Introduction
Sound is one of our most primal experiences: we all came into being with the steady background rhythm of our mother's heartbeat and the syncopations of other internal noises. We seem to respond to sound at an instinctual level. Sound affects us physically and psychologically. There have been cultures without painting, cultures without dancing, cultures without counting or the written word, but there has never been a culture without music. Equally, all children learn to speak (baring physical disability, of course). This suggests that sound and aurality are central to our identity as human beings.
The American linguist and political activist, Naom Chomsky, has convincingly argues that certain human abilities are hardwired into the brain. He argues that children, for example, learn to speak too efficiently (children can use and understand sentences structures they have never heard before by the time they are about four), to be explained in any other way. Equally, music seems to be hardwired into the brain -- prodigies are the exceptions (by having excessive development in that sector of the brain) that prove the rule. Indeed, most believe that true prodigies have only ever existed in the fields of music, mathematics and chess. These three things share many many things in common, as they do with language, the most obvious being the importance of underlying patterns and structures in each.
Acoustics
Acoustics is the science of sound, including its production, transmission, and effects. In present usage, the term sound implies not only phenomena in air responsible for the sensation of hearing but also whatever else is governed by analogous physical principles. Thus, disturbances with frequencies too low (infrasound) or too high (ultrasound) to be heard by a normal person are also regarded as sound. One may speak of underwater sound, sound in solids, or structure-borne sound.
Acoustics is distinguished from optics in that sound is a mechanical, rather than an electromagnetic, wave motion. The speculation that sound is a wave phenomenon grew out of observations of water waves. The basic notion of a wave is an oscillatory disturbance that moves away from some source and transports no discernible amount of matter over large distances of propagation. The possibility that sound exhibits analogous behavior was early noted: for example, by the Greek philosopher Chrysippus (c. 240 BCE), by the Roman architect and engineer Vetruvius (c. 25 B.C.), and by the Roman philosopher Boethius (CE 480-524).
How
do we hear?
The ear is an organ for hearing and balance. It consists of three parts: the outer ear, the middle ear, and the inner ear. The outer and middle ear mostly collect and transmit sound. The inner ear analyzes sound waves and contains an apparatus that maintains the body's balance.
The outer ear is the part which is visible and is made of folds of skin and cartilage. It leads into the ear canal, which is about one inch long in adults and is closed at the inner end by the eardrum. The eardrum is a thin, fibrous, circular membrane covered with a thin layer of skin. It vibrates in response to changes in the air pressure that constitute sound. The eardrum separates the outer ear from the middle ear. The middle ear is a small cavity which conducts sound to the inner ear by means of three tiny, linked, movable bones called "ossicles." These are the smallest bones in the human body and are named for their shape. The hammer (malleus) joins the inside of the eardrum. The anvil (incus) has a broad joint with the hammer and a very delicate joint to the stirrup (stapes). The base of the stirrup fills the oval window which leads to the inner ear. The inner ear is a very delicate series of structures deep within the bones of the skull. It consists of a maze of winding passages, called the "labyrinth". The front (cochlea) is a tube resembling a snail's shell and is concerned with hearing. The rear part is concerned with balance.
See also: The quivering bundles that let us hear
Making Sound work...
Qualities of sound include:
Space
Sound has spatial dimension because it comes from a source. Our beliefs about
that source have a powerful effect on how we understand the sound
Loudness (volume), pitch and timbre.
Rhythm
Rhythm is on of the most complex features of sound. Rhythm involves a beat
or pulse a pace or tempo and a pattern of accents or stronger or weaker beats.
Fidelity
Fidelity refers to the extent to which the sound is faithful to the source
as we, the audience conceive it.
Time
Sound permits the filmmaker to represent time in various ways. This is because
the time represented on the soundtrack may or may not be the same that represented
in the image.
sourced from FILM SOUND THEORY
Uses of sound
Sound affects our perception and understanding of material that uses it. On the simplest level our perception of the quality of work, for example, an interactive, is largely determined by the quality of its soundtrack. Most people rate an interactive with 8bit graphics and 24bit sound as better quality than an interactive with 24bit graphics and 8bit sound. Sound can create a narrative where none is obvious in the images, emphasis and support aspects of the narrative, or introduce new interpretational possibilities by contradicting the narrative.
Direct Narrative role Many kind of sound have direct storytelling role in film making. Dialog and narration tell the story and narrative sound effects can be used in such capacity too, for example to draw the attention of the characters for an off screen event. Such direct narrative sound effects are often written into the script, since their use can influence when and where actors have to take some corresponding action.
Subliminal Narrative role Sound has a subliminal role. Sound is working on its audience unconsciously. While all viewers call tell apart the various objects in a picture -- an actor, a table, the walls of an room -- listeners barely ever perceive sound so analytically. They tend to take sound in as a whole, despite its actually being deliberately constructed from many pieces. Herein lies the key to an important storytelling power of sound The inability of listeners to separate sound into ingredient parts can easily produce " a willing suspension of disbelief" in audience, since they can not separately discern the function of various sound elements. These fact can be manipulated by filmmakers to produce a route to emotional involvement in the material by the audience. The most direct example this effect is often the film score. Heard in isolation, the actual score played with the film often do not make much sense. The music is deliberately written to enhance the mood of a scene and to underscore the action not as a foreground activity, but a background one. The function of the music is to "tell" the audience how to feel, from moment to moment: Soaring strings 'mean' one thing, a single snare drum, another.
The emotional sound equation An example is the emotional sound equation that says that low frequencies represent a threat. Possibly this association has deep primordial roots, but if not, exposure to film sound certainly teaches the listener this lesson quickly. A distant thunderstorm played underneath an otherwise sunny scene indicates a sense of foreboding or doom, as told by this equation. An interesting parallel is that the shark in Jaws is introduced by four low notes on an otherwise calm ocean, and there are many other such examples.
Grammatical role Sound plays a grammatical role in the process of film making too. For instance if sound remains constant before an after a picture cut, the indication being made to the audience is that while the point of view many have changed, the scene has not shifted - we are in the same as before. So sound provides a form of continuity or connective tissue for films (and other works). In particular, one type of sound represented several ways plays this part. Presence and ambiance help to "sell" the continuity of a scene to the audience.
THE SOUNDTRACK: A basic Introduction, Dr. Fred Ginsburg
Synchresis
Synchresis is the forging between something one sees and something one hears
- it is the mental fusion between a sound and a visual when these occur at
exactly the same time
Rendering
Rendering: The use of sounds to convey the feelings or effects associated
with the situation on screen - often in opposition to faithful reproduction
of sounds that might be heard in the situation in reality
Materializing
Sound Indices
Sonic details that "materialize" or "de-materialize" the sound of moving images.
Temporalization
Influence of sound on the perception of time in the image
Magnetization
(spatial)
Magnetization happens in spite of the evidence of our own senses. The spectator
perceive that a sound source is in space of the image, no matter what the
real point of origin of the sound.
sourced from FILM SOUND THEORY
Audio
Recording: History and Development , Geoffrey Rubinstein
A great site about the History of sound recording, looking mostly at the American
scene over the 19th and 20th centuries,
SEEING
SOUND Dalia Progli
In this paper Progli discusses new developments in the creation of audio-visuals
in Australia by artists Ð Kenny Sabir the creator of the Distributed Audio
Sequencer (DASE) available on the Internet @ http://www.dase@onelist.com;
and the VJamm software created by Coldcut
The
visual sound Bo Fibiger.
Sound semiotics in multimedia production.
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