no option. As light and dark create the image, so
sound and silence create the sound track. Each
property—light, dark, sound, silence—appeals to
our senses differently.
In terms of film history, the transition to sound,
which began in 1927, brought major aesthetic and
technological changes in the way movies were
written, acted, directed, and screened to the public
(see Chapters 10 and 11). After the first few sound
movies, where sound was more of a novelty than a
formal element in the telling of the story, a period
of creative innovation helped integrate sound—
vocal sounds, environmental sounds, music, and
silence—into the movies. The results of this innova-
tion can be seen and heard in some of the great
movies of the 1930s, including King Vidor’s Hallelu-
jah!(1929; sound: Douglas Shearer), Rouben Mamou-
lian’s Applause(1929; sound: Ernest Zatorsky), G. W.
Pabst’s Westfront 1918(1930; sound: W. L. Bagier
Jr.), Fritz Lang’s M(1931; sound: Adolf Jansen), and
Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise(1932; no sound
credit). Comparing one or more of these movies to
several silent classics will help you to understand
how profoundly sound changed the movies.
Like every other component of film form, film
sound is the product of very specific decisions by the
filmmakers. The group responsible for the sound in
movies—the sound crew—generates and controls
the sound physically, manipulating its properties to
produce the effects that the director desires. Let’s
look more closely at the various aspects of sound
production controlled by the sound crew.
Sound Production
Sound production consists of four phases: design,
recording, editing, and mixing. Although we might
suppose that the majority of sounds in a movie are
the result of recording during filming (such sounds
are called production sounds), the reality is that
most film sounds are constructed during the post-
production phase (and thus are called postproduc-
tion sounds). But before any sounds are recorded or
constructed, the overall plan for a movie’s sound
must be made. That planning process is called
sound design.
Design
Sound design, or creating the sound for a film, has
in the past been the responsibility of a sound crew
composed of the artists and technicians who
record, edit, and mix its component parts into the
sound track. In conventional filmmaking with film
stock, the sound track is a narrow band to one side
of the image on which the sound is recorded. In
digital filmmaking, depending on the recording
method being used, the sound track basically con-
sists of a digital code being placed somewhere on
the digital recording medium. (Sound recorded
with the Dolby system, which reduces background
noise and enhances fidelity, further requires a the-
ater equipped with a Dolby playback system.)
As motion-picture sound has become increas-
ingly innovative and complex, the result of compre-
hensive sound design, the role of the sound designer
has become more well known. Given its name by
film editor Walter Murch—the sound designer for
such movies as Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conver-
sation(1974) and Apocalypse Now(1979), and Anthony
Minghella’s The English Patient (1996) and Cold
Mountain(2003)—sound design combines the crafts
of editing and mixing and, like them, involves mat-
ters both theoretical and practical.^2 Although many
filmmakers continue to understand and manipulate
sound in conventional ways, sound design has pro-
duced major advances in how movies are conceived,
made, viewed, and interpreted. Prior to the 1970s, the
vast majority of producers and directors thought
about sound only after the picture was shot. They did
not design films with sound in mind and frequently
did not fully recognize that decisions about art direc-
tion, composition, lighting, cinematography, and act-
ing would ultimately influence how sound tracks
would be created and mixed. They considered sound
satisfactory if it could distract from or cover up
mistakes in shooting and create the illusion that the
audience was hearing what it was seeing. They
considered sound great if it was loud, either in ear-
splitting sound effects or in a heavily orchestrated
musical score.390 CHAPTER 9SOUND
(^2) Randy Thom, “Designing a Movie for Sound” (1998),
http://www.filmsound.org/articles/designing_for_soundelder.htm
(accessed February 4, 2006).