This Is Not A Train: An exploration of meaning, emotion and the roles of sound in film through ambiguity and reassociation

This is a guest contribution by Carlos Manrique Clavijo.

Carlos Manrique Clavijo is a Colombian/Australian sound editor/sound designer and animation producer based in South Australia. He’s worked on award winning fiction, documentary and predominantly, animation from 2002. With Ana María Méndez, he is the co-founder of animation company, KaruKaru. Carlos has taught film sound design, audio post-production, and music and editing at tertiary institutions in Colombia and Australia. In 2018 he commenced working in the Sound Post-production department at the South Australian Film Corporation. Carlos is passionate and curious about film sound, animation, philosophy, social sciences and the arts.

 

“(…) I only need to record an empty tin can rolling for a bit. I can work from this recording for hours, and the sound is so transposed and unrecognizable that the tin can disappears. (…) The ‘railway’ element at half speed isn’t the slightest bit like a railway. It turns into a foundry and a blast furnace. I say foundry to make myself understood and because a little bit of ‘meaning’ is still attached to the fragment. But very soon I perceive it as an original rhythmic group, and I am in constant admiration at its depth, its richness of detail, its somber color.” –Pierre Schaeffer [1]

What is this train that we hear? What is it to us?

In what we do, sounds don’t just happen to exist with an ‘in-built’ and ‘necessary’ essence; they don’t just have an “in-itself” by default. And even if, from time to time, there could still be a trace of the source that could have produced such sound, it is but one of the many possibilities of what a sound event or a sound object [2] may potentially be or become to us: A sound is, in our hands and in our films, the thing, not in-itself but as it makes itself manifest to the listener [3]. We can’t deny that what we call the ‘source’ of a sound (the entity that would originate a sound when it is recorded or synthesised), can certainly have a place and a role in our sound-games. From time to time, the sound of a train could, in fact, be merely signifying just that: the idea of a train. And it may even, once in a while, be simply synchronised to an image of a train, or to the off-screen but yet diegetic presence of a train. But more often than most people realise, our trains are much more than just trains.

Our signifiers, those of sound designers, sound editors, composers, Foley artists, recordists and mixers, are not necessarily attached to univocal signifieds. By means of what we do with them, how we transform them and how we place them in relation to other sounds (as well as to particular images), they ultimately become that for which we cast them. The sound of a tree falling in the forest can be anything we want it to be, depending on what we intend to convey and as long as that feeble thing, suspension of disbelief, is not broken. Sounds are in the world (in the story-world), they are in their context (in the stories that unfold in front of us, inside our hearing mechanism, in our cognitive apparatus, in our cultural and personal baggage and in our imagination) as phenomena experienced by the listener – and then, only then, can they be defined and named. The semantic value of any given sound, what it is to us, is ultimately determined by the particular network of signs in which we embed that sound, or more precisely, by the network of signs in which our audience understands that sound to be nested in.

“And then there was a sound like people fighting with swords and I could feel a strong wind and a roaring started and I closed my eyes and the roaring got louder and I groaned really loudly but I couldn’t block it out of my ears and I thought the little station was going to collapse or there was a big fire somewhere and I was going to die. And then the roaring turned into a clattering and a squealing and it got slowly quieter and then it stopped and I kept my eyes closed because I felt safer not seeing what was happening. And then I could hear people moving again because it was quieter. And I opened my eyes but I couldn’t see anything at first because there were too many people. And then I saw that they were getting onto a train that wasn’t there before and it was the train which was the roaring” [4]

The complex machinery of simple narratives

As discussed by numerous authors, sound can fulfill several different roles in film and, as mentioned before, there will always be those literal instances in which sounds are attached to images or ideas of the sources that would produce them in our everyday experience of the world. This is what Tomlinson Holman calls the “narrative role”
[5]: the kinds of sounds that one would expect to hear, for instance, throughout that famous train shot by the Lumière Brothers. But with this example in mind, one must realise that it is a silent film that we’re talking about and hence the reason why we’re talking about the sound that one would expect to hear: even in its apparent simplicity, what matters is not the sound that the original train would have produced in front of the camera but the idea of the sound that we expect to hear in association with those images. This sound does not emanate from the train in the shot. And the sounds of other trains in other films throughout the years do not come from the speakers in cinemas either; they come from us, from our memories and from our expectations – from our personal experience of the world.

 

Waiting for the train: Anticipation, trajectories, expectation and emotional response

In the context of denotation, as mentioned before, the relationships between seeing and hearing appear to be somehow straightforward; we see a train, we hear a train. But what about hearing what can’t be seen? Perception and cognition are active processes and our minds are always trying to fill the gaps whenever presented with incomplete or ambiguous information [6]. Any type of incomplete pattern, any denial of information (eg. off-screen action, concealment through use of shadows, subjective shots, extreme close-ups, cut-aways, etc.), is an open invitation to play a game that we can never refuse; [7] we engage with the stimulus, lured by anticipation and captivated by expectation. These expectations are generated by patterns and sequences that vectorise our attention towards a definite endpoint as in one of the opening sequences from “The Polar Express” (2004). In it, Randy Thom beautifully presents us with all the clues we need in order to feel the awe that this train should inspire. At the same time, a key piece of the puzzle is left out (the image of the train), making us hang at the edge of our seats. This train is awe and anticipation.

 

The act of leaving ‘baits’ [8] for the audience to follow along a trajectory, generates questions and longing for resolution at the end of that trajectory. A crescendo, for example, will always plant the question of ‘for how long’ will something evolve, ‘how loud’ will it become and more importantly, when will that journey end. These ‘vectors’ can be elaborated in many different ways but some of the most common ones use gradual, linear and somehow predictable changes of: pitch, loudness, placement (within a stereo/surround/immersive field), timbre, signal processing (such as in the case of equaliser sweeps), textural changes in the ‘density and complexity’ of elements in the soundtrack and gradual acceleration (or deceleration) of rhythm/patterns.

In a very well known example from Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” part I (1972), Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), plays the son of the mafia patriarch who has until now been reluctant to take part in the family business. At critical moment of the story, Michael decides to meet Virgil Sollozzo, the gangster responsible for the shooting of his father. During the meeting (at around 01:28), while the camera shows a medium-close-up of Michael Corleone, Sollozzo starts explaining his version of the story to Michael in Italian (purposely lacking subtitles). As the camera slowly racks-in towards Pacino’s character until reaching a close-up, the sound of an elevated train appears and swiftly increases in loudness while the sound of Sollozzo’s voice fades away. The train finally takes over and reaches its maximum loudness, at which point this climax is suddenly interrupted by a gunshot and an abrupt relative silence. This train is the boiling combination of the character’s thoughts and emotions as he reaches mid-point of the story.

 

At the end of each journey, the way in which expectations are resolved (or not) will play an important role in colouring the audience’s emotional response and semantic interpretation of the piece: we may find relief, anger, pleasure, sadness, amusement, pride, fear, etc. And it is because of these tendencies of the mind that, in most art forms, the strongest potential for emotional response tends to lie in the most ambiguous or unexpected aspects of a work [9]. As Michel Chion beautifully puts it in “The Audio-vision”: “We never stop anticipating, and surprising anticipation – for this is the movement of desire itself.” [10]

Hidden cargo: encoded messages in film sound

 

The second movement of Dziga Vertov’s “Enthusiasm” (1931) (one of the earliest sound-films and certainly one of the most aesthetically daring within this context) presents the frantic response of Udarniks (shock workers) to a coal shortage in the Donbass region.

At around 24:20, we hear a disembodied voice stating that “there is no more coal”. After that, we start hearing what seems like train horns played in a frantic yet precise pattern, reminiscent of Morse code. As we hear it, we see meticulously composed shots of workers assembled for a meeting, factories, empty crates and low-angle mid-shots of a heroically-portrayed worker. The urgency of the horn finally climaxes on a long, sustained, oscillating, note. During this note, juxtaposed images of locomotives are finally revealed for a short amount of time, dissolving the acousmatic [11] nature of the sound by connecting it to its source. Shortly after that, the horn starts again roughly a minor sixth lower (see table below), almost as a retrograde of the previous ‘phrase’. It starts with the long note, then moves to the apparent Morse pattern and then back to a long note. It is then simplified by reducing the loudness of the higher notes.

Curious to confirm if these train sounds were actually Morse patterns I reached out to a Russian animator, who asked a friend of his, who in turn, asked another friend – a retired radio operator. They listened to the excerpt and explained that, after the previously mentioned voice stating that “there is no coal”, there are essentially two messages conveyed through the ‘Morse train horn’. The first one is, according to the translators, a short and powerful message urging people to collaborate with the state in developing the industry of the Donbass region and could be translated as “Everybody! Join-in and work on the five years plan!”. The second message is a demand and could be translated as saying: “Give us coal! The country needs to be given coal!”. [12]

At the end of this ‘sonic sequence’, at around 25:41, what remains of the cognitive dissonance and question about those horns being a Morse pattern or not, is partially resolved when we get to hear the more conventional Morse code sound on telegraph tones, thus confirming that this train is a code.

A summary of the structure and ‘elements of this ‘Morse train’ sequence described above could be encapsulated as follows (borrowing some terms from musical language for ease of denotation):

The music of trains

In 1948, French composer Pierre Schaeffer, a radio operator at the Radiodiffusion Française, also decided to play with trains. Referring to his “Etude Aux Chemins de Fer” (1948), he wrote in his journal:

“Six engines at the depot, taken by surprise, as it were, at home. I ask the drivers to improvise. One to start, the others to reply. These engines do certainly have voices of their own. One is hoarse, another harsh; one has a deep voice, another a strident one. I eagerly record the dialogue between these mild-mannered whales. At their conductors’ desks the Batignolles drivers watch me but quickly grow tired.”
[13] “(…) secretly I hope that one day there will come together an audience that prefers the theoretically less rewarding sequences, where the train must be forgotten and only sequences of sound color, changes of time, and the secret life of percussion instruments are heard.” [14]

 

These trains are music. In their epoch, they were the seeds of strange, never before heard compositions that used elements of music while experimenting with editorial tools to rearrange them into an aesthetic experience. To those trains and people like their musical conductor, we owe the possibilities that now lie in front of us and that we’ve become so used to manipulating with a few clicks of a mouse: looping, pitch-shifting, filtering, reversing, slowing down and speeding up, delaying, reverberating, compressing, expanding, cutting, pasting, slicing, splicing and fading. But it’s important to remember that, aside from the creative use of technical tools, it was the application of musical elements to all sorts of sound objects that lead to the emergence of Shaeffer’s oeuvre and legacy. “We are craftsmen”, he said. “(…) In all this wooden and tin junk and my bicycle horns I rediscover my violin, my voice.” [15] Our sounds, those of film-sound crafts people, can certainly be sculpted with musical tools like pitch logic, rhythmic patterns, tempo, harmonic relationships of consonance vs. dissonance, formal structure, etc. [16]

In a similar way, the musicality of trains can also be imbued with the semantic qualities of metaphorical and allegorical language to convey particular ideas and emotions. In the 1980s, in a different continent do Schaeffer, composer Steve Reich also played with musical trains: trains of childhood memories, trains of anguish and trains of survival. In “Different Trains” (1988), he used the pith logic of recorded voices as a source for melodies, the mechanical motion of train parts as inspiration for rhythm, and combined them with recordings of bells, train whistles, horns and sirens. The trains of the first movement represent Reich’s coast-to-coast travels in the US to visit his parents during his childhood. Those of the second movement are the trains he would have suffered, had he lived in Europe during the same time of trains of the first movement -trains that lead to the concentration camps of the Holocaust. Finally, in the third movement, back in the US, the trains we hear are those that exiled survivors from the war rode after migrating. Definitely not just trains; neither of these are just ‘merely trains’.

 

Trainsmutation: Sound motifs and allegories

There is a long tradition of the use of musical motifs in dramatic storytelling, as is the case in opera and film musicals. Distinctive ideas, very often containing memorable melodic cells, can be associated with characters, situations, moods, locations or other story elements, [17] seemingly working under the principles of pavlovian conditioning [18] [19]. But these motifs don’t have to be ‘musical’ in the strictly traditional understanding of the term. They can consist of a sound event (e.g. belonging to the sound effects or atmos categories) as ‘neutral stimulus’ that is presented at the same time with another ‘significative stimulus’ (e.g. a character) that will be bound to it, creating a relation of dependency between them. Thus, after establishing this connection through repetition, the motif (‘neutral stimulus’) can be presented to the audience, leading them to recall the response to the ‘significative stimulus’ without it being present.

In Joe Wright’s “Anna Karenina” (2012), the team working with sound designer Paul Carter extend the allegories crafted by Tolstoy in his novel and transform them into cinematic sound motifs. Tolstoy’s work of braided, tragic, romance story-lines exhibits themes that explore the cost of freedom achieved through destructive transformation, the cost of tradition versus change, of instabilities brought by the new industrial era versus the traditional conventions of an ageing patriarchal system. Trains are, throughout the story, an allegorical manifestation of these struggles.

“Early in the novel, Anna meets Vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under a train. (…) human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music.” [20]

To Anna Karenina, death is a way of finding freedom from the oppression of a life that holds her back. These forces of change are, like trains, as captivating and complex as they are unstoppable and potentially destructive.

The motifs of train sounds in this film appear very strongly at book-end sections that are connected with the kind of relationships that Milan Kundera describes in the quote above. In the first of these book-ends, at 17:29, the sounds of the stationed train punctuate two of Anna’s encounters with key characters: When she first meets her brother, Stiva, at the station, we hear a playful train horn as he raises his arms, illustrating the joy of the encounter. Then, after a few seconds (at 17:54), a loud steam release interrupts Anna’s walk (and shifts the emotional tone of the scene) as the train worker who will die a few moments later, crosses her path abruptly. About thirty seconds later (just after 18:25), the shot of Vronsky kissing her hand is violently interrupted by the loud attack of train machinery synchronised to a sharp edit. The cut presents an extreme close-up of train wheels emitting sparks as it comes to a stop in slow motion. This is followed by a short montage of extreme close-ups, illustrated with screeching, dissonant, metallic sounds in an uncomfortably close sonic perspective. These sounds then cross-fade into screaming of the people at the station as they watch the accident.

The second time that a similar motif is used, occurs at 31:20. In this sequence, from around 31:00, Anna watches Vronsky trying to make her jealous by dancing with princess Kitty in front of her. Anna suddenly realises the magnitude of the consequences that would arise from having an affair with Vronsky and betraying her husband (added to her awareness of Kitty’s feelings for Vronsky). As she has this realisation, she turns her back and swiftly walks away, trying to escape the situation. While this happens, the rattling of the percussion becomes an acousmatised train (existing only as a sound without a visual referent) that is rapidly unveiled by the image of an approaching train in the mirror (through which Anna also sees her own reflection). Anna and the train are thus inseparable. The momentum of the train of things to come is unstoppable. This is followed by a montage that intercuts extreme close-ups of train wheels stopping in slow motion, similar to the ones seen before, shots of Anna inside the train pressing a blade against her cheek, sparks from the train wheels and a couple of shots of Vronsky’s dance with Kitty. This montage is illustrated with screeching, dissonant, metallic sounds, similar to the ones heard before, but this time, there is a much greater contrast through fast cuts between harshly loud and tensely quiet moments.

Interestingly, towards the end of the film, in the sequence in which Anna Karenina jumps to her death on the train tracks (at around 01:53:00), the sound team doesn’t make use of the close sonic perspectives heard earlier, nor of the sequences of violent contrasts mentioned above. Only once, there is an intense contrast between the ominous train sounds in the shot of Anna getting crushed versus the frightful silence that accompanies Vronsky’s shot. Otherwise, the dynamic range seems narrower (especially under the light of the importance that this event has for the film), and the sounds of the train feel somehow lighter than in the previous examples. Is this, perhaps, alluding to the apparent easing of tensions that comes from such monumental decision? After this, a shot of Anna Karenina’s lifeless body is held for a remarkably long time while the train continues to produce an anempathetic sound, as if nothing had happened and everyone else’s life had continued its normal course. As the shot progresses, though, the pitch of the train’s rhythmic mechanisms gradually becomes lower, as if the principle of the Sheppard tone had been applied to the pitch envelope. At the same time, these sounds gradually fade out as if the train was also exhaling its last breath.

At a different point of the film, at around 05:13 the sound of a toy train becomes that of a real train. It then becomes rhythmical sounds of rubber stamps on paper, transforming after a while into the percussive elements of the music track. This train is also a symbol. It is the inevitability of modernisation, juxtaposed over the predictability of stiff social traditions. After playfully transitioning from the previous scene with very light chugging and a toy whistle, the unstoppable ostinato of the train’s rhythm counterpoints Anna’s awkward conversation with the countess. During this conversation Anna’s views and insecurities are confronted by the countess’ more seemingly ‘progressive’ attitude. After a brief mention of the countess’ reputation, Anna indirectly questions her about her love affair, to which she replies: “My sons were ashamed of me but I`d rather end up wishing I hadn’t than end up wishing I had”. The playfully irreverent tone of the scene shifts to a serious one when the train sounds conform to the time-grid of office bureaucracy. After that, they finally dissipate into the chaos of a seemingly messy theatrical orchestra.

The trains in this film travel from a narrative role through a musical one. They also fulfill grammatic functions and ultimately, and more importantly, serve an allegorical role: these trains are the unforgiving momentum of fate.

 

 

Grammatical and metaphorical trains

In Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather part III” (1974) at around 02:19:00, Al Neri (played by Richard Bright) travels to Rome to ‘settle’ the Corleone family’s accounts. After the fast passing-by of the train form the exterior, the whooshing sound blends into rattling of its motion from the interior (or so we believe), with the music cue gradually increasing in intensity. But our certainties vanish in the change to the next shot as soon as we realise that what we’ve been hearing is not a rattling train but the sound of a tambourine. This marks the beginning of a parallel-action, climatic sequence (a paradigmatic technique of all parts of the Godfather trilogy), between the unfolding vendetta and the stage performance of “Cavalleria Rusticana” (reinforcing at the same time, the thematic and plot connections between the opera and the film).

 

This particular non-train in “The Godfather part III” is not only fulfilling a “narrative role” but also what Tomlinson Holman calls the “grammatic role”. In his essential text, “Designing a Movie For Sound”
[21], Randy Thom makes reference to a similar use of sound as he describes its power to “smooth otherwise abrupt changes between shots or scenes”, “emphasize a transition for dramatic effect”, and to “connect otherwise unconnected ideas, characters, places, images or moments”. This train is a coma and a conjunction in a sentence; it stitches together disjointed shots from different scenes, consolidating separate aspects of the protagonist’s life, while exposing their contradictions. Similarly, in “The Audiovision”, Chion refers to a closely related use of sound and, through his discussion of “punctuation”, he presents sound’s ‘syntactical power’ to shape the structure of a piece and thus, also alter its meaning [22].

In a scene from Cloud Atlas (at around 00:52:34:00), Meronym (played by Halle Berry) and Zachry (played by Tom Hanks) are hiding under a bridge. After the suspense of the scene has reached its peak and the Kona horse riders of the war party ride away past their unseen targets, the rhythmic percussion of the galloping horse hooves transforms (in a similar way to the tambourine in “The Godfather part III”) into the sounds of a train traveling away across a vast landscape. This train is a drove of horses and, at the same time, it’s a link that brings together separate stories from different times in a way that is very characteristic of the narrative form and the structure of this particular film.

 

These trains are not merely connecting pairs of shots but they’re actually working at a higher level of the narrative structure by hinting at the way in which the authors make use of the cinematic language in ways that are unique to them [23]: extended parallel action during the climax of “The Godfather” films and interwoven times and places that are intimately connected thematically in the case of “Cloud Atlas”.

Aside these metalingual functions, acousmatic sounds like the previous ones create tension and expectation in the listeners, whose minds are constantly several steps ahead, trying to comprehend, analyse and classify what has been presented to them. But our responses to sound go far beyond the intellectual comprehension of structures or the perception of emotional tensions between familiarity and surprise. And it is in its metaphorical role that sound can fully realise its poetic potential.

Audrey Tautou’s character in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s “Amelie” (2001) is also a train. And so is Mathieu Kassovitz’s character, Nino Quincampoix. Aside from beautifully exploring the story of a person who becomes obsessed with helping others to the point of gradually loosing herself, “Amelie” deals with a straightforward central dramatic question: Will Amelie and Nino, two apparent soul-mates, ever get to meet one another? Throughout the film, Amelie and Nino are trains running on separate, yet parallel, tracks; never colliding. At 00:40:14:00, however, there is a scene that marks a key plot point (“Change of Plans” using Michael Hague’s terminology or plot point 1 in Syd Field’s terminology). It starts with an establishing, downwards-moving crane shot of a train station. In this scene, Amelie solves the “mystery of the photo-booth man” and realises how much she has in common with Nino. Love strikes. After the wide shot mentioned above, Amelie’s feet slowly walk into frame. The camera starts dollying screen-right and as she stops, it also comes to a rest. But her footsteps do not sound like footsteps. There are no footsteps! Instead, what we hear is the groaning brakes of a train coming to a rest. We wait in expectation as she lingers, longing for Nino to notice her. Suddenly, the spell breaks when we realise that Nino has a more pressing problem to solve and rushes in pursuit of the mystery man. Amelie runs after him and along her trail, we hear passing whooshes and reverberated whistles, all as if listening to objects passing by from a speeding train. As the music track commences, the rhythmic pattern of the high-hat also creates a strong reference to the mechanical sounds of a train in motion.

 

These trains aren’t just trains either. They are a girl and a boy, who have started to fall in love and are heading on a trajectory towards certain collision.

In our hands and in our mind’s ears; in our films and in our music, no train is ever just a train. They can be allegories, music and metaphors. All those trains and all those trees falling in forests can ultimately become anything that we concoct them to be. Those trains aren’t ‘objects out there’, and they aren’t obvious extensions of visual entities. They are boundless. Every sound we choose, every transformation we subject it to and every way in which we present it, speaks more about us than about itself or about the film that it makes part of. For every sound we record, perform, edit and mix, we reach inwards, into our personal experiences and our cultural baggage and at the same time, we extend ourselves outwards, by means of that which we share with others. These trains are the way in which we perceive and understand the world as well as the way in which we communicate and connect with others.

KaruKaru

Carlos Manrique Clavijo on IMDb

Footnotes:

[1] Schaeffer, Pierre, “In search of a concrete music”, University of California Press, Berklee, 2012, English translation by Christine North and John Dack, pg. 15 & 14

[2] The difference between sound events and sound objects is a subtle, yet important one.

Throughout his work, Pierre Schaeffer, develops the notion of sound objects as “sound fragments that exist in reality and that are considered as discrete and complete”, “(…) which are neither musical in the classical sense nor noises, i.e., they evoke neither pure music nor drama, but they are indisputable sound-beings (…)”[SCHAEFFER, Pierre, “In search of a concrete music”, op. cit, pg. 14 & 134]. “We understand by sound object, sound itself, considered in its aural nature and not as the material object (any instrument or device) from which it originates.” [SCHAEFFER, Pierre, “Tratado de los objetos musicales”, versión en Español de Araceli Cabezón de Diego, Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 1996, P.23, paraphrased into English by Carlos Manrique Clavijo]

According to Murray Schafer, Pierre Schaeffer’s sound objects are completely isolated in order to be studied and thus turned into laboratory specimens. Therefore he proposes the notion of sound events as the essential components of soundscapes, which are defined by the context in which they occur (including elements such as time and place). [Schafer, R. Murray, “The Soundscape”, Destiny Books, Rochester, 1994, pg. 131]

[3] There are immensely important and interesting bifurcations to explore along the path of ‘the thing in itself’ vs. things as they appear to us: from studies into the ‘Platonic’ idea or the ‘Kantian’ ‘in-itself” to the remarkable contributions of phenomenology.

“And we indeed, rightly considering objects of sense as mere appearances, confess thereby that they are based upon a thing in itself, though we know not this thing as it is in itself, but only know its appearances, viz., the way in which our senses are affected by this unknown something.”

[Kant, Immanuel, “Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics”, http://web.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/phil%20306/kant_materials/prolegomena5.htm, §32, pg. 314-315 (per pagination of German text of the Prolegomena, the Akademie edition, vol. IV, Berlin, 1911), translated by Paul Carus and independently revised by James W. Ellington (1977) and James Fieser (1997)]

“There is a tension between objectifying views that posit that the world, as we know it, exists ‘out there’ independently of human consciousness; and mentalist views, that think the world is purely a construction of the mind. Phenomenology was to steer a middle path.

(…) One of the crucial fundamental points of the phenomenological approach is that when we refer to ‘things out there’, we are in fact providing a name to ‘things’ constructed and named in the mind, without which they could not be thought.”

[Willis, Peter, “The Things Themselves” in Phenomenology, Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, 1:1, 1-12, 2001, at https://doi.org/10.1080/20797222.2001.11433860]

[4] Haddon, Mark, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time”, Doubleday (a division of Random House,Inc.), USA, 2002, pg. 123

[5] Holman, Tomlinson, “Sound for film and television”, second edition, Focal Press, U.S.A., 2002.

[6] Personal notes from ‘lectures on art and the brain’ delivered by Dr. Roberto Amador, National University of Colombia, 2001.

[7] Thom, Randy, “Designing A Movie For Sound”, 1999, at http://www.filmsound.org/articles/designing_for_sound.htm

Re-posted by the author at https://randythomblog.wordpress.com/2017/05/05/designing-a-movie-for-sound/ , May of 2017

[8] “(…) our job is to hang interesting little question marks in the air surrounding each scene, or to place pieces of cake on the ground that seem to lead somewhere, though not in a straight line. (…) [the] message is the bait. Dangle it in front of an audience and they won’t be able to resist going for it. in the process of going for it they bring their imaginations and experiences with them, making your story suddenly become their story.”

THOM, Randy, “Designing A Movie For Sound”, op. cit.

[9] Personal notes from ‘lectures on art and the brain’ delivered by Dr. Roberto Amador, op. cit.

[10] Chion, Michel, “Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen”, Columbia University Press, USA, 1994, pg. 56.

[11] “Acousmatic, a word of Greek origin discovered by Jerome Peignot and theorized by Pierre Schaeffer, describes “sounds one hears without seeing their originating cause. (…) The acousmatic sound maintains suspense, constituting a dramatic technique in itself. (…) A sound or voice that remains acousmatic creates a mystery of the nature of its source, its properties and its powers, given that causal listening cannot supply complete information about the sound’s nature and the events taking place. (…) If s fairly common in films to see evil, awe-inspiring, or otherwise powerful characters introduced through sound before they are subsequently thrown out to the pasture of visibility”

Chion, Michel, “Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen”, op. cit., pg. 71-72.

In the first of these passages, Chion quotes Schaeffer, Pierre. Traite des objets musicaux. Rev. ed. Paris: Seuil, 1967, pp. 91-99

[12] The readers should note that was impossible to find secondary sources for this translation up to the time of publishing this article.

[13] Schaeffer, Pierre, “In search of a concrete music”, op. cit., pg. 11

[14] Schaeffer, Pierre, “In search of a concrete music”, op. cit., pg. 14

[15] Schaeffer, Pierre, “In search of a concrete music”, op. cit., pg. 7

[16] Manrique Clavijo, Carlos, ” Sonic Centaurs: An Exploration of the Common Grounds Between Music and Sound Design”, 2013, at https://designingsound.org/2013/03/29/sonic-centaurs-an-exploration-of-the-common-grounds-between-music-and-sound-design/

[17] Recommended reading: Constantini, Gustavo, “Leitmotif revisited” at http://www.filmsound.org/gustavo/leitmotif-revisted.htm

[18] Chion, Michel, “Audio-Vision. Sound on Screen”, Columbia University Press New York Chichester, West Sussex, 1994, translated by translation by Claudia Gorbman, pg. 63

[19] I’ve also briefly touched on this matter in the chapter about sound design in Colombian animation, written for the book “Estudios Sobre Animación en Colombia – Acrobacias en la línea de tiempo”, Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, 2017, edited by Camilo Cogua, pg. 228-229

[20] Kundera, Milan, “The unbearable lightness of being”, translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim, Harper Perennial (A Division of Harper Collins Publishers), 1991, pg. 52 (pg. 12 of PDF document available at archive.org) text available online at https://archive.org/details/UnbearableLightnessOfBeingTheMilanKundera

[21] Thom, Randy, “Designing A Movie For Sound”, 1999,

http://www.filmsound.org/articles/designing_for_sound.htm, web article downloaded on the 20/09/05

[22]“The function of punctuation in its widest grammatical sense (placement of commas, semicolons, periods, exclamation points, question marks, and ellipses, which can not only modulate the meaning and rhythm of a text but actually determine it as well), has long been a central concern of theater directing. (…) So synchronous sound brought to the cinema not the principle of punctuation but increasingly subtle means of punctuating scenes without putting a strain on the acting or the editing. The barking of a dog offscreen, a grandfather clock ringing on the set, or a nearby piano are unobtrusive ways to emphasize a word, scan a dialogue, close a scene.

Punctuative use of sound depends on the initiative of the editor or the sound editor. They make decisions on the placement of sound punctuation based on the shot’s rhythm, the acting, and the general feel of the scene, working with the sounds imposed on them or chosen by them.”

– Chion, Michel, “Audio-Vision. Sound on Screen”, Columbia University Press New York Chichester, West Sussex, 1994, translated by translation by Claudia Gorbman, pg. 48-49

[23] Linguist Roman Jakobson refers to this use of language as “metalingual”.