a movie is set in other distinct environments—
seashore, desert, mountain valley—the natural
sounds associated with these places (the placid, tur-
bulent, and stormy rhythms of the sea; or the howling
winds of the desert sands; or the cry of a lone wolf in
an otherwise peaceful valley) reflect the director’s
point of view of landscape and often as well the
thoughts or emotional mood of the characters.
Alfred Hitchcock is a master of expressing his
point of view through sound. In The Birds(1963), for
example, one of the few of his movies that does not
have background music, Hitchcock uses a design of
electronic bird sounds (by Remi Gassmann and
Oskar Sala) to express his point of view about the
human chaos that breaks out in an unsuspecting town
that has been attacked by birds. Bernard Herr-mann,
who composed the scores for many Hitchcock
movies, including Psycho(1960), was the uncredited
sound designer on this one. It is a highly stylized
sound track, consisting of a juxtaposition of natural
sounds and computer-generated bird noises. Elisa-
beth Weis, an authority on film sound, writes:
[In] The Birds, screeches are even more important
than visual techniques for terrorizing the audienceduring attacks. Indeed, bird sounds sometimes
replace visuals altogether.... Hitchcock carefully
manipulates the sound track so that the birds can
convey terror even when they are silent or just mak-
ing an occasional caw or flutter.... Instead of
orchestrated instruments there are orchestrated
sound effects. If in Psychomusic sounds like birds, in
The Birdsbird sounds function like music. Hitchcock
even eliminates music under the opening titles in
favor of bird sounds.^8Directors of visionary movies—those that show
the past, present, or future world in a very distinc-
tive, stylized manner—rely extensively on sounds
of all kinds, including music, to create those worlds.
In 2001: A Space Odyssey(1968), where the world
created comes almost totally from his imagination,
Stanley Kubrick uses sounds (and the absence of
them) to help us experience what it might be like to
travel through outer space. The barks and howling1 2
Sound that thwarts audience expectationsA classic
example of sound thwarting audience expectations occurs
in Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps(1935; sound: A. Birch).
A landlady (actor not credited) enters a room, discovers a
dead body, turns to face the camera, and opens her mouth
as if to scream [1]. At least, that’s what we expect to hear.
Instead, as she opens her mouth we hear a sound thatresembles a scream but is slightly different——a sound that,
because it is out of context, we may not instantly recognize.
Immediately, though, Hitchcock cuts to a shot of a train
speeding out of a tunnel [2], and the mystery is solved:
instead of a scream, we have heard the train whistle blaring
a fraction of a second before we see the train.(^8) Elisabeth Weis, The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock’s Sound
Track(Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
1982), pp. 138–139.
FUNCTIONS OF FILM SOUND 417