Norwegian lyrical poet Jan Erik Vold said that the moose was the tram of the forest, and that the tram was the moose of the city. He also said: “Only the river repeats itself, and repeats itself, without repeating itself.”
It is such a great use of words to create meaning, and should stand as an exemplary of Roman Jakobson’s claim that we create utterances that we want others to hear, and we want others to hear these utterances because we wish to create meaning, to be understood: “we speak in order to be heard; and in order to be able to interpret, classify and define the diverse sounds of our language we must take into account the meaning which they carry, for it is in order to be understood that we seek to be heard.” (25).
In cinema, the film also wants to be heard, since it is through it’s cinematic audio-vision that the film will be understood. But, cinematic audio-vision is built up using a multiplicity of sound elements, that are usually mixed and represented in such a way that the separate elements often appear as one simultaneous track. The audio elements that make up the soundtrack can be a combination of dialogue, sound effects, and music, a fairly uncomplicated collection of elements. But these elements, each again, can contain, and be separated into multiple components.
The sound of the human voice for example, known in screenwriting as dialogue, can be a voice-over (either a character in the film or a third-person or interior-monologue (though, in a strict sense, not dialogue, it would be written as such in a script), or it can be characters talking to each other while occupying the same space or communicating via some device over a distance.
The sound effects element consist of four components:
Isolated Sounds: these are the real and specific sounds of everyday objects or other creatures like telephone rings, squawking birds, or toasters. These types of sound components are often referred to as spot-sounds.
Specialty Effects: these are the special sounds that are created and designed for imaginary objects and fantastical places, such as laser guns, fire breathing dragons, and dramatic deserts on alien planets.
Foley Sounds: these created sounds synchronise with the vision (this process of synchronisation can also be called audio sound replacement), placing footsteps into the film soundtrack; recreating the squeaky squelch of a wagon wheel on a muddy track; providing the realistic rustle of clothing.
Background Ambience: this type of sound provide the basic environment for the mise-en-scene, the subtle atmosphere that provides the illusion of being in a castle gaol, an old church, the beach, or a forest.
The music element has several different iterations. There is dramatic scoring, often known as the under score which is the traditional Hollywood orchestral film music. Building on the traditions of opera, this type of score is often bombastic climactic and and will usually contain themes for the different main characters, known as leitmotifs. This type of music: “maximally matches the visual events on the screen” (Kassabian, 2001, p. 45), and is non-diegetic, in other words, outside of the film’s narrative world. Then there is source music, which is music: “whose production is within the narrative world of the film” (ibid, p. 44). But there is also a third component of score music: what Earle Hagen (quoted in Kassabian) calls source scoring, music that falls right between diegetic and non-diegetic music. There is also pre-existing music, musical pieces that are appropriated for cinematic purposes, like the opening of Wagner’s Also Spracht Zarathustra from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Beach Boys Heroes and Villains used in Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox.
Then, add to that, the wide range of qualitative elements connected to sound, and the relations between these qualities, such as pitch relations; consonance and dissonance; tonality and atonality; and timbre, and the idea that the notion of source scoring is applicable to all the other sound elements and component. As a result, the auditory playing field of the cinematic audio-vision becomes vast indeed, with opportunities for the creation of highly complex and finely tuned auditory landscapes that can produce meaning, guide the audience experience, and immerse viewers in feelings, moods, and impressions.
Jakobson, R. (1978). Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning. Great Britain: The Harvester Press Limited.
Kassabian, A. (2001). Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music. New York and London: Routledge.