FILM SOUND: Ideas, research and reflections on film, sound and cinema listening
[1.] Film Notes: The Cinema as Listening Space, Film as 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
[7.] Booms, Bells and Distant Voice: The Ambiguity of Sound - Tarkovsky and Beyond | NFTS / 2014
Film, Time and Listening |2026 update
Time is a measurement of change.
Attention, the cache value of our time, our curiosity, the faculty that joins us to the world.
To be open and receptive, to really look and listen, is to examine the possibility of change.
Change is what hints at something beyond a narrow conception of being.
Film is a time-based audiovisual medium soliciting attention.
The audience is invited to look, to listen, to see and hear.
Deep Listening is a practice of expanded auditory attention.
Film, a container of unfolding time, cultivates the practice of deep, attentive listening.
Modern film technology captures a familiar sense of everyday reality; everything feels like it is all there.
Yet film may also venture beyond familiar, grounded sense experience.
Film permits the reassociation of what we see and hear through a decoupling of time from space.
Montage, Contrapuntal and Asynchronous Sound, The Diegesis, Cinema Space, Onscreen-Offscreen Choreography.
The re-organising of images and sounds activates spectatorship.
This is unique to audiovisual filmmaking.
Film can reveal present, unfolding, uninterrupted temporal experience.
It can also reveal something closer to the elastic, trnasient quality of dreams, memory and the changing landscape of the mind.
Let us imagine the film experience before the dawn of the talkie.
Did sound shatter the palace of dreams?
The cinema is a cocoon, isolated and out of reach from the encroaching world outside.
A focus space for an immersive multi-sensory experience.
It gathers together the active participation of its audience in a unique state of mass-intimacy - on my own, together with others.
The rock, the hill, the temple, the church, the cinema, all as embodied listening space.
The burning campfire.
Listening and Looking.
The optimal conditions for collective ritual.
Site for our shared horizon of meaning.