As the year continues, many of these posts will be philosophical in nature. Some will be in contradiction to previous postings. These are not intended as truths or assertions, they’re merely thoughts…ideas. Think of this as stream of consciousness over a wide span…
I live down the road from a fairly large, physically, Catholic church. Despite being made mostly of concrete, it’s in a somewhat classical cathedral style. High Vaulted ceilings, long nave, large wooden doors at the entrance…and so on. Since I’ve moved here, I’ve been wondering whether or not the bells I occasionally hear from it are real or electronic. The pattern and melody seems awfully complex to be a set of physical bells, but the tower is large enough to house bells of the appropriate size for the tones. I was wondering about this again the other day while walking past it, when I had a different thought…
“What if the church didn’t have any bells at all?”
My mind made the leap from the logistics of the bell system, to the idea that…traditionally…churches have bells. It’s a sonic element that is part of their identity, much in the same way that the Call to Prayer is a sonic element that is part of the identity of a mosque. There’s an assumption that these inanimate man-made structures have a sound; not just any sound either, but one that conforms to the historic traditions of a specific culture. What happens to an item or place like this if it is divested of that sonic element…if part of its identity is removed. Does it change the way people identify it? Do they notice? If they don’t, do they even realize that there actually is something different, or do they just assume that it’s still there outside of their perception in that immediate context?
What other items in our daily lives have this trait of an “assumed sonic characteristic,” and where can we take advantage of that in telling a story?
I’m gonna try something new this week. Let’s take the discussion over to Designing Sound Exchange.
Well the first thing that comes to my mind is acoustics.. This is sort of a problem when going out and having dinner in ‘trendy’ restaurants.. everything is stripped (bare walls, open wiring on concrete, open kitchens, no carpets… and the result is horrible sound.. it wears me down and I have hard time listening to people.
When we design sound for a restaurant in a movie… the first thought is mostly.. what do I need to make it convincing? You look for ambiences (cutlery, kitchen sounds, soft voices) you maybe add some music (light classical?) and you add some loop groups (additional sparse conversation) and foley. A dash of reverb..
But than you have the polar opposite of ‘modern restaurant’ reality: which is the sound of chaos.
This is not to say that reality will sell the story better.. but it makes you wonder what you can borrow from it?
And then you come back to what you really needed to do in the first place, think about the POV, perspective, state of mind of the characters/story. Maybe the restaurant should sound hectic (even though it looks very distinguished).
Too many times we (sound designers and directors) assume things about how things are supposed to sound in film. We ignore the fact that reality can sound more interesting and immersive than our historical/nostalgic film pallet.
For example yesterday I watched Magnolia (1999) again. I noticed that John C. Reillys’ police car has a very very loud rattle in his first scene. I realised that it made me symphatise with his character.. sitting there talking to himself. And instead of using a smooth silence, the ratlling was used to point out his lack of social interaction.
Later in the heated scene between Claudia and her father (talkshow host Jimmy Gator) there’s a nasty buzz creeping into the ambience, that is noticeably muted as soon as he turns away. Very simple but effective…