26. Film: Compelled to Listen

Film can compel us to listen. The idea to listen begins with the idea of the film.

Berberian Sound Studio [2012] dir. Peter Strickland

Filmmaker Peter Strickland understands the unique interplay between image and sound in film:

"I learnt from the age of 16 that you could convey an inner world after hearing Alan Splet’s sound design on Eraserhead. I also soon realised that it’s rare to find film people who are also music people or vice versa. It’s so strange — you could meet someone into Feher Gyorgy or Béla Tarr, but they listen to very middle-of-the-road music. So I was aware of this unexplored niche in terms of informing film with a whole new world of sonic ideas. Hearing is a far more active human sense than sight. As a filmmaker, your potential to ignite an audience’s imagination is far greater through using sound. With images, most of the work is done for us, but with sound, you´re filling in the gaps and that is very exciting and provocative for an audience. Sound also offers the spatial dimension that the image can’t always do. Bresson gave us a whole outside world in A Man Escaped, and we yearn for it even more since we’re trapped inside a cell." - Portrait of a Soundscapist: An Interview with Peter Strickland

25. The Cinema: Beyond the Black Box

Commenting on the future of cinema for the publication Where is Cinema, writer and former artists' moving image programme director at Tyneside Cinema (2018-20) Adam Pugh says:

“If cinema has a future, it certainly is in its being a social space. There are a lot of things that the visual arts could learn from cinema. A lot of people will not go into a gallery because they feel put off or threatened by it. A cinema is inherently more democratic because its history is all about this space for people to come together and have a collective experience.”

How does the cinema define itself in an age of multiplexes and online streaming? What kind of public setting for the screening of films exists beyond the conventional cinema space? Do the operation of alternative spaces compromise the filmmakers vision?

Art galleries, pubs, bars, community halls, churches, drive-through spaces and city parks are all commonly used to organise film events. These spaces broaden the public presentation of films to a wider audience who might not normally have access to a traditional cinema venue. The codes and practices of these spaces, as well as their technical and physical affordances, open up a variety of film experiences for audiences across different cultural and geographic contexts.

Images: Deptford Cinema - a volunteer-run 39-seater cinema space in South-East London.
For more information visit: http://deptfordcinema.org/.

The environmental, technical and social factors of these alternative spaces contribute to the formation of a unique screening soundscape, one in which the signal and noise of the film work, as well as the event itself, are redefined. The alternative space is, to apply Jonas Mekas’ famous phrase, the promise of “a less perfect but more free” site for cinema. 

“There is no other way to break the frozen cinematic conventions than through a complete derangement of the official cinematic senses.” - Jonas Mekas [1959].

24. The Cinema: Film in the Art Gallery

In 1993 Beligum Filmmaker and artist Chantal Akerman released her 16mm experimental documentary D’Est. In addition to its theatrical screening, the film was also presented as a multi-screen art installation. In an interview with art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, the filmmaker discusses the change in spectatorship that the gallery setting provides, allowing for a more physically active engagement with the work:

“The aim of this installation is to enable people to move around […] [a] desire to get the spectator physically involved in the installation space, which is why you had to arrange the screens not in a straight line. By which I mean that the video has often been reproached for inducing a contemplative and hence passive attitude in viewers, due to the frontal arrangement of the monitors. The idea of distributing what is to be seen in different directions is an effective solution to the problem.”

Tate Modern Turbine Gallery Space • Incoming [2017] by Richard Mosse

In the pure white cube of the art gallery the visitor is invited to stroll around. Film works repeat on loop, installed in a physically temporary space for the duration of the exhibition. With considerable effort and finance, an isolated black box can be constructed inside the gallery.

In a 2005 interview Christian Marclay commented on the nature of sound in gallery settings:

“Well, I think it’s great that there is this interest in sound and music, but the overall art-world structures are not yet ready for that, because sound requires different technology and different architecture to be presented.”

The gallery is dynamic, unwieldy, impossible to tame. A bare interior endlessly reflects; voices reverberate, strolling bodies are audible bodies, neighbouring artworks sonically invade.

Now [2015] by Chantal Akerman • m.A.A.d [2014] by Kahlil Joseph

No space is the same, the conditions are constantly changing. Touring exhibitions, like film screenings, always sound different from place to place. To meet the economic demands of an ever-changing schedule of exhibitions and events, the gallery remains a highly adaptable physical space. Its spatial arrangement - the way in which it might guide its visitors - is quickly rearranged with movable wall partitions, hanging fixtures, sculptures and mobile lighting. The acoustic properties of the gallery space are in continual flux.

Sound is everywhere, emanating from nearby artworks or the noise and background chatter of strolling visitors and nearby traffic. Headphones provide a certain type of soundproof solution but at a potential cost to the spatial experience of the work itself.

180 Strand, London • Broken Spectre [2022] by Richard Mosse

Video artworks can be conceived with the exhibition site in mind. Or, in the case of particular types of sound art, directly engage with and emerge from the spatial properties of the space itself. The video work of Bill Viola transforms gallery rooms into resonant chambers. Low subterranean murmurings swarm around the space, complex masses of water fill the room with an incessant, overwhelming rapture of noise. Viola describes these works as “total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound” - an immersive experience of the gallery space itself.

Source: Chantal Akerman interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist

23. The Cinema: Electroacoustic Expansion

In 1956 The Philips Electronic Company commissioned Le Corbusier to design and build a pavilion for the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. Rather than build a conventional exhibition stall, the architect promised to construct:

“an Electronic Poem and a vessel containing the poem; [where] light, color image, rhythm and sound join together in an organic synthesis.”

Composer and architect Iannis Xenakis assisted Le Corbusier in the design of the structure. He also created a unique musique concrète tape piece titled Concret PH (1958) to be played inside the pavilion. This two and half minute minature consisted of burning charcoal sounds subjected to various sonic transformations and overdubs to create dense granular textures. These layers of sounds were projected via the pavilion’s 400 loudspeakers, acting as a transitional music to help guide visitors into the performance space. For the main presentation, Edgard Varèse’s eight minute electronic composition Poème électronique (1958) was diffused and spatially synchronised with an array of projected video and light displays. The completed pavilion was one of the first electronic-spatial environments to combine architecture, film, light and music into a total experience made to function in time and space. Its unique sound diffusion system prefigured later designs such as Francois Bayle’s 80 loudspeaker system The Acousmonium.

Around the time of the World’s Fair in Brussels, abstract filmmaker Jordan Belson and musican Henry Jacobs were busy in San Francisco organising a series of innovative audiovisual concerts called Vortex Concerts. These events took place at the Morrison Planetarium and utilised a large number of projectors and loudspeakers to playback and manipulate various sounds and images in space. In 1963, experimental filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek began building his own hemispherical theatre, the Movie Drome in New York, where he would organise live collage performances of images, video and multi-channel sound. Experimenting beyond mere video playback, these multi-sensorial performance events influenced the development of the psychedelic light shows of the 1960s. Today they are recognised as precursors to what is now considered Expanded Cinema - moving image and sound beyond the conventions of cinema spectatorship.

Hollywood was increasingly interested in the potential for spatialised sound in the cinema. In 1978 Dolby introduced a split surround system (stereo) for the screening of Superman, while a newly conceived Dolby Stereo 70mm six track system was designed a year later for the cinematic screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

Philips Pavilion, World’s Fair 1958 • Movie Drome performance, circa 1963, Stan Vanderbeek

The use of multiple loudspeaker technology to project sound in space has been integral to the development and public presentation of electronic and tape-based music throughout the 20th century. The playback and manipulation of pre-recorded sounds in both concert and installation settings emerged out of the innovations in magnetic tape as well as multi-channel loudspeaker technology. These contributed to the development of an electroacoustic art form concerned with exploring “the traits of the sound itself, independent of its cause and of its meaning.”

In both public presentation and performance - inside both the cinema, the concert hall and beyond - film sound and contemporary music deploy a similar array of electroacoustic technologies to project and diffuse sound across multiple loudspeakers.

22. The Cinema: Vibrational Space

When I say that I see a sound, I mean that I echo the vibration of the sound with my whole sensory being. (Phenomenology of Perception, pg 234, Maurice Merleau-Ponty)

The experience of sound vibrating in a cinema room is the convergence of the spectator’s body, electroacoustic technology and the particular characteristics of the physical space. The darkened room is illuminated by the play of light projected onto the screen. The amplified sounds of the film’s soundtrack activate the acoustics of the space, vibrating the air molecules that surround the spectator’s body. The cinematic sound space is constructed spatially and socially within the cinema architecture itself and in the film work we see and hear. The cinema is an embodied multi-sensorial experience that unifies the spectator with the spatio-temporal site that they inhabit.

In 1974 the blockbuster movie Earthquake was released. For its theatrical premiere a unique subwoofer soundsystem was developed called “Sensurround”.

With the increasing populatory of television, Jennings Lang, a producer and former executive of MCA/Universal Television, identifed the need for movies to distinguish themselves as expanded entertainment spectacles that could provide a thrilling experience unique to the cinema setting. Inspired by a recent Los Angeles tremor experience, Lang approached the Universal City Studios Sound Department about making Sensurround a reality for a future earthquake film.

W.O. Watson, a retired former sound director for Universal, returned to work to join the engineering team that would go on to design and build the Sensurround system. In 1974 Watson told American Cinematographer:

“When I saw the Earthquake script I realized that we would be able to come up with a form of audience participation - something that would make the viewers feel that they were part of the action that was going on [...] We generate both sub-audible and audible frequencies that actually vibrate the torso and the diaphragm inside the body. You feel something going on in your flesh and the auditory nerves are also responding to the sensation. The viewer feels that the building is shaking. It isn’t really, but it feels that way. If you touch a thin plaster wall in the theater, or if you touch a seat that has metal in it, you find that the seats [are] actually vibrating.”

By 1977 there were reportedly 800 Sensurround equipped cinemas around the world, showing such films as Midway (1976), Rollercoaster (1977) and Battlestar Galatica (1978). By the end of the decade other extended low frequency formats like Warner Brothers’ Megasound began to be developed. This lead to the wider development and manufacturing of subwoofer technology both inside and outside the cinema.

Sources: The Earthquaking, Subwoofing Magic of Sensurround by Marke B.
Images: …in Sensurround by Thomas Hauerslev

21. The Cinema: Private/Public Spectacle

It is in this urban dark that the body’s freedom is generated; this invisible work of possible affects emerges from a veritable cinematographic cocoon; the movie spectator could easily appropriate the silkworm’s motto: inclusum labor illustrat; It is because I am enclosed that I work and glow with all my desire. (Roland Barthes, Leaving the Movie Theatre)

Beginning in 1888 Thomas Edison, along with his assistant William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, began to develop the Kinetoscope - a peep-hole motion picture viewer. Inspired by the work of Eadweard Muybridge, Edison described his ideas for a device which would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear" - record and reproduce objects in motion. Initially it was hoped that the Kinetoscope would play synchronised sound and image. Edison believed that this could help drive sales of the Phonograph. In 1893 he gave the Kinetoscope its first public presentation at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in New York.

The Kinetoscope was designed for private viewing. A peep-hole at the top of the cabinet allowed the viewer to see the animated images moving inside. By 1894 Kinetoscope parlous were being setup in New York. A parlour consisted of several machines each playing a different film of between 30-60 seconds in length.

In 1895 the Lumiere brothers publicly unveiled their own camera-projector invention - the Cinematographe. Later that year they organised the world’s first commercial movie screening at the Grand Cafe in Paris. The Cinemtographe was smaller and lighter than Edison’s moving image technology. The machine’s ability to project light meant it could display moving images on a screen for an audience.

In 1905 popular showman Harry Davis established the first Nickelodeon motion picture theatre in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Often combining short film screenings with vaudeville performances, these storefront theatres quickly spread in populatority throughout the United States. By 1910 there were more than10,000 such theatres across the country.

In 1925 Scottish engineer John Logie Baird demostrated the world’s first working television system. Mechanical television systems were soon replaced by electronic systems that used a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT). In 1934 Telefunken manufactured the first commercial CRT television sets.

Beginning with the Kinetoscope, the early viewing parlous and the grand movie palaces that followed, through to the high street cinema, consumer television, 20th century digital communication, the Internet and online streaming services, the history of moving image technology and the corresponding cultivation of viewing habits, seemingly circles back on itself: From private peeping to public spectacle to home viewing and mobile streaming.

20. The Cinema: Gulliverisation

The cinema is a uniquely immersive space. It sensorially envelops the spectator with sound and light. Through submission the audience comports itself as active spectators.

Images and sounds projected into cinema space stand over and above the spectator, both temporally and spatially. The spectator remains small, the cinema machine big. Private, mobile technology inverts this relationship.

Wizard of Oz [1939] dir. Victor Fleming

Media archaeologist Erkki Huhtamo has written about the “Gulliverisation of the world”. Marked by accelerated industrial production, mass urbanisation, developments in advertising and technological innovation, this “increasing and diminishing of perspectives” began to emerge in the second half of the 19th century and continued into the early part of the 20th century. It led to what Huhtamo describes as a:

“radical change in the anthropomorphic, human-sized based world of perception of Western man […] the big became even bigger and the small even smaller.” [During this period'] “the size of the human observer kept on shifting between gigantic (in relation to the carte-de-visite photographs ortradecards) and Lilliputhian (in front of large billboards or below advertising spectacles in the sky). Something similar happened in the field of media 'immersion' into an enormous circular panorama or diorama painting (and later, the cinema screen) [that] found its counterpart in the act of peeking at three-dimensional photographs with the ubiquitous hand-held stereoscope.”

The big screen and the small screen - the big room and the little room. Differences in scale distinguish a public form of spectatorship from a domestic one. Through these differences of scale, territory and accessibility, the public space (cinema) - a site for possible social encounters - always threatens a potential diminishing of individual autonomy. The challenge to modern urban living is, as Georg Simmel outlined in 1903:

“the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life.”

To leave the house is to relinquish absolute autonomy. In contrast, the domestic setting of the home (television) promises a sanctuary of individual control and comfort. Huhtamo writes:

“Gulliverisation operates at the divide between the public and the private. The urban environment, with the skyscraper as its ultimate manifestation, became more and more 'inhuman', whereas the home provided a return to the anthropomorphic scale.”

Reference: Gulliver in Figurine Land (en) [1990] E. Huhtamo, Messages on the Wall: An Archaeology of Public Media Displays [2009] E. Huhtamo, The Metropolis and Mental Life [1903] G. Simmel

19. The Cinema: Focus Space

In a recent conversation Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa considers the shared social experience of the cinema space:

“Now we have many different opportunities – TV, streaming services, websites, depending on what you like. It’s different though, because you watch films alone. You don’t feel the way the audience is receiving the film. I’m a little afraid of that, because I always make films for big screens with a good 5.1 sound and I like to feel the emotions of the viewers. Watching films together triggers immediate discussions afterwards. On the other hand, when you watch films alone or just with very few people, you have very limited possibilities to talk and to listen to what others have to say. In the future, cinemas may be like opera houses – something very special and unique. That’s why festivals are so crucial. They have to keep that possibility of watching films on a big screen. “

In a cultural landscape engineered to satisfy consumer demand, it is easy to feel that nothing in the world shows up as having any more value than anything else. All is simply a matter of choice according to the prevailing mood of any given moment. The apparent ‘levelling’ of meaning that pervades our culture expresses itself, in part, as the never-ending, accelerated consumption of private, portable and disposable media content. This is the raison d'etre of todays Content Industry.

Writing in the 1980s, Albert Borgmann presents a philosphy of focus things and practices to re-examine the instrumental rationality of our technological living. He writes:

"A focus gathers the relations of its context and radiates into its surroundings and informs them". 

One of the examples Borgmann uses is the “culture of the table”; the table that gathers together the active participation of the family, its traditions, cultures and the gits of nature.

The cinema is a publicly accessible place for the coordination of a focal event - a unique kind of viewing and listening space. A site for shared and private performance spectatorship, “a paradoxical mass-intimacy” as Walter Murch describes it. It gathers the scattered people around the glow of its screen, bringing into focus our private and shared condition.

Inside spectators submit themselves to the uninterrupted flow of time that constitutes the film performance. This collective experience, as with all socially sanctioned rituals, manifests the spectator’s shared ‘horizon of significance’; that which shows up in the world at that moment as significant and meaningful.

18. Spectatorship: The Invisible Cinema

In December 1970, the first Invisible Cinema opened in New York at the original Anthology Film Archives. It ran till 1974. It was designed by Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka as a distraction-free, total cinematic environment.

The Invisible Cinema was envisaged as an architectural space that would be completely focused on the image and sound of the film.

"All the elements of the cinema are black: the rugs, the seats, the walls, the ceiling. Seat hoods and the elevation of the rows protect one's view of the screen from interception by the heads of viewers in front. Blinders eliminate the possibility of distractions from the side. We call it The Invisible Cinema." (Manifesto quoted from Karsten Witte's collection Theorie des Kinos). 

Later in 1989 after a modified version of the original idea was set up in the film auditorium of the Albertina in Vienna, author and critic Harry Tomicek wrote:

“The conversion of the auditorium makes the 'Invisible Cinema' the only cinema in the world to remain shadowed to the point of invisibility and utterly removed from our perception while we see films. Similarly, in remaining invisible, this architectural space grants us a maximum of concentration and pleasurable immersion in what becomes visible and audible within it: a suggested world made of image and sound known as film." (Neue Zürcher Zeitung)

In the article Invisible Cinema, A Movie Viewing Machine, author Gamze Yesildag writes how Peter Kubelka envisioned the cinema:

“He calls the space he designed a ‘movie-viewing machine’: This revolutionary and controversial design is based on the idea of ​​cameras, movie processing machines, film editing machines and projectors to which the film is attached. The room where the movie is watched must be a machine designed for watching movies.”

Image Source: Invisible Cinema, A Movie Viewing Machine

17. Spectatorship: Cinema Protocol

The cinema space is an isolated black box that disconnects the spectator from the outside world. Talking and the use of phones is politely discouraged. Instead, the spectator is invited to watch and listen to what they see and hear in the cinema space.

Perhaps the cinema is a place for the tuning of our visual and auditory senses; to "quieten the mind and render it susceptible to divine intervention” as Cage suggested. American experimental filmmaker Peter Hutton once said:

“For the most part, people don’t allow themselves the time or the circumstances to get into a relationship with the world that provides freedom to actually look at things.”

Perhaps the cinema is a place to experience the gradual, uninterrupted passing of real time.

2 stills from Study of a River [1996-1997] dir. Peter Hutton

Inside the cinema the spectator sits quietly still, looking forwards for the duration of the screening. Film time is linear time, unfolding in a space that remains physically static and seemingly permanent. 

The various conditions of a typical cinema space - sound, light, furnishings, seating, temperature, air quality - are highly controlled to create a comfortable, distraction-free environment. Carefully positioned cinema loudspeakers behind the screen and mounted around the walls and ceiling direct specific channels of sound into the seating area. Soundproof walls, absorption panels, soft furnishing and thick curtains help to reduce extraneous noise and dampen the natural acoustics of the cinema space. Except for the presence of fire exit signs, house lighting is switched off for the duration of the film, while the entrance doors remain closed. All this is designed in order to promote a focused, immersive experience of the film performance. 

BFI Southbank Cinema (NFT1), London

The cinema space however is never silent. There is always an audible hum and rumble - the sound of the space itself. Air quality control in a post-pandemic age makes this more so.

No two cinema spaces sound alike. Every room possesses its own particular acoustic character.

16. Spectatorship: Disciplined Contemplation and Musicking

The cinema developed out of the theatre and concert hall. All share an interest in the eye.

Today, in most parts of the world, the typical Euro-centric concert hall, theatre or cinema space politely requests its visitors to be silent and still for the duration of the programme. This is in order to minimise distractions and create a suitable atmosphere for concentrated attention.

Amour [2012] dir. Michael Haneke

The conventions of cinema spectatorship originate in the 19th Century. This was a time when attitudes concerning the proper conduct and social behaviour at classical music concerts began to change. Audience participation, background talking and the presence of animals inside performance venues began to be outlawed. Instead, a quieter more reverential atmosphere began to emerge that cultivated the private and polite contemplation of the performance spectacle.

Contemporary, westernised film spectatorship is an expression of a 20th century modernist value system. This promotes certain attitudes of decorum towards the veneration of high art. Such values serve to affirm an atmosphere of disciplined spectatorship. In music, the still, silent, concentrated listener, that cultivates, according to Theodor Adorno, the authentic, actively engaged expert listener. This is in contrast to the common listener, the jitterbug, who is slavishly subsumed by the salacious rhythms of popular music. 

For Adorno high art and intellectualism are pitted against the entertainment and commercialisation of the emerging 20th Century Culture Industry; the mind at war with the body. But this disciplined spectatorship is only one among many ways of experiencing performance events.

In a typical all-night Javanese shadow puppet performance (Wayang Kulit) the audience is welcome to come and go as they please, engaging with the puppets and music in different ways from different perspectives. Spectators are free to seat themselves either side of the translucent screen. On one side they can witness the play of shadows. On the other they can watch the master pupeteer (Dalang) manipulate the various hand-made puppets while also observing the gamelan musicians performing along side him. Food stalls are often setup nearby, and the general ebb and flow of village activity mingles with the sounds of the gamelan and the flickering display of shadows.

Throughout Indonesia performance of all kinds feel like an occasion to strengthen community bonds and identity. These collective rituals assist in establishing and maintaining healthy relationships with the spirit world. Ethnomusicologists and anthropologists find similar ritualised patterns of behaviour and meaning-forming occuring in other cultures and communities throughout the world.

Musicologist Christopher Small expresses these ideas ecologically through his concept of Musicking.

"The act of musicking establishes in the place where it is happening a set of relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies. They are to be found not only between those organized sounds which are conventionally thought of as being the stuff of musical meaning but also between the people who are taking part, in whatever capacity, in the performance; and they model, or stand as metaphor for, ideal relationships as the participants in the performance imagine them to be: relationships between person and person, between individual and society, between humanity and the natural world and even perhaps the supernatural world." [Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening, 1998]

As Small describes in his book, Musicking can be applied to performance practices across all cultures and traditions. This includes all amatuer as well as professional forms of the European classical tradition.

What kind of relationships are established in the cinema space? Is Musicking part of the film viewing/listening experience?

15. Spectatorship: Ritual

Ellen Dissanayake describes human art-making as: “Dromena - the sense of behaviour made special.”

The stage performance is a unique ritualised multi-sensorial occasion for the presentation of activities outside the norms and habits of everyday living.

Spectators observe performers - registering facial expressions, body movements, the gestures and handling of props, costumes and instruments. In this the spectator discovers something mysterious and fascinating.

In all types of performance settings the visual and auditory senses remain coupled in constant stimulation.

14. Spectatorship: The Visual Aspect of Music and Theatre

Embodied music cognition considers the human body as the natural mediator between mind and physical environment. It explores how music perception is based on action; how movement (i.e. dancing to music) provides corporeal meaning. In contrast, a disembodied approach to music cognition is concerned with how cerebral meaning is formed through perception-based analysis of musical structure.

Composer Harry Partch [1901-1974] with his instruments. Source link here.

Inspired by the colourful costumes, elaborate masks and dramatic gestures of East Asian performing arts, writer and theatre director Antonin Artuad [1896-1948] challenged the conventions of European theatre. He described his newly conceived Theatre of Cruelty as “a new theatrical language of totem and gesture – a language of space devoid of dialogue that would appeal to all the senses.” Modern theater for Artuad was to be a visceral spectacle of light, sound and gesture.

Some years later in America, composer Harry Partch [1901-1974] similarly challenged euro-centric conventions of spectatorship and performance, stressing instead the importance of music as a multi-sensory experience involving the body: 

“[…] the music itself, elusive to words. I call it corporeal, because it roots itself with other arts necessary to civilization, in a unity that is important to the whole being - mind and body. Even the visual element of seeing the instruments played is a vital one.”

Concurrent with Partch’s idiosyncratic music, Jazz pianist and composer Sun Ra [1914-1993] was busy on the East Coast with his Arkestra band. Together they were developing their own type of Gesamtkunstwerk (Wagner's notion of a total artwork incorporating all other art forms). These increasingly elaborate performances unfolded in a ritual-like atmosphere and involved costumes, visual art, dancers and collective drumming.

Despite working at different times and places, these three maverick artists shared an interest in the embodied, corporeal dimension of their work. Performance for them was a powerfully visceral, multi-sensory spectacle.

13. Spectatorship: The Transsensorial

“The eye carries information and sensations only some of which can be considered specifically and irreducibly visual (e.g. color); most others are transsensory. Likewise, the ear serves as a vehicle for information and sensations only some of which are specifically auditive (e.g., pitch and intervallic relationships), the others being, as in the case of the eye, not specific to this sense […] In the transsensorial or even metasensorial model […] the sense are channels, highways more than territories or domains.” [Michel Chion, Audio-Vision, 1994, p137]

We see and hear through a web of senses. Neurological research suggests that lived experience occurs where mind, body and world converge. 

In a 2005 paper titled Why Seeing is Believing: Merging Auditory and Visual Worlds, IIana Witten and Eric Knudsen question the traditional reasoning that visual capture reflects an inherent physiological advantage that favors visual over nonvisual spatial information. The authors suggest that:

“visual capture occurs not because of any inherent advantage of visual circuitry, but because the brain integrates information optimally.”

12. Listening: The Cocktail Party Effect

The brain's ability to focus auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, like background chatter, is an example of the Cocktail Party Effect. 

Top (L-R): Mash [1970] • McCabe and Mrs Miller [1971] Bottom (L-R): Thieves Like Us [1974] • Nashville [1975] dir. Robert Altman

Robert Altman was interested in creating realistic multi-character dialogue within a given scene. His use of multiple radio microphones to create naturally overlapping conversations is well-documented. Less noted is the performance style of many of his actors.

Dialogue parts often appear to lack theatrical performance projection; lines are sometimes mumbled and uttered quietly, mixing with the dialogue of other characters nearby. There is an intended naturalism to these conversations that feels closer to Cinéma Vérité documentary-filmmaking than classical Hollywood style. 

For the modern viewer used to ultra-close and controlled dialogue (a result of practical production sound concerns in commercial filmmaking as much as stylistic convention), the sum effect of this overlapping, under-projected naturalism can lead to a sense of compromised intelligibility - we’re not exactly sure what’s always being said. *

The Altman approach to dialogue naturalism is further extended by his casting of non-professional actors who are less accustomed to theatrical voice projection. Technical enhancements are achieved in-camera and later in post-production; wider ensemble shots are favoured over single character close-ups, while overall dialogue mixing is less concerned with total intelligibility of every uttered word.

* Director Christopher Nolan's so-called ‘punk style’ might be considered a recent exception to the Hollywood drive for ultra-intelligibility, though whether his approach is entirely effective or not for the kind of films he makes, is another question.

11. Listening: The Ventriloquist Illusion

Our senses are connected. They function at the nexus of lived experience; the synergy of mind, body and world. These multiple sensory stimulations are integrated by the nervous system to produce meaningful perceptual experiences. 

David Eagleman writes in his 2011 book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain how the visual field informs our auditory experience:

“The different senses influence one another, changing the story of what is thought to be out there. What comes in through the eyes is not just business of the visual system—the rest of the brain is invested as well. In the ventriloquist illusion, sound comes from one location (the ventriloquist’s mouth), but your eyes see a moving mouth in a different location (the ventriloquist’s dummy). Your brain concludes that the sound comes directly from the dummy’s mouth. Ventriloquists don’t “throw” their voice. Your brain does all the work for them.”

Multisensory illusions like the Ventriloquist Effect and the McGurk Effect - where the auditory component of one sound is paired with the visual component of another sound, leading to the perception of a third sound - suggest that vision greatly influences auditory perception.

10. Listening: The Ear

Sound is a vibration. Sound waves travel through oscillating molecules in a medium like air or water. 

Light reaches the human retina within the 180-degrees forward-facing field of view. Sound reaches the ears from all directions at all times. Artist Christian Marcly once commented:

“I think it is in sound’s nature to be free and uncontrollable and to go through the cracks and to go places where it’s not supposed to go.” 

The eye can shut out external stimuli with the aid of an eye-lid, while the ear remains in a state of permanent receptivity.

9. Listening: Evolution

Humans are accustomed to hearing sounds from everywhere at any time. The sources of these sounds are not always discernible to the eye. 

A developed auditory sense has allowed humans to gather information from their surroundings. Hearing acts as a kind of early-warning system, enabling humans to identify the general direction of a sound and react to it before the need for visual confirmation.

Our causal mode of listening has helped humans evade predators and navigate through hostile environments. Language introduces semantic modes of listening that has supported mankind’s growing need to understand and cooperate with one another in an increasingly complex and socialised world. 

In the course of everyday life these habitual listening modes - the causal and semantic - are often activated and combined simultaneously. Chion writes: “We hear at once what someone says and how they say it“.

8. Listening: Quiet Silence

The quiet can be unsettling, disorientating. The absence of sound can suggest social isolation, remoteness.

Such spaces can reveal the sonic activity already present within them; a naked cough is exposed in the hush of the library, a shuffling of feet suddenly violates the quiet. 

Carnival of Souls [1962] dir. Herk Harvey

Sudden unexpected changes to a sensory input arouse attention. These can manifest as feelings of discomfort and fear. In the 1962 horror film Carnival of Souls, organist Mary Henry emerges from a department store changing room only to discover that the world has suddenly fallen silent. She no longer can hear anything from the environment around her. All is mute. The only sounds she can hear are her own voice and footsteps. Later she reports to the doctor:

"It was more than just not being able to hear anything. Or make contact with anyone. It was though...as though for a time I didn't exist. As though I had no place in the world. No part of the life around me.”

Derealisation is described as an alteration in one's perception of the world. Depersonalisation is an alteration in one’s perception of self, often observing the body and mind from outside at a distance. Such dissociative disorders are ways for the mind to cope with stress and trauma. Manipulation of mental dissociative states through targeted sound design (e.g. changing sound levels, use of silence) is commonly used to heighten subjective states in many genres of narrative filmmaking.

Ikiru [1952] dir. Akira Kurosawa

In Ikiru [1952], director Akira Kurosawa allows the dreaded news of the protagonist’s health to hang in the air in silence. Lost in thought Watanabe leaves the hospital, slowly exiting out on to a city street devoid of all sound. A large truck suddenly passes by, awakening him from his introspection. The cacophony of the city violently returns.

For Alfred Hitchcock, the artificial silencing of a victim at a particular moment operates at the most provocative level - the spectator is affected not by what is seen or heard, but what is imagined. In a famous scene from Frenzy [1972], Hitchcock abruptly cuts the sound of the outside world after Barbara "Babs" Milligan enters the murderer’s flat. As the door closes, the camera smoothly and silently tracks back down the stairs before slowly returning to the bustling city life outside. In this sequence the use of silence over the continuous tracking shot heightens the grim, inevitable fate that awaits Babs. She is alone and helpless. No one outside is aware of what is about to happen. No one, that is, except the spectator, who plays out the scene in their own mind.

Discussing the unique role sound performs in his own equally violent film Benny’s Video [1992], Austrian director Michael Haneke elaborates on this Hitchcock approach:

“With an image, you cut the imagination short. With an image, you see what you see and its 'reality'. With sound, just like words, you incite the imagination. And that’s why for me it's always more efficient, if I want to touch someone emotionally, to use sound rather than image.”

Frenzy [1972] dir. Alfred Hitchcock

7. Listening: Stochastic Resonance

The modern, mobile knowledge worker seeks an ideal workspace away from the isolation and the monotony of the home. For many people such a space is one with a certain optimal level of background noise.

In our city spaces, cafes, galleries and bars, an animated conversation nearby can prove distracting. Attention drifts towards audible phrases and fragments that spill out into one’s own private acoustic zone. Noise-canceling headphones soundproof one from such interference. 

And yet, small amounts of noise can be beneficial for our senses. First discovered in studies of animal behavior, Stochastic Resonance is the phenomenon that describes how sensory signals can be enhanced by certain optimal levels of noise in a system. Studies show that a low-to-moderate level of ambient noise in public spaces like a coffee shop can actually boost abstract thinking and creativity. The variety of visual and auditory stimuli in a public setting can also stimulate creative thinking, while the physical presence of other people can act as a motivating factor to work more effectively.