I am going to be writing about and exploring an example of how sound design influences us. Quite often we're not hearing the original sound recording, but we're listening to sound that is specifically designed to make us feel the way the director wants us to feel. I am going to take look at, possibly, the most iconic sound effect and why it worked so well, and I will give short demonstration on how we encode and draw information/emotion from sound. The Lightsabre. So well known I'm not even going to add a picture of it here. It's familiar and yet also refreshing and exciting. Most cultures are familiar with a sword as a weapon and its expected functions ( swipe, stab, spinning it with a flick of the wrist to look cool) and a lot of this we experience through film and TV. I'm not sure many people are still crusading and having sword fights anymore. Most people can do an impression of a Lightsabre in great detail, the hum, swooshes and clashes it makes. It's a cool sound and is probably cemented in human culture now. If one day a real one is created, we will all be really disappointed if it doesn't sound exactly like the movies. It's a great piece of sound design, because like the visual aspects of it, the audio is also familiar yet new and exciting. This is a key part of sound design, the audience has to believe that the sound and visuals are connected. It’s sound is convincing because it has a basis in real world sounds, with expected acoustic properties. When a Lightsabre is swung around, it reacts in accordance with our acoustical expectations. If I swung a hollow metal pipe, you'd know what kind of sound it would make because of the model our brains have made for this type of material, size and movement. This extends to non-existent objects. When you see a Lightsabre, you can be convinced that this is the sound it's supposed to make. Ben Burtt first recorded the raw sound of a stalled electrical motor (“Grrrrrr”). He then added the sound of a television power supply for high frequency sweetening (“Hummm”). However, to encode the recording with a spatial component, Burtt replayed these sounds at half-speed through an amplifier to a speaker and re-recorded them using a shotgun microphone, which he wielded like a sword at various angles in front of the speaker. Because this microphone had a 9 lobed pickup pattern—meaning it was highly directional in its focus—the re- recorded sound floated on and off axis, offering the shimmering oscillations and electronic “whooshes” of the Jedi light saber. (Whittington, 2007) Drawing on the familiar sound of an electrical motor and TV power supply, and the physical acoustic properties of the doppler effect ( swinging the microphone around the sound source for the sensation of movement), the swoops and clashes reminiscent of the sword fights we've seen in movies and played as children, this all gives the audience enough real world reference to accept the abstraction of a Lightsabre. We judge the acoustical properties of sound and match these properties to memory sound bank of matching objects and/or events. We can call this Causal listening; Listening for the purpose of gaining information about the sound's source. (Chion,1990). Even if the sound does not match the sound source we still connect the two objects through Synchresis. Synchresis is defined by Chion (1990) as “ the spontaneous and irresistible weld produced between a particular auditory phenomenon and visual phenomenon when they occur at the same time.” Any sound that plays at the same time as an event creates a sensation that the two are related, even if there are unrelatable. If we saw the lightsabre powered up and at the same moment heard the sound of an elephant roar, our brains would weld these together, but we would notice the confliction. Another example is the whoops and beeps in comedy films as a character falls over. We may relate a metallic crashing sound to a character falling over in a comedic, scene but our brain will not accept that the person, made of bone and flesh, caused that metallic crashing sound. We would recognise that the sound is that of a trash can being dropped. We can use the phenomenon to enhance our sound design, either by meeting expectations or by disregarding them completely. Here we have a short clip, produce by the increasingly talented Rob, whereby I've added some audio as to demonstrate how we encode & draw information into & from sound. First, mute your device and watch the clip. What sound would you expect? What kind of feeling? Then have a listen, did it meet expectations or go against them? We see a small desk lamp but already through Synchresis we have welded the Godzilla like percussion to the movement of the lamp. We also have the tense strings and horns drawing a common horror/thriller sensation. As the lamp looks up we hear the squeak of the lamp. This was originally the sound of a squeaky door opening, but it has been manipulated to a higher pitch, in order to match the expectancy of the audience ( we expect small things = high pitch). A small desk lamp wouldn't create the same lower pitch sound as a door. I mean, it probably wouldn't make much of a sound at all in reality, but hey, you're watching a movie to be entertained, so embrace the hyper-real sound. Now to break the "horror/thiller" set up, we make the lamp cute and playful.... how? We add the sound of a dog panting and a squeak toy. Through our cultural affordance of this sound, it brings up associations of cute, happy, playful and we apply these to the lamp. This is an example of how sound design can influence us in so many ways. Quite often we're not hearing the original sound recording but we're listening to a sound designed to make us feel the way the director wants us too. The Birth of The Lightsabre Audio-Vision (1990) Michel Chion Sound Design and Science Fiction (2007) William Whittington
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