the body must be anchored in a given space (p. 164)

• Voice-off and Voiceover• Visibility and audibility• Cinematic spaces: 3 types• Silence• Uncanny• Power

• Pleasure of hearing• Overhearing and voyeurism• Psychoanalytic theories of unity

and separation• The “sonorous envelope”

Doane’s main points in her discussion of cinematic voice and space :

• Politics of the voice• Feminism• Voice of the mother in

psychoanalysis• Voice of the patriarchal order• Voice as other

1. Phonographic (perceptual fidelity): simulation

2. Telephonic (intelligibility): writing

2 Models of sound recording in film:

• Dialogue recording from the early 1930s onwards

• Telephonic - minimizing reverberation, background noise, and speech idiosyncrasy;

• Maximizing “directness” and “frontality” of recording and the intelligibility of dialogue;

• Statistically dominant• Sound as intelligible structure

Narrative priority:

• Simulation model – representing the experience of hearing within the diegesis

• The “invisible witness” model of narration

• POA // POV – humanized machine perception

• Narratively important and perceptually specific

• Sound as event

Point of Audition: