Musicality in Sound Design

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The Soundtrack Volume 1 Number 3 © 2008 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/st.1.3.193/1

‘I wanted an electronic silence …’

Musicality in Sound Design and the Influences of New Music on the Process of Sound Design for Film Mark Underwood Abstract

Keywords

This paper explores connections between sounds and music, whether sounds can indeed be musical, and whether they can inhabit the same intellectual landscape as music. Drawing upon the work of composers as well as film-makers and film sound designers, it considers the way in which we listen, and the way in which our listening has changed over the past century of film and recorded sound. It also considers the ways in which many of the ideas first proposed as a reaction to Late Romanticism have developed into later musical idioms, and the way that some of these have found their way into film sound.

Musique Concrète sound design early sound film electronic music

Be not afeared; the isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices, That, if I had wak’d after long sleep, Will make me sleep again: and then in dreaming, The clouds methought would open, and show riches Ready to drop upon me; that when I wak’d, I cried to dream again. William Shakespeare The Tempest Act 3, Scene 2

Sounds in a dream, music in a dream, voices in a dream: Shakespeare’s lines seem to imply the quintessence of sound film. We as designers of film sound should strive to be as subtle, as mesmeric as Caliban’s dream, to orchestrate and collaborate, structure and weave, to leave our audiences with the afterglow of audile remembrance.

The beginning of a New Listening The beginning of the twentieth century was a period of fundamental change in musical thought. Although music and composition by their very nature continually develop and change, there was to be a sea-change in music between 1900 and 1915 which was to prove as striking and as radical as the progression from still images to film. The rapid movement away from tonality towards the atonal and structuralist had real and lasting ramifications in the way composers – and listeners – perceived and conceived not only music, but sound itself.

ST 1 (3) pp. 193–210 © Intellect Ltd 2008

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Up until the late nineteenth century, western music used as its clay a set of harmonic intervals, sounds and structures, which despite relatively slow long term development had been in use since the late sixteenth century. Starting with the introduction of the even tempered scale in the late seventeenth century, there had been gradual developments in the structure of music, the development and growth of sonata form, technology of instrumentation, and the gradual growth in scale and resources of the symphony and the Late Romantic Orchestra, but these were all changes to a fundamentally similar and homogeneous musical tonality and language. It was into this world of largely diatonic (major-minor) tonality and Austro-German symphonic narrative which Claude Debussy introduced his Prélude à L’ après-midi d’un faune in 1894. This seemingly innocuous flute melody is seen by some as the heralding of a new age of modern music. It shakes loose its roots in diatonic harmony, ushering in the new language of impressionism and looking forward into a century in which fundamental developments and changes to musical language, form, structure and tonality would occur. Debussy’s move away from the traditional structural and harmonic language of the late romantic period heralds a greater change than simply that of one within music itself, it promotes two important modes of thought which are central to both the new music of the period and to the development of the use of sound in general. Firstly, Debussy thought of music as not simply narrative, or programmatic: he believed it carried with it the ability to convey abstractions of situations, in fact impressions by inference. Music alone has the power to evoke as it will the improbable places, the unquestionable and chimerical world which works secretly on the mysterious poetry of the night, on those thousand anonymous sounds made when leaves are caressed by the rays of the moon. (Griffiths 1992: 10)

Secondly, and more importantly, Debussy opened the door to a new kind of listening and an actual change of acceptance in listening, where sounds become ‘messengers’ in their own right and have the metaphorical ability to inform and conjure in a deeper, more subversive way. This method of expression is not far removed from the way in which a sound designer might approach a scene in a film. The use of non-literal sound to invoke a mood or atmosphere is central to the role of sound in film. This mode of listening and perception also led indirectly to the development of some of the major musical movements and forms of the twentieth century.

A change in the wind Within twenty years, the so-called Second Viennese School were experimenting with atonal writing, and expressionism was emerging; Arnold Schoenberg had written his second string quartet and Webern had written his Five Orchestral Pieces, both of which embraced atonality. Comparing Debussy’s flute motif from Prélude à L’ après-midi d’un faune and the atonality 194

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of Webern, we can already see how much had changed in this short time. In another ten years, Joseph Rufer, Schoenberg, Webern and Berg had adopted serialism; Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring premiered in Paris in 1913, and Italians Luigi Russolo and Fillipo Marinetti arrived at another watershed in definitions of music and sound composition. Marinetti’s initial statement of 1909 ‘… a roaring motor car … is more beautiful than the victory of Samothrace …’1 points to the attitude of some composers to the post first world war years. Debussy too, feels this change in the wind. Is it not our duty…to find a symphonic means to express our time, one that evokes the progress, the daring and the victories of modern days? The century of the aeroplane deserves its music. (Griffiths 1992: 104)

But Debussy, Schoenberg and Stravinsky whilst embracing modernism, integrating new use of rhythms and tonalities into their work, were continuing to write for largely conventional orchestral forces. In Italy however, a new movement was emerging. Luigi Russolo, amongst others, was exploring the possibilities offered by using machines to make sounds, sounds that could then be constructed into music. These new composers, (Futurists as they became known) were not alone in their new use of found sound. Dziga Vertov travelled around his native Russia collecting sounds by recording them onto cylinders and discs. Famously, the Futurists wrote music for factory sirens and industrial machines. Their music was that of, and utilised, the forces from the world around them, specifically the man-made and technological world. Another tear in the fabric of conventional listening had been made. These early strivings to construct music from found sound were very much hampered by the lack of an editable form of reproduction, or in some cases any form of reproduction, some pieces only being able to be performed live. The new idea, however, of a music constructed without the necessary encoding process of musical notation, orchestration and conducting, provided the listener with a very pure form of musical experience. It has to be said that whilst this was not immediately successful as music in its own right, the techniques of using sounds as an accompaniment to film were already in use. Avant-Garde filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel had used gramophone discs and sound making props to accompany his film Un Chien Andalou (1929) from behind the screen. However, in Buñuel’s hands this kind of sound accompaniment was often more of an act of subversion, or protest against more mainstream narrative film, than an attempt to use it in a more musical or metaphorical sense. A change had happened in listening, the departure from tonal music and conventional forces had begun and the doors were opening to a change in acceptance. It is notable that this change could happen so fast, and be so radical, and yet here possibly is music which connects directly and deeply to the subconscious. Not only Erwartung but all of Schoenberg’s music of this early atonal period gives the impression of having arisen unwilled from a very deep level of his mind, of being the product of an introspective psychoanalysis. So personal ‘I wanted an electronic silence …’

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1. The full quotation from Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, written in 1908 and published on the front page of Le Figaro in 1909 reads: “A racing motor car, its frame adorned with great pipes like snakes with explosive breath, a roaring motor car that seems to be running on shrapnel is more beautiful than the Victory at Samothrace.”

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was the music, and so little filtered by the intellect, that he did not feel able to teach atonal composition. (Griffiths 1992: 104)

It is as if removing the contextual baggage of accepted tonality was in some way able to shorten the interpretive journey. It is a blurring of boundaries, a place where freed of convention, music can begin to become sounds, and in doing so connect in a different way. If we recognize the nature of atonality as being similarly alien to the early twentieth century ear as Russolo’s sound machine music, then we can only be surprised at the conclusion drawn here that the music is drawn from deep within the composer, and that it is not only possible to be touched by music of this type, but in fact it is within us to be touched. If this is possible, to be touched by unconventional music, music masquerading as sound, it suggests the possibility of being touched by sounds themselves as abstract signifiers. Indeed the path to musique concrète begins here, and perhaps the path to modern sound design in film.

The coming of Sound Film Since the very beginning of its history, film has had a need for sound accompaniment. Initially the projector itself was accompanist. After several disastrous fires caused by the volatile nature of early film stock, the projector was removed to a separate room, leaving only silence. Film viewed in silence is an uncanny experience as Philip Rosen, writing on Eisler and Adorno’s 1947 book Composing for the Films, notes: They begin by suggesting that the spectators of a purely silent cinema must have been subject to a certain unpleasantness and even shock, for the moving two-dimensional figures of humans seen on the screen are ghostly, in that they exist on the borderline between living and non-living. The point is not that spectators of early cinema experienced a literal fear of ghosts, but that they experienced a subconscious shock because of their own socially imposed likeness to the half-live effigies on the screen … This helps explain why music was so quickly added to film. Its cultural role as magic and immediate subjective inwardness helped ‘exorcize’ the ghostliness of the images by supplying indication of genuine, spontaneous life. This helped the spectator overcome the shock and accept the literal immediacy of the images … (Rosen 1980: 174)

Music has a capacity to subvert the conscious analytical processes of the mind and to strike at a far deeper, more intuitive centre: As the art of the ear par excellence, music is aimed at a perceptual-mental apparatus, which resists the rationalization of sounds music embodies. This resistance can draw musical technique towards forms, which promote the understanding of the organization of sounds as an indistinct impression of collectivity and/or unmediated subjective spontaneity. This helps explain how the most standardized music can be regarded as an expression of ‘subjective inwardness’. Music can make an apparently direct appeal both as a

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manifestation of the divine or supra-individual and of the essentially human – or better of the divine, sacred, unrationalizable aspects of the human. (Rosen 1980: 172–73)

In other words, music is a sort of mental short cut, a very efficient way of conveying emotion, or allowing the expression of emotion or the extrapolation of thought by inference. In the right context, this process seems to end itself with complete naturalness to film diegesis. With the coming of sound film, it quickly became apparent that literal use of synchronous sound, that is, sound recorded with the images and played back verbatim as it were, was an area for serious consideration. Even at this early stage, people were realising the power of non-synchronous sound as a diegetic tool. Film-makers and theorists realised that the sound film, despite being a technologically momentous invention, could, if not handled carefully, undermine already established techniques. A misconception of the potentialities within this new technical discovery may not only hinder the development and perfection of the cinema as an art but also threaten to destroy all its present formal achievements. (Weis & Belton 1985: 83)

In 1928, Russian filmmakers Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov drew up a statement concerning sound film. Within it they stated areas of particular concern, and offered a set of guidelines from which to work. ONLY A CONTRAPUNTAL USE of sound in relation to the visual montage piece will afford a new potentiality of montage development and perfection. THE FIRST EXPERIMENTAL WORK WITH SOUND MUST BE DIRECTED ALONG THE LINE OF ITS DISTINCT NONSYNCHRONISATION WITH THE VISUAL IMAGES. And only such an attack will give the necessary palpability, which will later lead to the creation of an ORCHESTRAL COUNTERPOINT of visual and aural images. (Capitals as in the statement by Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov.) (Weis & Belton 1985: 84)

Despite the fact that this statement does not reflect the approach taken by all Russian filmmakers, Dziga Vertov, for instance, never advocated this counterpoint of sound and image, the use of musical terminology is immediately apparent. Even at this nascent stage, film-makers are aware of the need for a complex, thoughtful approach to be taken with regard to sound. Indeed an approach not dissimilar to musical composition. It would seem that there are two worlds waiting to be joined. On the one hand we have a musical language emerging that embraces unconventional sounds and tonalities; and on the other a visual language of moving pictures needing, in fact requiring, sound from the real world to accompany them. The real revelation is, as the Classical Film Theorists realized, the sounds accompanying film images are absolutely necessary: but importantly, they must be organized, structured, constructed, in order that they ‘I wanted an electronic silence …’

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provide the most efficient and seemingly naturalistic, and yet artful, accompaniment to the picture. Sound film was accompanied by an important development in recording technology. Sound had been able to be recorded and reproduced for some 30–40 years before the coming of a successful optical sound system. There was one important difference, however, between the discs and cylinders of Edison’s gramophones and cylinder recorders, and the new optical sound track. It could be edited. Up to this point, time in a recorded sense was linear, but could not be cut, reordered, restructured, juxtaposed. On a disc recording, it is not possible to extract a single sound, and place it in a different place temporally on the disc. The position of the sounds relative to one another is fixed. In a sound camera recording onto film, because of its linear nature, a segment (of any length) can be removed from its position in the sequence of recordings, the film rejoined as if it had never existed. This removed segment can then be taken, stored, and replaced in a different place, just as the picture could be. The new technology allowed a composition of sounds not possible before. If a composer wished to juxtapose sounds, or to build textures of an unusual or interesting nature, he would write the parts for his instruments, assemble his musicians and allow them to play. Immediately, he could hear his imagined textures played literally in front of his ears, as it were. The new music of the early twentieth century as yet had no means of expressing itself in this way. Music composed of natural or found sounds could not be constructed without using the conventional methods of assembling the necessary ‘sound makers’ and instructing them to play together. With the coming of linear recording, it was possible to record a sound, extract a portion to be used, and then to assemble the ones chosen into any order. Thus the assembling of sound montages became not only possible, but also relatively easy, using a readily available technology. Film came to embrace this momentous leap forward in compositional ability a long time before serious music. Lee De Forest patented the Audion tube in 1907, allowing developments which led to Western Electric’s Vitaphone system in 1923, which utilized discs of recorded sound synchronized with the projected picture. The Jazz Singer (1927) included four ‘Vitaphoned’ sections in which Al Jolson sang. The real breakthrough came however, when RCA introduced their Photophone System in 1928. This system allowed sound to be recorded as varying patterns of light and shade directly onto photographic film. Not only was synchronisation now much easier to achieve, the sound was recorded in a linear way, as on the later magnetic tape technology. This allowed the sound to be edited and montage created in the same way as picture editing. Film-makers were already exploiting the ability firstly to edit sound together, and secondly to theorize about, and utilize, non-synchronous film sound from the early 1930s. It took the serious music world another twenty years before composers such as Pierre Schaeffer, writing works such as his Etude Aux Chemines De Feu (1948), pioneered the technique of so-called musique concrète. It is claimed that the use of found or natural sound in compositional terms was only seriously begun with the work of composers like Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen in the late 1940s with the coming of age of the magnetic tape recorder: however, directors such as Reuben Mamoulian 198

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were using sound montage with great effect and musicality as early as 1933. In the so called Symphony of Natural Sounds at the opening of Love Me Tonight, Mamoulian shows us that not only were film-makers aware of the possibilities offers by sound montage, they were exploiting them in what I believe to be a wholly musical way. In the montage from Love Me Tonight, we hear sounds, which have been excellently recorded, carefully selected and then rhythmically edited together. We hear the use of rhythmic, non-tonal sounds i.e. sweeping, used in conjunction with more tonal sounds i.e. the baby cry, which to my ears may even have been tuned for the purpose. It has certainly been cut to make a phrase shape. This demonstrates a use of musicality as well as a sense of film montage, the sound track being used as a score element but using found sounds instead of conventional instruments. Mamoulian had used this technique in his direction of an operatic production of Porgy and Bess. He considered the sounds to be musical and indeed they have a metre and an organisation as he details here: The curtain rose on Catfish Row in the early morning. All silent. Then you hear the Boum! of a street gang repairing the road. That is the first beat: then beat 2 is silent; beat 3 is a snore-zzzz! – from a negro who’s asleep; beat 4 silent again. … Then the rhythm changes: 4:4 to 2:4, then to 6:8 and syncopated Charleston rhythms. It all had to be conducted like an orchestra. (Weis & Belton 1985: 236)

Lucy Fisher, writing on Mamoulian’s use and development of film sound, sums up concisely: Many things are revealed by Mamoulian’s description of his Symphony of Noises. Clearly it shows that he was ripe for the new film medium and that he viewed sound as a formal element to be manipulated according to its unique aesthetic principles. It also demonstrates that for Mamoulian, sounds were an essential element in creating an environment, and that dialogue was by no means the sole conveyer of meaning. Rather, concrète noise, as well could be expressive. (Weis & Belton 1985: 237–238)

Before Love Me Tonight, Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932) was another great innovative moment in film sound. Mamoulian constructed his track using exaggerated heartbeats, bells heard through echo chambers and completely artificial sounds created by photographing light frequencies directly onto the sound track. The recordists referred to it as ‘Mamoulian’s stew’ but it was probably the first experiment with purely synthetic sound. (Weis & Belton 1985: 242)

It is remarkable how early in film sound history Mamoulian was adopting the use of concrète and abstract techniques and their absolute effectiveness. These electronic and synthetically created sounds are instantly ‘I wanted an electronic silence …’

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associated with fear, and that there was none of the riotous behaviour in cinemas associated with performances of the new music of the time. It was as if the combination of images and these new sounds were waiting to happen, as if they were the most natural and intuitive way of expressing the emotion of the film. Obviously, heartbeats have an immense sympathetic response from our own bodies, as fast music will speed our hearts and ambient music will sedate, indeed their use now is seen as hackneyed and clichéd. But who could have known that the strange, synthetic sound generated from light of different colours, or instruments photographed onto optical film and then played backwards would have such a profound effect. Mamoulian was one of the great innovators of early sound cinema, he at once recognizes the necessary use of structure when constructing a sound track, and above all, musicality. Allied with this is his chimerical (although entirely successful) use of found or synthetic sounds. It would seem that at this time in the early 1930s that film sound had advanced well ahead of current musical thought and practice. It may well be that as film was, and is, an extremely commercial medium; advances were made possible by funding provided by box-office revenues, as opposed to new music which has always been seen as the poor relative, largely due in part to the non-populist nature of its output.

Musique Concrète However, advances were being made in compositional thought, although it seems that the methodologies employed in film sound were still ahead of musical thinking. In 1938 however, John Cage produced his Imaginary Landscape No.1, in which the performers ‘played’ variable speed turntables along with prepared piano (a piano that has had various objects inserted into its strings to alter the sounds it makes). This is of course a piece for performance as opposed to a purely tape composition, and therefore is different in method to a piece of work for edited sound. The sound world it creates however, is alive and imaginable. This piece is a ‘landscape’ as opposed to a prelude, and that in this way it harks back to the Debussian impressionist thinking of 1900. The other landmark compositional event of this time was Pierre Schaeffer’s 1948 work Etude Aux Chemines du Feu. Although it is regarded as more of a study or essay, practicing new ideas and techniques, this piece is heralded as one of the first true pieces written in the Musique Concrète style. Schaeffer takes as his source material the sounds of locomotives. Using turntables with ‘stuck grooves’, he constructed a piece of music created entirely from the real-world sounds of the trains he recorded. In order to create this impression, he deconstructs the sounds of the train into various elements. The whistles, the chuffing, the wheels, are all isolated and reconstituted, enabling us to consider them as individual sound objects. Schaeffer called these objects ‘objets sonore’, and developed a whole syntax and catalogue of definitions in order to describe them. He found it necessary to assemble a solfège for objets sonores which would classify them in terms of hierarchies of tessitura, tambre, rhythm and density. (Manning 2002: 26)

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At first glance, Etude Aux Chemines du Feu could be said to be not much more than Mamoulian’s Symphony Of Natural Sounds, a construction of sounds portraying a scene or impression of an object. It is the very act of deconstruction however, which signifies this piece as a milestone in the development of sound. Schaeffer has taken us beyond the literal representation of the train and has presented each of its constituents to us as an object for consideration, often subtly altering them temporally, by looping (tonally), by pitch shifting and spatially, by juxtaposition. Although it is characteristic of noise to recall us brutally to real life, the art of noise must not limit itself to imitative reproduction. It will achieve its most emotive power in the acoustic enjoyment, in its own right, that the artist’s inspiration will extract from combined noises. (Russolo 1913)

It is this deconstruction which is one of the things fundamental to sound design in film, the dismantling of the literal audio world, and the carefully considered reconstruction of an impression of the real world, allowing in only the elements necessary to tell the story. The work of the musique concrète composers is interesting in relation to film sound development for five reasons: 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

The use of real-world sounds or found sound is the basis of almost all film sound. The non-literal nature of film sound lends itself to techniques of montage. Temporal and spatial adjustment of sound. By deconstructing sounds, composers are beginning a process of new awareness of sounds, the connotative and objectival properties of individual sounds becoming more apparent. The juxtaposition of literal ‘real’ sounds i.e. dialogue in a film context or perhaps an instrument in a concrete work, and tape construction.

Electronic music Alongside this concrète revolution, came the growth of electronic music. This music takes as its basis sound created entirely synthetically. These sounds were originated using electronic oscillators (devices which make electronic tones, often variable in some way) and recorded onto the newly available magnetic tape. Notable early examples were the Ondes Martinot and the Theremin, the former used to great effect by Olivier Messiaen in his Turangalîla-Symphonie (1946–8) where it showed its great ability for unearthly sounds. Another great exponent of this kind of music was Edgard Varése, whose first great electronic work Déserts (actually for taped electronics and orchestra), was described thus by the composer: … Physical deserts, those of the earth, the sea and the sky, of sand, of snow, of interstellar space or of great cities, but also those of the spirit, of that distant interior space which no telescope can reach, where man is alone. (Griffiths 1992: 157)

‘I wanted an electronic silence …’

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Here again is the reference to unearthly quality in this new music and to the connection men felt to their innermost landscape. Perhaps because the sounds were genuinely synthetic, genuinely quite new to earthly ears that they have this strikingly alien feel. In 1958 Varése composed his Poème Électronique for the Philips Pavillion at the Brussels Exhibition of the same year. In this striking work electronic sounds are combined with bells, a solo soprano, a chorus and organ. The original was designed to be playedback over a large number of loudspeakers inside the pavilion. This is a ranging imagination at work, and indeed, ideas first used here have found their place in work from film to installation art and composition right up until the present day. The use of electronics combined or juxtaposed with natural sound was continued by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry who collaborated in 1949–50 to produce Symphonie pour un homme seul, and later by Karlheinz Stockhausen in Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–56) who used recordings of a boy’s voice, edited to form phrase shapes in sound, as opposed to the original shapes of the sung words. These edited voices represent the youths in the furnace from the book of Daniel. The overall effect is disturbing and very effective, the boy’s voices becoming metaphorical sound, representing fear and religious ecstasy, riding a sea of electronic sounds and textures. Stockhausen uses differing acoustic treatments on the voice adding another dimension to the texture he creates. The new timbres of the electronic scores provided a natural contrast to the conventional sounds of orchestra or voice; this juxtaposition of synthetic and natural sounds, as well as sounds which are acoustically different, is a common and desirable compositional tool.

A Bifurcation So it seems that there was a division in the new practices and disciplines of music composition. On the one hand we have the concrète school of Schaeffer and Henry at RTF in Paris, and on the other we have the German school at WDR with Stockhausen working on his purely electronic scores. These two schools never agreed about the nature of their differing work. It is possible that this was purely nationalistic, and it is certainly true that the work seems to express the characteristics of the two nations; the French work often suffused with humour as in Symphonie pour un homme seul, and the deeply serious structural Electronische Musik from the studio of WDR. At the Internationale Ferienkurse Für Neue musik held in Darmstadt in 1951: The French and the Germans disagreed violently and the Swiss criticized both for describing their work as music. (Manning 2002: 30)

In film music and sound of the time, this division is not nearly as marked, with directors and composers choosing a variety of combinations of techniques for their films. In the 1950s and 1960s, advances in magnetic recording saw the coming of the multi-track tape recorder in 1965 and the invention of the synthesiser by RCA in the late 1950s and its later commercial realisation by Robert Moog. Films were quick to exploit this 202

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new technology. The advent of reliable magnetic recording with more than one track per machine, coupled with new analogue synthesisers, meant that the creation of electronic music became faster and easier. In 1955 it took Karlheinz Stockhausen eighteen months of painstaking recording and editing to produce thirteen minutes of his ‘Gesang der Jüglinge’. By 1963, Remi Gassman and Oskar Sala were able to construct the entire electronic score for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds in a matter of two or three months.

Electronics in design Hitchcock set out with the specific intention of using an electronic score for The Birds: his method of ‘spotting’ the sound for a picture once the cut was finished was, he felt, lent depth and new scope by the new technology. Until now we’ve worked with natural sounds, but now, thanks to electronic sound, I’m not only going to indicate the sound we want, but also the style and nature of each sound. (Truffaut 1985: 237)

Actually, the electronic sound in The Birds is fairly repetitive, the bird attacks are lent a new dimension by the addition of the electronic squawks in the score, but Hitchcock’s real genius and feel for the depth sound can add to a scene, is apparent when Rod Taylor opens the door for the first time and sees the birds assembled there. I asked for a silence, but not just any kind of silence. I wanted an electronic silence, a sort of monotonous low hum that might suggest the sound of the sea in the distance. It was a strange artificial sound, which in the language of the birds might be saying, ‘we’re not ready to attack you yet, but we’re getting ready …’ (Truffaut 1985: 297)

Hitchcock has crossed a border here, in the sense that firstly he has decided that there will be no conventional music, only electronic sound, secondly he is using this electronic sound as both signifier and connotator. The birds are given a series of semi-literal sounds in electronic form that represent the real-life sounds of birds, ‘orchestrated’ by Bernard Herrmann. In addition to these electronic sounds, placed instead of real bird sounds, to heighten the tension of the attack scenes and make the birds seem alien and sinister, Hitchcock uses his ‘electronic silence’ sounds, sounds in place of conventional score, or atmospheres, which actually may have a far more profound effect on the audience because of their non-melodic, alien quality. Here is a director totally at home with the power of non-natural sound in film, not only choosing to include electronic sound, but to do so at the exclusion of conventional score. Hitchcock realized that merely including electronic sound was not sufficient; he consciously elected Bernard Herrmann – a composer – as ‘sound consultant’, as someone who would sculpt and structure the electronic squawks and caws created by the technicians, in effect creating a musical score with them. ‘I wanted an electronic silence …’

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It is this realization that effective use of sound must be carried out with respect to rhythm, pitch, timbre and form, which makes The Birds, and indeed any film soundtrack, successful. The use of deconstructed or abstract sound objects, in an arranged and structured fashion, is fundamental to film sound design, and here we can see the compositional approach of Herrmann working perfectly with regard to a non-musical soundtrack.

Concrète in design In 1960s France a notable exponent of the use of musicality and experimentation in sound was Jacques Tati. He created non-literal sonic landscapes for his films, replacing the sync recording with his own whimsical reconstruction of the sonic world inhabited by his films’ protagonists. Tati was particularly preoccupied with the theme of the dehumanising effects of post-war technology, architecture, urban planning, transport and the growth of the inner-city landscape. In films Playtime (1967), he structures and manipulates sound to signify the human-technological interface. Perspectives are altered at whim, objects carry sound ‘signatures’ often not their literal sounds. People, especially in groups are given a new sonic identity: any character in a landscape will ‘interface’ with it sonically. Every step on a surface, every chair, every light switch is explored in terms of its signature, both sonically in the sense of the sound it makes in Tati’s diegesis and also how any character will react to it, both as an object and to its character expressed in the sound it is given. Examples of this are the chairs in the office, the entryphone machine that the guard uses, or any of the many doors in the film. Each has its own whimsical personality, portrayed largely by its sound. The chairs for instance react differently depending on who sits on them: the entry-phone has a series of electronic noises, admonishing the guard for getting the code he taps in wrong. This meticulously woven tapestry of sound-object interfaces and relationships can only exist if it recognizes basic musical structure, relationships of timbre, form and dynamics. Tati is a master at this; his musicality is represented in innumerable examples of exquisite structuring, layering and contrapuntal use of sounds and textures, creating a world entirely from scratch. Tati claims this same freedom of silence for himself in creating his universe.…In so doing, he has freed the audience from contemporary film’s literal bonds and allowed them to partake of the freedom of expression and imagination that was thoughtlessly discarded at the advent of sound. (Maddock 1997: 143)

A particular feature of his work, which is seemingly unique at this time, is his use of perspective in his replaced audio. Any sound recorded in a space has a sonic signature composed of its own character, plus that of the space it was recorded in and the distance away from the recording object. We as human beings are particularly attuned to this, Walter Murch famously described this relationship as akin to an audio ‘smell’. We may have not smelt this particular thing for ten years, but one whiff and immediately we are taken straight back. The same, he says, is true for acoustic signature in sound; we instinctively know the environment from which a sound has come. 204

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Whether reverberant, full of echoes, dry, close, distant, all of these signifiers tell us very precisely where, and what we are listening to, with all of its connotations. In Playtime, Tati uses the vast impersonal echoing spaces of the brutalist airport with particular effect, he reduces the people in the airport to sonic ‘washes’, impressions in fact.

America in the 1960s and 1970s Hollywood in the late 1960s and early 1970s was caught in the backwash of the European new wave movements. Graduates from USC, George Lucas and Walter Murch were much influenced by European cinema, indeed Murch studied in Italy for a time. It was in their search for new ways to make film, and to move away from the American film equivalents to the ‘Cinema du papa’ dismissed by their European counterparts, Lucas, Murch and Francis Ford Coppola began to focus on sound as an interchangeable entity with score. Sound was very important to us. In THX 1138 we decided we would create a soundtrack that was primarily sound effects-based – the music would operate like the sound effects and the sound effects would operate like music. (Ondaatje 2002: 19)

Although this was not an entirely new concept, Murch brought to it a freshness, perhaps because he was someone who had discovered music concrète by accident whilst experimenting with a tape recorder and listening to the radio as a child. I came home from school one day and turned on the classical radio station, WXQR, in the middle of a program. Sounds were coming out of the speaker that raised the hairs on the back of my neck. I turned the tape recorder on and listened for the next twenty minutes or so, riveted by what I was hearing. It turned out to be a record by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry-two of the early practitioners of musique concrète. I could hear a real similarity with what I had been doing – taking ordinary sounds and arranging them rhythmically, creating a kind of music on tape. (Ondaatje 2002: 7)

Perhaps it was because Murch was of the generation following Bernard Herrmann, for instance, and therefore carried less of the baggage of convention with regard to score and effects. Herrmann was of a previous generation, with earlier influences: Herrmann championed the works of Paul Hindemith, Aaron Copland, Gustav Theodore Holst, Charles Ives and Cyril Scott, associations reflected in his musical tastes and conducting choices for recordings in the late sixties and early seventies. (Broek 1976: 98)

Indeed, Herrmann had studied with Copland at Juillard. Murch’s sound world was that of Cage, Varese, Morton Subotnick and more importantly, his philosophy was far more wide ranging than just film and radio. ‘I wanted an electronic silence …’

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Starting with THX 1138, Murch’s film sound work brings together many of the techniques and philosophies of new music. He deconstructs sounds, alters them, uses them rhythmically, places them in a world context. Murch speaks of being taken with the ideas behind the work of John Cage: – that by taking humble sounds out of their normal context you could make people pay attention and discover the musical elements in them. (Ondaatje 2002: 9)

The helicopters in Apocalypse Now are deconstructed into individual elements, a blade swish here, a turbine whine there, even a synthesised blade sound added. In The Conversation the long zoom in on the square in the prelude is an audio zoom, the sound of the square eventually becoming the sound of Harry Caul’s feet walking. Even in the early films, Murch uses these techniques. In American Graffiti, he took the recording of the Wolfman Jack radio programme specially recorded and written for the film, and rerecorded it by playing it in ‘real’ spaces. By using a portable tape recorder, Murch was able to take the sound to its ‘natural’ environment and record the playback with the acoustic signature of cars, buildings and open urban spaces. This technique was quite new at the time and was probably only possible because of the coming of small lightweight tape machines. By adding this acoustic ‘fingerprint’ to the sound, Murch has added musicality to these everyday sounds; they somehow transcend their origin, become more than the sum of their parts. They have a way now to tap into our memories, our innermost places and associations. This technique, which Murch calls ‘Worldizing’, has been used to great effect since, notably by sound designer Ren Klyce. In David Fincher’s film Seven, Klyce uses this technique to create an exterior environment for the character William Summerset (Morgan Freeman) when he is in his apartment at night. Morgan Freeman’s character is an insomniac police detective who is only able to sleep by listening to a metronome by his bedside. Fincher wanted to capture this sleepless frustration and heighten the tension of the city. The noise of garbage trucks in the middle of the night, waking him up no matter where he stayed, seemed to be a good place to start. Klyce developed this theme, recording actors playing out scenarios based around homeless people arguing and fighting drunkenly and incoherently. He even went as far as to record two separate groups of actors, one white, the other black, in order to give texture to the source material. He then recorded other actors pretending to be annoyed neighbours. All the recordings were made in city locations such as alleys and tenement blocks using two microphones, one close-up and the other distant. Some of these recordings were also re-recorded in a similar way to the Murch tracks from American Graffiti, by playing them in city spaces and recording them in these real world acoustics. All of this meticulously prepared sound is heard as the backdrop through the open window and walls of Summerset’s apartment. Summerset is in bed reading, and the sounds of the arguing and shouting drift across the scene. He is distracted by the sounds, turning with slight annoyance, slight resignation, and starts his metronome. These sounds are immediate signifiers to us. We all empathize with Summerset’s situation, the lateness and inability to sleep are all familiar, and the sounds of the street only heighten this tension. These sounds have 206

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both connotative and denotative meaning to us. We hear them as literal sounds, we understand the tones in the voices and can picture the people making them, and where they are being made. They also have a denotative property, in that we are making associations with these sounds and our own memories of similar situations. We have all lain awake at night unable to sleep and kept awake by irritating noise. The sound here is acting as a metaphor. We understand the sound as a whole ‘object’: where this object is comprised of the sound, its surroundings, its context, and the way in which it has been related to the image we see. The literal sound of people arguing in an alley on its own would not be enough to make the connection. In his novel War of the Worlds, H.G Wells describes the sounds of trains heard in the late summer evening after the landing of the first cylinder: The sound of shunting trains, ringing and rumbling, softened almost into melody by the distance. (Wells 1898: 3)

These sounds are transformed by their context, and in this case by the sleepy listener, into something they are not. We have all heard these sounds in the hinterland between waking and sleep, and Klyce has short circuited the need for any more literal explanation of Summerset’s state of mind by making the sounds he hears resonate in us. The echoing people and distant sirens in Seven inform us in a very efficient way, not only of the location of Summerset, obviously in a big city apartment block at night, but add his state of mind, by inference. The city is similarly represented in both the soundtrack and the score. The film is filled by the omnipresent malevolent sounds of the city. Klyce skilfully weaves the little sounds, specifics, in his terms, into the roar of traffic, the buzz of neon, the complex dripping and plopping of the rain, added to which is the slowed-down industrial noise of the score.

So, can sounds really be music? I thought it had to be possible to retain absolutely the structural qualities of the old musique concrète without throwing away the content of reality of the material which it had originally. It had to be possible to make music and to bring into relation together the shreds of reality in order to tell stories. (Luc Ferrari interviewed in Pauli 1971: 41)

It has become plain that the notion of sound as music is a much more complex idea than it first appears. The role of music in film as emotional signpost is much written about and well understood. The properties of music, what Walter Murch describes as ‘Embodied Sound’, are also clear but the actual understanding of how it does it are less clear. Music, however is completely different: it is sound experienced directly, without any code intervening between you and it. Naked. Whatever meaning there is in a piece of music is ‘embodied’ in the sound itself. This is why music is sometimes called the Universal language. (Murch 2005: 2)

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Music, then, is a language able to be read directly, without the intervening ‘codes’ of speech. Sound, it seems, sits somewhere in between. In order for sound to function close to music, it needs to cloak itself in the trappings of the sound-object. The meaning, in order to be deeply felt, must make the highest and lowest layers of our brains connect. Only then can the sound and image perform in a truly mythic way. When talking about myth, LéviStrauss pointed out, ‘Myths are not ultimately about what can be easily said, otherwise we would just say it.’ (Wishart 1996: 67) Sounds must be metaphorical, must cloak themselves with characteristics which enable them to bypass the rational brain and delve unhindered into memory. It is this ability which, I believe, is the most important characteristic. In order to succeed at all, these sound-objects must be identifiable enough with their source to intrigue, and carry with them enough connotation to satisfy the incomplete circle of film perception. The experience of film is often related to that of dreams. I believe that one of the secret engines that allows cinema to work, and have the marvellous power over us that it does, is the fact that for thousands of years, we have spent eight hours every night in a ‘cinematic’ dream state – and so are familiar with this version of reality. (Ondaatje 2002: 49)

If we can tap these dream worlds and recreate the fluidity of dream sounds, the way in which we link sound and context, maybe we can crack the code and touch our audiences with as much effect and subtlety as music.

Conclusion – Working towards a musical approach The composer Carter Burwell, speaking at the School of Sound in 2001, gave a talk about composing for the Coen Brothers in which he makes some very important points about working in an integrated way with a sound designer. It would seem that working on Barton Fink he and Supervising Sound Editor Skip Lievsay were able to produce a truly integrated score and sound track. Many of the techniques they used are ones discussed here. Concrète techniques, prepared instruments, electronic sounds: sound used metaphorically and impressionistically. Most interestingly, Burwell talks of ‘dividing up the frequency spectrum’ with Lievsay, where there were percussive sound effects, there was sustained notes, where there was a mosquito, Burwell used low sounds; Skip would say, ‘Well, I’ve got a mosquito here,’ and I’d say, ‘Well OK, I’ll give you the high frequencies, but I’d kind of like to do something down below.’ Or he’d say, ‘Well I’m kind of interested in having a banging sound here,’ I’d say ‘Well, great I won’t do any percussion, but I’d like to do some low bed of dissonant trombones.’ (Sider 2003: 200)

This is such a logical way to work, and in fact it is the way any music would be constructed. The sounds (or notes) must have room to be heard and a space in which to play out. The mix for this film was both easy and successful, with the score and effects creating a truly homogenous 208

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soundtrack. Anyone who has seen this film will usually comment on the sound and will largely not be able to discriminate sound from music, both are truly interchangeable. At the start of his lecture, Burwell gives a definition of the purpose of film music: It tells you about character, it tells you about plot, mood and by the use of motives that recur, it creates connections either subliminally or consciously for the audience. (Sider 2003: 200)

Surely our goal as designers is to strive for this: for this definition of music to in fact become our definition for sound. In a mere hundred or so years, the nature of sound and of listening has changed in an order of magnitude which would have shocked even the Futurists. The advent of cheap, reliable computer technology has revolutionized the methods of composers and sound designers alike. We can shape, construct, even evolve, entirely new sounds quickly and efficiently, and send them via the Internet to colleagues, friends or even strangers. The sudden leap in our ability to communicate has narrowed the world, but hopefully will broaden our experiences and our ability to learn and hear more. Who knows what the next hundred years will bring in music and listening: we can only look forward and hope that it will be as unexpected and fascinating as the last. Composers and designers are working in truly fascinating areas of design, composition and research, many of which will surely find their way into the practice of film sound design. It is in keeping a broad outlook and a ‘beginner’s mind’ that we find the unexpected, hear the unknown, make the connections and seek to draw them into our own works. Works cited Allen, R. and Smith, M. (2003), Film Theory and Philosophy, Oxford: OUP. Altman, R. (1992), Sound Theory Sound Practice, London: Routledge. Antheil G. (2001), Ballet Mechanique, Naxos 8.559060. Barton Fink (1991), Joel Coen. Broek, J. (1976), Music of the Fears, Film Comment, September – October. Cook, P. and Bernink, M. (1999), The Cinema Book, second edition, London: BFI. Debussy, C. (1993), Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Philips Classics438 742–2. Dr. Jeykll and Mr Hyde (1931), Reuben Mamoulian. Early Vibrations Vintage Volts, Caipirinha music CAI 2027.2. Ewen, D. (1991), The World of Twentieth Century Music, second edition, London: Robert Hale. http://fargo.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/~kevin/lievsay/index.html. Accessed 7th September 2002. Fight Club (1999), David Fincher. http://www.filmsound.org Grey, C. (1968), The History of Music, London: Unwin Bros. Griffiths, P. (1992), Modern Music: a Concise History from Debussy to Boulez, London: Thames and Hudson. http://lavender.fortunecity.com/hawksane/575/ starwars- advanced.htm. LoBrutto, V. (1994), Interviews With Creators of Film Sound, USA: Praeger. Lost Highway (1997), David Lynch.

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Love Me Tonight (1932 ), Reuben Mamoulian. Maconie, R. (1991), Stockhausen on Music, London: Marion Boyars. Marinnetti, Filippo, Tommaso The First Futurist Manifesto, France, Le Figaro. Maddock, B. (1977), The Films of Jacques Tati, London: Scarecrow Press. Manning, P. (2002), Electronic and Computer Music, second edition, Oxford OUP. http:// media-arts.rmit.edu.au/Phil_Brophy/MMAlec/Psyco.html. Accessed September 2004. Monaco, J. (2000), How to Read a Film, third edition, Oxford: OUP. Murch, W. (2005), Clear Density – Dense Clarity (Lecture) http:/www.transom.org/ guests/review/200504.review.murch2.html OHM Collection of Early Electronic Music (1998), OHM 01. Ondaatje, M. (2002), The Conversations Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, London: Bloomsbury publishing Ltd. Pauli, H. (1971), Luc Ferrari – Fur Wen Komponieren Sir Eigentlich? (For Whom Do You Compose?) Frankfurt: Fischer. Playtime (1967), Jacques Tati. Rosen, P. (1980), Cinema/Sound No. 60, USA: Yale French Studies. Russolo, Luigi (1913), L’Arte dei Rumori (The Art of Noises) Letter to Francisco Balilla. Pratella. Seven (1995), David Fincher. Shakespeare, William ([1623]1984), The Tempest, sixth edition, London: Arden Methuen. Sider, L., Freeman, D. and Sider, J. (2003), Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures 1998–2001, London: Wallflower Press. Sonnenschein, D. (2001), Sound Design, USA: Michael Wiese Productions Ltd. Schoenberg, A. (1990), Gurrelieder, RSO Berlin DECCA 430 321–2. Schoenberg, A. (1988), Verklarte Nacht, EMI cdc7 49057 2. Stockhausen, K. 3 (1952–1960), Elektronische Musik, p. 1991, Stockhausen. The Birds (1963), Alfred Hitchcock. The Conversation (1974), Francis Ford Coppola. THX 1138 (1971), George Lucas. Truffaut, F. and Scott, H. G. (1985), Hitchcock, London: Simon and Schuster. http:// www.uib.no/herrmann/articles/music_of_the_fears/. Accessed 24 September 2004. Varèse, E. (1998), The Complete Works, DECCA 460 208–2. Weis, E. and Belton, J. (1985), Film Sound Theory and Practice, New York: Columbia University Press. Wells, H. G. (1898 [2005]), War of the Worlds, Penguin Modern Classics edition, London: Penguin. Wishart, T. (1996), On Sonic Art, London: Harwood. http://www.yk.psu.edu/ ~jmj3/murchfq.htm. Accessed 18th October 2002.

Suggested citation Underwood, M. (2008), ‘‘I wanted an electronic silence…’ Musicality in Sound Design and the Influences of New Music on the Process of Sound Design for Film’’, The Soundtrack 1: 3, pp. 193–210, doi: 10.1386/st.1.3.193/1 Contact: E-mail: http://underwoodsounddesign.com/

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