VII
Walter Murch… We gestate in Sound, and are born into Sight
Cinema gestated in Sight, and was born into Sound.
P8
Empathetic and Anempathetic Effect
‘On one hand, music can directly expresses participation in the feeling of the scene, by taking on the scenes rhythm, tone, and phrasing…One the other hand, music can also exhibit conspicuous indifference to the situation, by progressing in a steady, undaunted and includable manner:’
Side note: examples Hitchcock’s Psycho (the shower) and Antonioni’s The Passenger (an electric fan)
P10
Sound perception and visual perception have their own average pace by their very nature; basically, the ear analyzes, processes, sythensizes faster than the eye.
P25
…there are at least three modes of listening, each of which addresses different objects. We shall call them casual listening, semantic listening, and reduced listening.
Casual listening, the most common, consist of listening or a sound in order to gather information about its cause (or source).
Side note: Sound which indicates something has happened e.g. like a closed door.
P28
I call semantic listening that which refers to a code or a language to interpret a message: spoken language, of course, as well as Morse and other such codes.
P29
Pierre Schaeffer gave the name reduced listening to the the listening more that focuses on the traits of the sound itself, independent of its cause and of its meaning.
…every individual hears something differently, and the sound perceived remains forever unknowable. But perceptions not a purely individual phenomenon, since it partakes in a particular kind of objectivity, that subjectively that reduced listening, as Schaeffer defined it, should be situated.
P30
Everybody practices at least rudimentary forms of reduced listening. When we identify the pitch of a tone or figure out an interval between two notes, we are doing reduced listening; for pitch is an inherent characteristic of sound, independent of the sounds cause or the comprehension of its meaning.
Side note: look at Traite des objets musicaux by Schaeffer – system classification
P31
However, reduced listening has the enormous advantage of opening up our ears and sharpening out power of listening.
P33
But we must also remember that these three listening nosed overlap and combine in the complex and varied context of the film soundtrack.
…we must take into account that conscious and active perception is only one part of a wider perceptual field in operation.
Surely, out conscious perception can valiantly work at submitting everything to its control, but, in the present cultural state of things, sound more than image has the ability to saturate and short-circuit our perception.
P34
…sound has an influence on perception through the phenomenon of added value, it’s interprets the meaning of the image, and makes us see in the image what we would not otherwise see, or would see differently. And so we see that sound is not at all invested and localised in the same way as the image.
p47
Unification
The most widespread function of film sound consists of unifying or binding the flow of images.
P48
The function of punctuation inits widest grammatical sense…has long been a central concern of theatre directing.
P49
So synchronous sound brought to the cinema not the principle of punctuation but increasingly subtle means of punctuating senses without putting a strain on the acting and editing.
Naturally, music can play a major punctuative role. It certainly did in the silent era, but in a less precise, more appropriate way, owing to the much looser methods of synchronising music with image.
P58
Point of Synchronization and Synchresis
A point of synchronization, or synch point, is a salient moment of an audiovisual sequence during which a sound event and a visual event in synchrony.
P71
Acoustic, a word of Greek origin discovered by Jerome Peignot and theorized by Pierre Schaeffer, describes “sounds one hears without seeing their originating cause.”
P74
(Pie Chart)
P75
Why reject a valuable distinction simply because it isn’t absolute? It is a mistake to see things in a binary, all-or-nothing logic.
We must add new categories—not claiming thereby to exhaust all possibilities, but at least to enlarge the scope, to recognize, define, and develop new areas.
P114
The materialization indices and the sound’s details that cause us to “feel” the material conditions of the sound source, and refer to the concrete process of the sound”s production. They give us information about the substance causing the sound—wood, metal, paper, cloth—as well as the sound is produced —friction, impact, uneven oscillations, periodic movement back and forth, and so on.
P120
Sound in Animation: Putting to Movements
Delande and Celeste determined that sometimes these vocal productions “partake in a code of expression of feelings”
Side note: look into the study
P121
The sound here conveys movement and its trajectory rather than the timbre of the noise that supposedly issues from a car. “The substance of the sound has nothing to do with resemblance, it’s the sound trajectory that does.”
P122
[Mickey Mousing]…has been criticised for being redundant, but it has an obvious function nonetheless.
The various gags and actions of the film are accompanied and punctuated by the musical figures you would expect; when the flea jumps, a musical cue jumps with it, as in the circus.
P149
It can be said that sound’s greatest influence on film is manifested at the heart of the image itself. The clearer treble you hear, the fast your perception of sound and the keener your sensation of presentness.
Side note : what does ontologically mean?
P166
Never is television as visual as during some moments in music videos, even when the image is conspicuously attacking itself to some music that was sufficient to itself.
Of course not everyone aggress. Cinephiles especially attack music videos as eye-assaulting; they dislike the stroboscopic effect of the rapid editing.
Audio Visual Analysis
P185
For reasons we have already examined, sound seems to remain much more difficult to categorize than images, and there remains the risk of seeing the audiovisual relationship as a reptile of illusions, even tricks—all the more contemptible for being so.
P186
Audiovisual analysis must rely on words, and so we must take words seriously — whether they are words that already exist, or ones being invented or reinvented to designate objects that begin to take shape as we observe and understand.
P187
[masking method] Screen a given sequence several times, sometimes watching sound and image together, sometimes masking the image, sometimes cutting out the sound.
P189
[Forced Marriage] …we become conscious of yer fundamental strangeness of the audiovisual relationships; we become aware of the incompatible character of these elements we called sound and image.
P192
Side note: look at experiment called La Dolce Vita