David Lynch describes how a particular approach to film sound can create the possibility of a certain mood or atmosphere emerging in film. Films like Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001) are full of scenes that feel tense and claustrophobic. Much of that atmosphere is achieved through the sound design.
Lost Highway [1997] dir. David Lynch
Electronic composer Kim Cascone was assistant music editor on Twin Peaks and Wild at Heart and describes this cinema of atmosphere in an encounter he had with the films of Andrei Tarkovsky:
“I detected a sound field surrounding the screen similar to the ones involved by Lynch. A layering of unidentifiable sounds defined the space around the screen and deftly drifted to various parts of the theater [...] Foggy off-screen evocations of a type of space always existing beyond our periphery, just out of reach or dismissed as background noise.”
Audible tones and drones exist on a spectrum somewhere between sound design and music. Sometimes they appear to naturally emerge, almost imperceptibly, out of a scene’s particular soundscape. Here we might consider these sound elements belonging to the diegesis of the soundtrack, the film world inhabited by its characters. Elsewhere, such sounds appear to lack any identiable source. Instead they linger somewhere closer to the non-diegetic space of the musical score.
The expressive potential of this ambiguity between what is considered sound design and music is furtile ground for creating engaging and unusal sonic atmospheres and moods. Horror pictures, psychological dramas and science fiction films lend themselves particularly well for this kind of cross-synthesis of noise, sound and music.
The general consistency and eveness of such continuous or steadily evolving tones and drones contrasts with what Michel Chion has termed “Materializing Sound Indices.” These are the details of sounds that draw us towards the material aspects of the scene; “that cause us to ‘feel’ the material conditions of the sound source, and refer to the concrete process of the sound’s production”. Chion identifies Tarkovsky and Bresson as two directors who have a predilection for materializing indices “that immerse us in the here-and-now”. Jacques Tati on the other hand dampens material reality with all it’s creaky and uneven detail by supressing such indices, and instead, “subtly gives us an ethereal perception of the world”.
Inside the cinema space a running celluloid film performs an audible materialization of the mechanical process of 24 animated film frames a second. The accompanying rumble, click and hiss - these uneven artefacts of the optical sound process, made audible as the film print’s waveform passes through the projector’s exciter lamp - acts as a constant reminder of the “here-and-now” materiality of the living film medium itself.
Film Selection:
The Eyes of My Mother [2016] dir. Nicolas Pesce
The Babadook [2014] dir. Kristina Ceyton
Enter the Void [2009] dir. Gaspar Noé
Lost Highway [1997] dir. David Lynch
The Sacrifice [1986] dir. Andrei Tarkovsky