Sound Design Theory and Practice

Working with Sound

Leo Murray

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317298236
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Categoría: Arti performative

Sound Design Theory and Practice is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the concepts which underpin the creative decisions that inform the creation of sound design.

A fundamental problem facing anyone wishing to practice, study, teach or research about sound is the lack of a theoretical language to describe the way sound is used and a comprehensive and rigorous overarching framework that describes all forms of sound. With the recent growth of interest in sound studies, there is an urgent need to provide scholarly resources that can be used to inform both the practice and analysis of sound. Using a range of examples from classic and contemporary cinema, television and games this book provides a thorough theoretical foundation for the artistic practice of sound design, which is too frequently seen as a 'technical' or secondary part of the production process.

Engaging with practices in film, television and other digital media, Sound Design Theory and Practice provides a set of tools for systematic analysis of sound for both practitioners and scholars.

1

INTRODUCTION

This book began with the desire to improve the alignment of the teaching of sound design concepts with sound design practice.¹ For anyone wishing to integrate the analysis or theory of sound design with the practice of sound design there remains a substantial gap in the existing literature between the analysis of the finished article and the practice that creates it. For any practitioner working to create the soundtrack for documentary and drama production, or the interactive sound design for digital video games, the work presents an array of challenges and requires a range of skills, both technical and artistic, which deserve articulation in their own right. Apart from purely theoretical disquisitions on sound, industry practice may be conveyed by practitioners themselves reflecting on their own work or by interviews with practitioners in more academic texts. However, currently there are few texts that tie theory and practice together systematically. That is the aim of this book.

Previous generations of sound practitioners often learnt their craft through an apprenticeship model in which the student sat at the teacher’s side gradually soaking up experience from real-world examples. The artistic and technical demands of the work could be learned side by side under the guidance of an experienced hand. Contemporary training is more likely to be through technical and tertiary institutions, rather than through a master-apprentice model, and this should ideally provide the opportunity for teaching theory alongside practical instruction. There is a sizable proportion of people working in the industry who may not have formally studied sound but who nevertheless have arrived at a position in the industry through a combination of talent, providence and the motivation to learn for themselves through practice.

Studying sound design involves a range of approaches to the treatment of sound. Sounds may originate from authentic recordings, or may be replaced in a studio, or even designed from scratch.² Music may be written for the production or the production may be edited to fit the music. Sometimes the focus is on accurate and faithful recordings, and other times on the wholesale replacement or careful editing of the original recordings in such a way as to hide the artifice of the process. The real happily lives alongside the fabricated. The synchronous coexists with the asynchronous. Each and every sound element can be subsumed by the needs of the story being told or the game being played. When combined with the images, subtle or major changes in meaning or emphasis are routinely discovered, discarded, or built upon.

In this environment, the aim of this book is to illuminate some of the processes at work in the creation of the soundtrack in such a way as to make it of practical use to those working in the industry, and to those engaged in studying, analysing and teaching sound. Where traditional analytical approaches focus on the product, the aim of this more practitioner-based approach is also to give due attention to the process. A practice-centred model has been adopted in which the theory and concepts can be applied in the context of the actual practice. The aim is therefore to devise a theory of sound design based on the actual practice of sound designers.

In working on various productions and in teaching the practice of sound design I have found many enlightening works of theory written from the perspectives of the critic, analyst or theorist, as well as interviews and articles from practitioners. However, the two have rarely correlated and there has appeared to be a disconnection between the theory and the practice. This was particularly true in the area of sound design, which has been comparatively neglected in film theory. There appeared to be an opportunity to address two issues simultaneously by articulating a theory of sound design, firmly grounded in industry practice. This book, therefore, addresses the following question:

What theoretical model best matches how sound is used by sound designers in actual practice?

The soundtrack and the depth and complexity of work that leads to the creation of the soundtrack are often ignored altogether, reduced to a series of seemingly purely technical stages. The quotation below, from 1938, illustrates the long-held view that from an outside perspective the production of the soundtrack is seemingly pre-occupied with the technical details of microphones, mixers, equalisers and the like:

When you hear a famous violinist in Carnegie Hall you think of him only as a great creative artist – certainly not as a mechanical technician. Yet, if you were to spend hour after hour with him during practice, it is probable that you would become quite conscious of the meticulous placing of his fingers on the strings, his bowing, and even the kind of strings used on the violin. If, during all this time he appeared by necessity to be engrossed with technique, it is quite possible that when you went to the concert you would still think of him as a fine technician and of his violin as a mere mechanical tool. His concert would actually be just as beautiful a creation, but your point of view would have spoiled your appreciation of it.

It is fortunate that the audience seeing a finished picture has not seen it being rehearsed over and over again in the re-recording rooms. If the re-recorder is successful, the audience is not conscious of his technique but only of the result achieved. The director and producer watching the re-recorder work out the details, however, may think him and his tools very mechanical, for in spite of what is going on inside his head (the important part of re-recording), his hands are performing a multitude of mechanical operations, and his conversations with his assistants are in terms of machines.

(Research Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 1938, 72)

The musical analogy is a useful one. In order to produce anything approaching a pleasant sound, one must first master the mechanical and technical aspects of the instrument so that they become invisible to the listener. Sound practitioners are all too aware that often the better their work the more invisible it becomes. To the audience there may be no appreciation at all that any work has gone into the production of the sound track.

To those involved in video games, television or film production, but not directly in sound, the process could be seen as mysterious, technical or irrelevant. On a film set, for example, the majority of the film crew are concerned with the production of image, including the camera, gripping, lighting, art, hair, make-up and so on. Their work is visible, particularly where on set video playback shows the fruits of their labour. Conversely, the sound crew typically comprises just two people and often only they are aware of what is being recorded, with the other crew being in the sonic equivalent of ‘the dark’. Headphones give access to a separate world denied to the others. Conversely, the work of other departments is often visible first hand, but also through the camera’s lens and onto the playback screen. Any problems, solutions or changes in the sonic world are all but hidden.

It is readily accepted that the photographer (or cinematographer) must fully understand and master the technology and techniques of the camera in order to produce artistic work. The means of producing the art become irrelevant once the art is exhibited. Sound could and should be perceived in a similar way. However, due to a lack of awareness, knowledge and understanding of its processes it is relegated to a secondary, subsidiary or worse still purely technical series of processes, rather than an artistic enterprise. Akin to the photographer’s camera or the violinist’s instrument, the sound practitioner uses techniques and technologies that need to be understood and mastered in order to create the artwork, which is hidden once the work is performed or exhibited.

This book intends to form a theoretical and conceptual foundation to the practice of sound design, which is too frequently seen as a ‘technical’ or secondary part of the production process. It is hoped that this will facilitate a means of analysing and describing the ways in which sound, in its broadest sense, can be used to ‘create meaning’. As well as being of some practical use to those engaged in the study and practice of sound design, it is also hoped that delineating the theoretical underpinnings of sound design practice will contribute in some way to the perception of sound design as a creative enterprise, rather than a predominantly technical one.

While I was researching sound theory, film theory and film criticism, I was also working on films, watching films and reading various practitioners’ own writing about their methods and approaches. In reading the practitioners’ opinions and descriptions of their own working practices, it seemed that there were commonalities and methods of work that were partly attributable to schools of thought or industrial and organisational structures. There also appeared to be commonalities in their working methods that seemed to reveal a consistent and meaningful approach to the production of the soundtrack. Their approach was not typically concerned with the technical details or the minutiae of the sonic elements, but with the overall effect of the sound and picture combination as a whole. There was an overriding emphasis on the story, and how the sound helps to tell the story. The function of the soundtrack, rather than its components, increasingly became the focus of my research. What does each part do, in terms of the overall story? How are these effects achieved? How do sound design professionals see their role and their work?

If the fundamental role of the soundtrack is to help tell the story, then accordingly the fundamental role of the sound design practitioner is also to help tell the story. Taking this seemingly common-sense, but altogether necessary, starting point, it follows that the sound choices – whether they are about the clarity of a line of dialogue, the choice and timing of music against a sequence of images, the suggestive possibilities of the background ambiences, or the realistic portrayal of an event – are all concerned with how they help to tell the story.

This led to an examination of theories that had been used in film, thus far, to see what might be most suited to the particular function of explaining sound design. The field of semiotics has provided a good deal of the raw theoretical material from which film theory has grown. Semiotics is the study of signs, and for many people (myself included), signs are a tremendously useful way of thinking about how we make sense of the world. The ideas of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure have been adapted by generations of theorists in a range of academic fields. The Saussurean model of the sign, or an adaptation of it (Barthes 1968; 1972; Metz 1974), is most frequently used in film analysis. Saussure’s model, developed from his study of linguistics, takes into account the arbitrary nature of signs and the importance of the sequential order of signs to create or modify meaning. Since the visual perspective of films can be easily divided into scenes, shots and still frames, there is a temptation to use the analogy of a filmic language, whereby the film’s structure is the equivalent of the words, phrases and sentences of a language. There has been less success in adapting this model adequately to describe sound in film. However, the work of Peter Wollen (1998) indicates that there might be another semiotic pathway. The model of the sign proposed by the American Charles Sanders Peirce takes account of a great many of the functions, properties and uses of sound, which cannot be accommodated in the linguistic, Saussurean model. Further study gave me confidence to argue that the Peircean model of the sign and its related concepts provide a comprehensive and generally applicable method of analysing how sound is used, and how the listener might make sense of what they hear whilst also providing a language that can be adapted to describe how sound is used. This semiotic model is described later.

Sound analysis and sound-image analysis

Whilst the main purpose of this book is to extrapolate sound theory from sound practice, it is also essential to apply the theory and concepts ‘after the fact’ to the completed production, in order to illustrate the flexibility of the theoretical model being used. In doing so the intention is to demonstrate how the concepts of Peirce’s semiotic model can be applied to the finished productions to explain how the meaning for the audience is arrived at from the material presented in the production.

A fundamental problem facing anyone wishing to practice, study or teach sound design is the lack of a theoretical language to describe the way sound is used and an overarching framework that adequately explains how sound design works in practice. Whilst there are a growing number of books, conferences and journals geared toward the critical examination of sound design, or sound in other audiovisual media, there are few texts that are sufficiently grounded in the corresponding day-to-day work of practitioners. This research is an attempt to use the experience of practitioners within the industry to inform the theory and, through the application of Peirce’s semiotic model, identify and provide a critical language that allows theory to inform the practice.

This book shows how semiotics can provide the framework and the language to analyse and describe both the product and the practice of sound design. It can be applied at micro and macro levels of analysis, being equally applicable to individual sound elements and the soundtrack as a whole. It can be used to explore what the audience hears and what the practitioners do as they manipulate sound for effect. Its flexibility also allows it to accommodate other sound theories. The Peircean model has the potential to provide both the justification for sound production practice and the means to bring sound production out of the shadows. By gaining the means to elucidate previously concealed sound production processes, it is possible to give this practice the acknowledgement it merits as a fundamental and influential element of any audiovisual artefact that cannot, and should not, be taken for granted.

In this book a number of case study productions are discussed to ascertain how sound is used in conjunction with images to perform its various functions: to create the narrative, to create a sense of immersion, to present reality (or a sense of reality), and so on. Two film examples are discussed in some detail, and their soundtracks are analysed at both macro and micro levels to highlight the flexibility of the approach: from the specifics of the individual representative sounds (and musical motifs) in King Kong (Cooper and Schoedsack 1933), to the unfolding of sound-image relationship and subsequent creation of meaning in No Country for Old Men(Coen and Coen 2007). Whilst the analyses are primarily based on the actual films, supporting data is also used from published accounts of those who worked on the films. Other types of audiovisual works such as non-fiction production (news, documentary, television sport) and interactive media (e.g. various video game genres) are also examined to illustrate the range of productions which can be analysed.

An initial driving force during the research for this book was the belief, or at least the suspicion, that there was an underpinning rationale shared by many sound practitioners in their approach to their work that had not yet been satisfactorily explained. During this research, many of the sound editors, recordists, designers and mixers interviewed brought up the issue that often work in sound is inadvertently downplayed. This is partly because it is ‘invisible’, in the sense that it is difficult to determine what work has actually been done, but also because the work in progress is actually heard by relatively few, and even where this work is heard, it is not often immediately apparent what end is being achieved by the work. Part of the problem of anal...