◡◶▿ Sound: a silent killer

How to control sound, and how you can never control sound | Summer sound letter #1

Sound is a silent killer. Like a gas, audiences don’t notice sound ‘getting around.’ It gets into everybody’s ears. Imagine what you could do with that kind of access.

Sound begins as vibration and travels as a wave to the ear. On its way through the head, it wobbles around the corridors, takes a short bath, and dances through fields of deep inner hair before anyone even knows it’s in there. Only on arrival in the audience’s brain does the sound make its presence known.

The audience can hardly hope to have much control over that at this stage. If they’re paying attention, they might make some personal sense of one sound or another. If they’re not paying attention, sound creeps past, unarrested, moves things around, makes its own meaning. A film issues more sounds at once than anyone could possibly attend to.

But the filmmaker who understands and harnesses sounds, who harnesses the idea of sound, has a powerful apparatus at her control. The sound apparatus is powerful because people don’t notice what the filmmaker is doing to them with sound.

📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️

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