Global Sonic Culture
Film Sound: Audio-Viewing Cinema
Films are produced using three types of sounds: human voices, music and sound effects. These three types of sounds are crucial for a film to feel realistic for the audience. Sounds and dialogue must perfectly sync with the actions in a film without delay and must sound the way they look. If a sound doesn’t quite match the action on screen, the action itself isn’t nearly as believable. One way to achieve believable, high-quality sounds is to use original sound clips rather than relying solely on sound libraries for sound effects.
Another way to make a film more believable using sound is it incorporate what are known as asynchronous sound effects – often in the form of background sounds. These sounds do not directly correlate to the action occurring in a scene, but they can bring a film to life. Including sounds typical of a city or rural area can help to make the film’s setting more realistic.
Sound on film can be dated back to the early 1880s, when Charles E. Fitts filed a patent claiming the idea. In 1923 a patent was filed by E. E. Ries, for a variable density soundtrack recording, which was submitted to the SMPE (now SMPTE), which used the mercury vapor lamp as a modulating device to create a variable-density soundtrack. Later, Case Laboratories and Lee De Forest attempted to commercialize this process, when they developed an Aeolite glow lamp, which was deployed at Movietone Newsreel at the Roxy Theatre in 1927. In 1928, Fox Film purchased Case Laboratories and produced its first talking film In Old Arizona using the Aeolite system. The variable-density sound system was popular until the mid-1940s.
Opposite with variable-density, in the early 1920s, variable-area sound recording was first experimented on by the General Electric Company, and later was applied by RCA which refined GE’s technology. After the mid-1940s, variable-area system superseded the variable-density system, and became the major analog sound-on-film system until modern day.
What does a sound designer do?
The person directly in charge of crafting a film’s sound design is, you guessed it, the sound designer. On a particularly small production, the role of the sound designer may be all-encompassing. They might serve as the only person responsible for a film’s entire audio component.
On larger productions, the sound designer typically leads an audio team consisting of a combination of some or all of the following sound design jobs: Foley artists, Audio Engineers, Re-recording Mixers, Dialogue Editors, Supervising Sound Editors, ADR teams, Music Editors and Supervisors, and even Composers.
The vast majority of a sound designer’s work is done during Post-Production but that does not mean the best film sound designers cannot be involved in a film as early as the Pre-Production stage.
The spectrum of sound design for film
Different films call for different styles of sound design. If you were to take something like 1917’s sound design and swap it something like the cartoon sound design of the Looney Tunes, the results would be bizarre and off-putting. Like most facets of filmmaking, the best film sound design adapts to suit the individual project at hand.