“The ultimate metaphoric sound is silence. If you can get the film to a place with no sound where there should be sound, the audience will crowd that silence with sounds and feelings of their own making, and they will, individually, answer the question of, “Why is it quiet?” If the slope to silence is at the right angle, you will get the audience to a strange and wonderful place where the film becomes their own creation in a way that is deeper than any other.”

- Walter Murch

Walter Murch will be talking about sound at Chicago Humanities Fest 2011. The event is scheduled for Nov 13. Price is $10 in general admission and $5 for students.

As a film editor and sound designer, Walter Murch has worked on classic films of our time, includingApocalypse Now, The Godfather, and The English Patient, among many more. The winner of multiple Academy Awards, Murch, with his technological know-how, has helped to elevate the art and impact of film sound to a new level. His latest projects, which include editing Phil Kaufman’s Hemingway & Gellhorn and directing an episode of Lucasfilm’s animated Clone Wars, are quintessential Murch: eclectic, distinctive, and visionary. In conversation with Lawrence Weschler, CHF artistic director emeritus, Murch discusses the evolution of film technology from the creation of the 5.1 sound format to today’s Final Cut Pro.

via @pulsetrain

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

On a related note, here’s an interesting recent interview with Coppola on Risk, Money, Craft & Collaboration.

I think it’s generally misleading  to say, “Well, that sequence had eighty tracks, it must be great.” Ideally, for me, the perfect sound film has zero tracks. You try to get the audience to a point, somehow, where they can imagine the sound. They hear the sound in their minds, and it really isn’t on the track at all. That’s the ideal sound, the one that exists totally in the mind, because it’s the most intimate. It deals with each person’s experience, and it’s obviously of the highest fidelity imaginable, because it’s not being translated through any kind of medium.

So, at a certain point, there were 160 tracks for Apocalypse. That is an awful lot, but on the other hand, if somehow I could have achieved the same effect with no tracks, I would have been more impressed.  Or one track. If there had been one sound that did all of that, so mysteriously, I would be more impressed. but what that means is: thinking very, very deeply, and being very, very lucky in getting exactly the right thing. And if you can do that, then the number of tracks is meaningless. But, generally speaking, it doesn’t happen very often, if ever, to get that one thing. That’s just an abstract ideal that I always strive for.

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Time to get yourself a new book, huh? Look at this:

“A fascinating behind the scenes look at the previously unexplored territory of horror film sound..
Through in-depth analysis of sound in the films of Dario Argento and discussions with leading practitioners, this book explores our inherent relationship with sound; examining how and why specific sounds are chosen and utilised to express and manipulate human perception and emotion.”

“Talent, initiative and attention to detail”

“Interesting and provocative”

SOUNDS TO DIE FOR – SPEAKING THE LANGUAGE OF HORROR FILM SOUND

Part 1 - Discussions & Interviews

• Walter Murch
• Antonella Fulci
• Michel Chion
• Claudio Simonetti
• Claude Letessier
• Gary Rydstrom
• James Bernard

Part 2 - The Sound World of Dario Argento

• Deep Red
• Water:Bringer of Death
• Beware the ‘Raptus’
• Watcher in the Wind
• Symbolic Roots

• Suspiria
• Voice Behind the Curtain
• Great Wall of Sound

• Conclusion
• Footnotes
• References
• Recommended Reading
• Filmography
• Index

Via U.S.O Project

The Washington Post has published an article by film critic Ann Hornaday, who talks about the use of sound in film, specially the sound effects.

She talks about the importance and good use of sound in several films such as “Secretariat, “Buried”, “The American”,”Inception”, “The Social Network”, “Cast Away”, “Pearl Harbor” and more. This might be not too much new stuff for a person who already works on this field, but hey! is on The Washington Post!

In his film about Secretariat, the 1973 Triple Crown champion and one of the most famous horses in history, director Randall Wallace rose to that challenge in an unconventional way — he appealed to filmgoers’ ears, rather than their eyes. Even as the images in “Secretariat” would depict well-known events, Wallace decided, he would infuse the movie’s soundtrack with an almost subliminal tension. So as the chestnut colt — called Big Red through most of the movie — makes his way from the Kentucky Derby to the Preakness to the Belmont Stakes, discerning audiences can make out something beyond the roar of the crowd and thundering hooves: the sound of Secretariat’s heart beating.

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Via: Social Sound Design

The School of Sound has announced the release of a reprinted version of “SOUNDSCAPE: The School of Sound Lectures 1998-2001“, one of the most amazing books to read if you’re involved with sound design or sound in general.

SOUNDSCAPE is a compendium of presentations given during the first four years of the School of Sound investigating the modern soundtrack and the ways sound combines with image in both art and entertainment. Directors, sound designers, composers, editors, artists and theorists define and interpret their personal use of sound from both traditional approaches and radical new perspectives.

The contributors include directors David Lynch and Mike Figgis; sound designers Walter Murch, Owe Svensson and Randy Thom; composers Carter Burwell, David Burnand and Stephen Deutsch; producer Bob Last; theorists Laura Mulvey, Michel Chion and Ian Christie; critics Peter Wollen, James Leahy and Shoma Chatterji; screenwriter Phil Parker; filmmakers Mani Kaul and Amie Siegel; music producer Manfred Eicher; anthropologist Thanos Vovolis; and poet Tom Paulin. The contributors represent some of the most insightful people currently working with sound.

Key to each chapter is each speaker’s focus on working methods and creative thinking, investigating how sound is integrated into their practice and way of communicating. The presentations are remarkable in their breadth and depth of discourse, each one expanding the thinking about audio-visual production into unexpected and inspiring territory.

SOUNDSCAPE is available on Central Books. A separate US distributor will be listed soon.

Via: @schoolofsound

Some years ago, MPEG published a very interesting article of Charles Maynes talking about his approach on the use of the worldizing technique:

For some of us in sound and music circles, “worldizing” has long held a special sense of the exotic. Worldizing is the act of playing back a recording in a real-world environment, allowing the sound to react to that environment, and then re-recording it so that the properties of the environment become part of the newly recorded material. The concept is simple, but its execution can be remarkably complex.

In Walter Murch’s superb essay on the reconstruction of the Orson Welles film A Touch of Evil, he quotes from a 58-page memo that Welles wrote to Universal to lay out his vision for the movie. At one point, Welles describes how he wants to treat the music during a scene between Janet Leigh and Akim Tamiroff, and he offers as elegant a description of worldizing as I can think of:

The music itself should be skillfully played but it will not be enough, in doing the final sound mixing, to run this track through an echo chamber with a certain amount of filter. To get the effect we’re looking for, it is absolutely vital that this music be played back through a cheap horn in the alley outside the sound building. After this is recorded, it can then be loused up even further in the process of rerecording. But a tinny exterior horn is absolutely necessary, and since it does not represent very much in the way of money, I feel justified in insisting upon this, as the result will be really worth it.

At the time, Universal did not revise Touch of Evil according to these notes, but the movie’s recent reconstruction incorporates these ideas. Worldizing is now a technique that has been with us for some time and will likely be used and refined for years to come.

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Detailed analysis on the beginning of cinema. The possibilities of film-making as a languaje, exposed from the perspective of the great editor (and first to be referred as “Sound Designer”).

Vía: U.S.O Project

“Sound has a great power but it is a conditional power. It places the image in a physical and emotional context, helping us to decide how to take the image and how it integrates itself into everything else.”

-Walter Murch