Sound Depth of Field

So I was sleepless last night after having been in bed only 3 hours, and decided to try reading on the couch. Good time for the deeper concepts of David Sonnenschein, which I don’t have the patience for normally. I’ve picked up and put down the book so many times, I can’t remember which parts I’ve been over. Terms like "emotional inventory" and "musique concrète" demand a mode of creative thinking that doesn’t jive with my practical side. He’s showing the artistic potential within a mostly technical craft. It crosses the wires in my brain because I know the conditions on the battlefield of production don’t allow for such artistic freedom. It’s like how military warfare could be more like performing ballet. I came to a place where he wrote that people can only subjectively discern one or two sounds at a time, any more would blend together as one sound. “Bullshit,” I thought.

I fetched myself a bowl of leftover spaghetti, and put on the DVD the director lent me as an example of great sound design. I sat with my ears maybe 18 inches from the speakers of my TV, with my face in the spaghetti, and listened to the opening scene of the movie as the light from the picture glowed around me. You can actually hear a lot of distinct sounds without the distraction of the visual sense. I was fascinated that no matter where it was in the movie… no more than 3 sounds were going on at any given moment, and many times just one sound. They actually killed the background sound of cicadas in the desert when a car radio started, and when the radio stopped, the cicadas faded back in. This was the answer I was looking for regarding the sound equivalent of focus, or depth-of-field.

Earlier today, actually, my wife wanted to show me how clean the Wilhelm Scream* is in Pixar’s Lifted. It was very clean, albeit also very wet because the character falls down a hole, but I noticed something else. When the story continues aurally as the credits burn in on screen, we hear each sound separately, like they each take a turn without overlapping. Alarm clock, bird tweets, yawn, bed creak, Wilhelm, and body fall. That is fascinating! Now, certainly this is partly do to the comedy of a cartoon. Mechanical rhythm from what appears to be organic is funny. However, I think I’m on to one of the secrets to the magic of movie sound.

One sound at a time accomplishes two goals. It directs the audience’s attention to an object and it is heard clearly.

A scene between two people talking in a car came later. The sound of the car running was mixed very low. It seemed to be at most one third of the volume of the voices. The dialogue dominates unrealistically, but it works. Sound design served the story. That’s the key I’m striving to achieve.


*The Wilhelm scream was burned into my emotional memory as a stormtrooper falling when I was very young, because I watched and rewatched Star Wars so many times growing up. It's like your memory of a guitar solo in a song. When you hear it out of place, sampled in another song, you notice! I have been aware of the stormtrooper scream in movies just as long as I can remember but I never really could convince my friends that it was true. Well, I was right.