discussion explains in detail what the table shows in
summary form.
The pitch(or level) of a sound can be high (like
the screech of tires on pavement), low (like the
rumble of a boulder barreling downhill), or some-
where between these extremes. Pitch is defined by
the frequency(or speed) with which it is produced
(the number of sound waves produced per second).
Most sounds fall somewhere in the middle of the
scale, but the extremes of high and low, as well as
the distinctions between high pitch and low pitch,
are often exploited by filmmakers to influence our
experience and interpretation of a movie.
In Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz(1939;
sound: Douglas Shearer), the voice of the “wizard”
has two pitches—the high pitch of the harmless
man behind the curtain and the deep, booming
pitch of the magnificent “wizard”—each helping us
to judge the trustworthiness of the character’s
statements. Similarly, in the “all work and no play”
scene in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining(1980), the
pitch of the accompanying music changes from low
to high to underscore Wendy’s (Shelley Duvall)
state of mind as she discovers Jack’s (Jack Nichol-
son) writing (the low pitch corresponds to her anx-
iety and apprehension; the high pitch signals that
her anxiety has turned into sheer panic).
Sound propagates through the air in a wave that
is acted upon by factors in the physical environ-
ment. Think of this as analogous to the wave that
ripples outward when you throw a rock into a
pond—a wave that is acted upon by the depth and
width of the pond. The loudness(or volume or
intensity) of a sound depends on its amplitude, the
degree of motion of the air (or other medium)
within the sound wave. The greater the amplitude of
the sound wave, the harder it strikes the eardrum
and thus the louder the sound. Again, although
movies typically maintain a consistent level of mod-
erate loudness throughout, filmmakers sometimes
use the extremes (near silence or shocking loud-
ness) to signal something important or to comple-
ment the overall mood and tone of a scene. In The
Shining, during the scene in which Wendy and Jack
argue and she strikes him with a baseball bat,
Kubrick slowly increases the loudness of all the
sounds to call attention to the growing tension.
394 CHAPTER 9 SOUND
123
Exploiting the perceptual and physical
characteristics of soundFrancis Ford Coppola’s
Apocalypse Now(1979; sound designer: Walter Murch) opens
with horrific images of war and continues with a scene of a
very agitated Captain Benjamin L. Willard (Martin Sheen) in his
Saigon hotel room. The first words in his voice-over narration——
“Saigon. Shit!”——introduce the movie’s counterintuitive logic.
Between missions, Willard is distraught, not because he has
not returned home to the United States, but because he is
“still only in Saigon.” The jungle is where he really wants
to be. Intercut with shots of Willard, here seen upside down,
are shots of his ceiling fan, the jungle, helicopters, napalm fires,
and so on——all of which are represented in a ferocious and
hugely ambitious sound track that combines sonic details,
noise, dialogue, voice-over, and music. Together, pictures and
sound prepare us for many of the movie’s key themes,
including the hellishness and surreality of the Vietnam War,
the devastating power of military technology to destroy
human beings and natural resources, and the complex roles
within 1960s American society of countercultural forces such
as rock music, drugs, and psychedelia.