In a number of recent posts I sketched out how certain film locations, story themes or scenarios open up interesting sound design opportunities for filmmakers. Surveillance, telecommunication technology, tales of survival, body horror, stories set in remote natural landscapes or in industrial spaces; these are all examples of film situations and environments that are designed for sound - films conceived with sound and attentive listening as essential component to the experience of the work.

By focusing on such film scenarios I have consequently so far put aside talking about particular film genres and how these afford different approaches to using sound. While any such detailed discussion lies outside the scope of these brief notes, in the wider context of film as a medium for sound and listening, the broader discussion here would feel incomplete if I didn’t allow some space to linger on a few key genres, if only briefly.

Science-fiction, horror and war are three genres that, in terms of soundtrack design, demand a great deal of attention. Both in literarature and film, historically these genres arrive readymade with a striking level of auditory associations - an active and audible soundscape baked into these story worlds.

Science Fiction

In the late 1940s technical innovations in electronic synthesizers and magnetic tape recording technology began to arrive in Hollywood. These new tools immediately expanded the sonic possibilities for scoring films with new sound effects, noises and electronic music. In traditional science-fiction tales, new and inventive sounds began to accompany moving images of spaceships, robots, alien creatures, machinary, weapons, radio communication as well as the operation of buttons, dials and all manne of electronic control surfaces.

From Bebe and Louis Barron (Forbidden Planet, 1956), Walter Murch (THX 1138, 1971), Eduard Artemyev (Solaris, 1972) and Ben Burtt (Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, 1977) through to modern Hollywood movies involving large teams of sound editors and mixers (The Matrix, 1999; Gravity, 2013; Arrival, 2016 etc.), the ever expanding ambition of science fiction filmmakers has always presented sound designers and electronic composers with exciting opportunities for creating new and unusal soundworlds.

Traditionally the science fiction film allows for a close interplay between sound and music. One isn’t quite sure where the sounds of one department begins and the other ends. In some filmmaking contexts (e.g. independent and experimental filmmaking practices) it’s not unusual for both sound design and music duties to be performed by a single individual. In addition to shooting and writing the film, director Chris Marker performed and recorded the electronic score for his sci-fi travelogue Sans Soleil (1983). Pierre Bertault and Antoine Bonfanti are credited with what appears to be location sound roles for the project.

This ambiguity between sounds, noises and music is deliberately explored in Andrei Tarkvosky’s two science fiction films from the 1970s - Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979).

In a 1979 interview Tarkovsky discussed the sonic ambiguity of Stalker, describing his intention to merge the music and sounds together to create an experience that the audience would not completely understand or be aware of:

“It seemed to me that it could - that it must even - rely solely on sounds...But this music must be barley heard beneath the noise, in a way that the spectator is not aware of it. Moreover, I would like most of the noise and sound to be composed by a composer. In the film, for example, the three people undertake a long journey in a railway car. I'd like that the noise of the wheels on the rails not be the natural sound but elaborated upon by the composer with electronic music. At the same time, one mustn't be aware of music, nor natural sounds.”

Horror

Such ambiguity helps define another important type of sound film - horror. A genre whose defining feature is the experience that surreptitiously emerges through an engineered atmosphere of instability and uncertainty. Here the soundtrack’s potential for subliminal stimulation operates on the spectator to stir emotional states of fear, dread and anxiety without conscious recognition.

In Silence of the Lambs (1991) consider the changing roomtones and background ambiances as Clarice enters Hannibal Lecter’s maximum security cell for the very first time. The film’s sound designer Ron Bochar illustrates how such sounds are often composed from disparate sound sources before under going post-production processing and treatment:

“I can't begin to list the material that went into all that. But there were animal screams and noises built into the ambience itself downstairs there. From a little movie I had made years ago called Little Monsters I took this lunatic kind of screaming that I had recorded; I took track, processed it, slowed it down, and played it in reverse. That became one of the ambiences in the room, too. It's the room tone, but the room tone has been made from some guy screaming in pain.”

*Silence of the Lambs* [1991] dir. Johnathan Demme

In his book Occult Aesthetics, Kevin Donnelly uses the term “the occult” to describe any “hidden workings or processes that are unable to be observed.” He writes:

“Aesthetics can work in mystical, magical, and unapparent manners, and the synchronization of sound and image in the cinema is an exmplary case in point […] Horror films appear to know more about the occult of aesthetics than other film: They play around with this lynchpin of cinema far more than other genres. There is something potentially disturbing about the cinema’s illusion that has a determinedly supernatural character.”

The atmospheric tension and mood of a horror film is shaped by the precise placement and manipulation of diegetic sound elements and non-diegetic music/sound design score. Working in tandem, both elements of the soundtrack can thus be designed to operate on the spectator’s reptilian brain, exploiting our core instinctual responses for survival and safety.

Audiovisual immersion into a convincing story scenario sets the stage for the spectator’s willing suspension of disbelief. Neurologically, the horror soundtrack is processed by the auditory cortex which communicates messages to the amygdala, the brain’s neural core for processing fearful and threatening stimuli. Sudden loud noises or ominous low frequency rubbles activate the brain’s fight or flight response as the threat of danger is triggered. Discordant, chaotically structured bands of high frequencies replicate human screams and cries of pain, heightening a feeling of deep discomfort and distress. Horror music in particular exploits this upper register to great unsettling effect.

*Apocalpyse Now* [1979] dir. Francis Ford Coppola • *Saving Private Ryan* [1998] dir. Steven Spielberg

War

Distress and discomfort are very much part of the vocabulary of the loudest, most sonically omnipresent film setting - the war film. In his unique 2015 study Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma and Survival in Wartime Iraq, “The Belliphonic” is how author J.Martin Daughtry describes the spectrum of sounds produced by armed combat - the combination of two latin words for war (bellum) and voice (phone).

At certain moments in war film history, the brutal sonic violence of the battle field reaches its logical extreme in breaking the combatant’s threshold (ear drum) for basic auditory perception. Here momentary hearing loss is expressed as a sustained high pitched tinnitus tone, used to illustrate the resulting auditory damaging of a nearby explosion. This subjective perspective is further emphasised by attenuating the sounds of the surrounding environment, often by rolling off high frequency content. Such extreme moments of psychology and impaired perception are masterfully exectued with changes in sound in scenes from war films Apocalpyse Now (1979), Come and See (1985) and Saving Private Ryan (1998).

The 2005 Persian Gulf war film Jarhead offers an interesting example of warfare noise, and how sound and camera choreography working in tandem can effectively move the perspectives from the objective space of the world to the subjective mental space of a charcter.

In one famous battlefield scene the film’s protagonist, Anthony Swofford, finds himself standing, transfixed in a state of stupor, as gunfire and bombs explode all around him. As the camera smoothly tracks towards his face the sounds of the battlefield diminish in audibility. The character’s voice-over soon breaks the quiet, followed then by the naked granular sounds of falling sand showering over his face. Here, framed visually in the close-up shot, the same technique of attenuating the environmental sounds communicate a shift in storytelling perspective. To the spectator such a sonic device feels familiar, commonly used across different film genres, but no less effective and emotionally engaging.

Film Selection:

Arrival [2016] dir. Denis Villeneuve
Sans Soleil [1983] dir. Chris Marker
THX 1138 [1971] dir. George Lucas
Forbidden Planet [1956] dir. Fred M. Wilcox

The Babadook [2014] dir. Kristina Ceyton
Paranormal Activity [2007] dir. Oren Peli
The Exorcist [1973] dir. William Friedkin
The Innocents [1961] dir. Jack Clayton

Son of Saul [2015] dir. László Nemes
Saving Private Ryan [1998] dir. Steven Spielberg
Come and See [1985] dir. Elem Klimov
Apocalpyse Now [1979] dir. Francis Ford Coppola