Acousmatic Sounds In Cinema

Sound is something quite special, impactful, and adds layers of elements and complexity to a film. As with the progression of the movie making medium, sound has grown and changed drastically over the decades. However, sound cues in the form of effects, dialogue, and everything in between, shapes our perceptions of a scene and movie.

It is usually pre-recorded and placed over the top of a film or video and commonly used in documentaries or news reports to explain information. Focusing on selected sounds can create tension, atmosphere, and emotion. It can also impart personality to film characters. Walter Murch (the doyen of sound designers) once described the character sounds (in a film he directed) as "coronas" which can magnify each character' s screen space. A figure who is associated with a particular sound (often suggested by his or her clothing), has "a real presence that is pervasive even when the scene is about something else or the character is off-screen."

There is also another form of acousmatic, and it is the subtle comments of the crowd. Because there are so many appearances and performances the crowd reaction becomes very important to the context of the story from an outside critical standpoint. Putting these comments together creates one huge

In the Truman Show, the theme of audience manipulation is demonstrated through the use of sound. Non-diegetic sound is used when Truman is too scared to go on the boat that will take him to Harbor Island. Heavy repetitive beats are used in the background to showcase Truman’s fear of the ocean. These sounds manage to give the audience a similar feeling to what Truman would be feeling at that moment. However, diegetic sound is also used effectively throughout the film in order to inform the audience about the sounds used in the story itself. Diegetic sound is used in the scene where Lauren (Sylvia) is taken away by her so called father. In this scene, the actors are in distress and start shouting and sharing their emotions, whilst still manipulating the audience through these very emotions. The use of non-diegetic sound in the Truman Show is highly manipulative as it takes the audience into the world of Truman by making them feel the same emotions of fear as Truman. The use of sound in the background makes it evident that its main purpose is to manipulate the viewers’ emotions. It is then evident that the use of sound in the Truman show is highly manipulative over the audience as it forces them to also feel the same emotions as Truman. It is highly effective as the non-diegetic sound is merely focused on affecting the viewers.

Another example of sound is Hitchcock's use of voice over. For instance, as Marion drives away with the money she ha stolen, she imagines conversations between the people she has left behind and their reactions to her faults. Hitchcock also uses sound, which doesn’t complement the image that we see. Whilst the on screen

Along with background music, sound effects play more of a role on the way we feel than many moviegoers think, and "although the function of sound effects is primarily atmospheric, they can also be precise sources of meaning in film" (Giannetti, 225). When the

     In the movie Citizen Kane , young Charles Foster Kane is very energetic, optimistic and has a very positive outlook on life. At the same time he hates his old and bitter guardian, Mr. Thatcher, who has secluded himself from the everyday man and the only thing he is after is money and stature. Later on in life Charles Kane turns into an exact carbon copy of Mr. Thatcher, even though that is exactly what he wanted to get away from. In this essay I will prove how the used of sound, in the scenes in Thatcher¡¦s library and Xanadu, as compared to the earlier scenes in young Kane¡¦s newspaper office, help establish this development in Kane¡¦s character.

The Blue Angel is a German film directed by Josef von Sternberg, from 1930. In 1929, there a clear division in film, the division was between sound and silence. Sound was a major attraction to audiences during the Great Depression. The Blue Angel was Germany’s first complete movie with speech. There are four types of soundtrack materials in films, such as speech, music, noise, and silence. I am focusing on silence, which contains three subcategories, such as absolute, virtual, and selective. The characters in The Blue Angel who are associated with silence are Professor Rath and the clown. Silence for both characters signifies madness and sadness.

“The most exciting moment is the moment when I add the sound… At this moment, I tremble.” (Akira Kurosawa) Sound is arguably the most important concept in cinema studies, being there ever since the beginnings. It can radically change the way a motion picture is looked at and it can render what the director may sometimes find hard to depict using only his camera. Looking upon silent cinema one discovers an era which wasn’t at all silent, but rich in sound of different forms, from the simple narration of the images shown on screen, accompanied by a piano, to the complex score later composed specifically for that film. An example of that complex score is shown in Sunrise, a film by F.W. Murnau, which lies at the border between silent cinema and sound cinema. Considered to be one of the first films with an actual score, Sunrise is a great example of the multitude of dimensions and effects sound can have.

Sound’s importance is often overlooked in film, it’s either completely ignored or relegated to a minor status. This is surprising as sound can have such an impact on the audience’s emotions and can mold their reactions. The scene I have chosen to analyse is the shower scene from the much discussed 1960 Hitchcock film Psycho.

Another aspect of sound in this film was how it affected the story. By using sound dramatically in certain parts and not using it at all in other parts, sound gave this story an entity of its own. For example, during long stretches of film with mostly dialogue, there was no music played in the background, only a phone ringing in the distance, or the men's voices during their deliberation. These long silences also took place during editing shots of the town and images that surrounded this German city. This dramatic difference in sound was a revelation of how mood can be made by images and sound put together to make an incredible component.

The importance of music in movies is highly regarded for manipulating the viewer’s emotions and helping them immerse into the story. Music is one of the prime elements in cinema. Without it a movie would feel dull and unexciting. There are three elements in a movie: one is acting, the second is picture, and the third one is music. It is a holy trinity; if incomplete, there would be a lack of sensation and excitement. Both acting and picture can stand independently from one another, but music is the one that makes the movie memorable.

Sound and editing are both very crucial concepts in film. In Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run (1998), the way the narrative structure is set up can make the differentiation of diegetic and non-diegetic sound difficult for the viewer. The relationship between sound and the narrative structure, however, also makes the viewer more aware of the film's artificiality. In King Hu's Come Drink With Me (1966), we see how the major motifs of editing emphasize the unrealistic and fantasy qualities of the characters.

The film that I have chosen as a case study for my final paper is: Pan’s labyrinth (2006) by director Guillermo del Toro, and it is a case of real-fantastic cinema. Here I present my essay entitled “ The narrative power of sound in Pan’s labyrinth “of Guillermo Del Toro . It will analyze the sound design , the identification of its elements, the ways in which they are presented and their interrelations, to understand and explain how these elements work together in conjunction with the visual image, to support the narration of the story. Consequently, this research seeks to answer the question: How does the sound in the film ‘Pans Labyrinth' relates to

The notion that film functions rhetorically is hardly novel, and, indeed, there is a long tradition of film criticism within rhetorical studies.5 Historically, the rhetorical criticism of film has tended to focus on the representational aspects of cinema, attending to how films compel audiences at a cognitive rather than corporeal level. But more recently, scholars in an array of fields (Kennedy, 2000; MacDougall, 2006; Massumi, 2002; Shaviro, 1993; Sobchack, 1995, 2004) have begun to consider how cinema appeals directly to the senses, how it sways viewers somatically as well as symbolically. Attention to the body corresponds closely to the affective (re)turn in rhetorical studies,6 for conceptualizing rhetoric as embodied necessarily “reflects a merger of reason and emotion” (McKerrow, 1998, p. 322; see also Johnson, 2007). Rhetorical