FILM SOUND: Ideas, research and personal reflections on film, sound and cinema listening
[1.] Film Notes: The Cinema as Listening Space, Film as a Sonic Medium | 2nd draft | 2022-2023
[2.] Film Notes: Additional film titles | 2023-2025
[3.] Film: Moving image collaborations and experiments | 2004-2025
[4.] Listening to Films | 2016-2020
I. 100 excerpts of film sound - edits 1931-2014 *
II. The Tarkovsky Suite - edits and collages
III. The Bergman Suite - edits and collages
IV. The Cyberpunk Suite - edits and collages
V. The Malaise of Modernity - edits and collages | Antonioni, Teshigahara, Welles and Film Noir
VI. The Phantasmic Ataraxic Cinematic - edits and collages
* Excerpts also presented on separate pages with film images, sound content description, credits and selected quotes:
1-10, 11-20, 21-30, 31-40, 41-50, 51-60, 61-70, 71-80, 81-90, 91-100
[5.] The Act of Listening Series: The act of listening performed and revealed as film image | images and text | 2017-2020
[6.] Encounters with Noise in the Dark: Personal reflections | images and text | 2016-2020
Film Sound in the Attention Economy|2025
Time is a measurement of change. Our attention is the cache value of our time, our curiosity, our love - the faculty that joins us to the world. To be open and receptive, to really look and listen, is to entertain the possibility of change; that we might challenge, and thus ultimately transcend, our narrow conception of ourselves and the world around us.
Film is a time-based audiovisual medium. It solicits our attention. We are invited to look and listen, see and hear. Deep Listening is a practice of expanding our focal and global attention. Film as a container of time cultivates the practice of deep, attentive listening.
Modern film technology captures a familiar sense of everyday reality - everything seems to “be there”. Words are heard when an actor opens their mouth; the sound of a door closing makes sense when someone leaves the room. But film also transcends familiar sense experience, permitting the reassociation of images and sounds through an exploration of time (audio/visual montage) and space (onscreen/offscreen cinematography). Here the medium captures a quality closer to the expressive and ambiguous character of dreams, memory, the internal landscape of the mind. A technique unique to audiovisual filmmaking, the reassociation of images and sounds activates spectatorship.
The cinema is a cocoon. Isolated from the distractions of the outside world, the cinema is designed to cultivate an atmosphere of concentration and attentional focus towards an immersive experience of light and sound. The cinema is a focus space for film performance. It gathers together the active participation of its audience in a unique state of “mass intimacy”. The cinema par excellence provides the optimal conditions for the public performance of film. It is the site for our shared horizon of meaning.