Musicalized Sound Design and the Erotics of Cinema

2019 ◽  
pp. 89-126
Author(s):  
Danijela Kulezic-Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Physical Activities ◽  
Sound Design ◽  
Environmental Sounds ◽  
Visual Movement ◽  
Sensory Overload ◽  
Musique Concrete ◽  
Film Form

Chapter 4 explores the sensuous dimension of contemporary soundtracks through examples of soundtrack musicality drawn from diegetic sounds such as physical activities, walking, or environmental sounds. The chapter argues that the overall musical effect produced by the interaction between repetitive sound and rhythmicized visual movement creates musicality of an inherently cinematic nature, a type of audiovisual musique concrète. This approach is theorized through the concept of the erotics of art, contending that the practice of blurring the boundaries between music and the soundtrack’s other elements is intimately connected to the emergence of a trend that emphasizes the sensuousness of film form—its sonic and visual textures, composition, rhythm, movement, and flow—without confusing it with sensory overload.

The Erotics of Cinematic Listening

2021 ◽  
pp. 367-384
Author(s):  
Danijela Kulezic-Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Integrated Approach ◽  
Sound Studies ◽  
Tree Of Life ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Feminist Discourse ◽  
Sensory Overload ◽  
Film Form

This chapter explores cinematic listening by bringing together ideas from contemporary musical and sound studies, the concept of erotics in art championed in the 1970s feminist discourse, and ideas of “new materialism” in film studies. It emphasizes the sensuousness of film form as something distinct from sensory overload, and suggests that a sensuous mode of listening is inherently musical. Focusing on films including Arrival (2016), Under the Skin (2013), Elephant (2003), and Tree of Life (2011), the chapter shows that the erotics of cinematic listening is facilitated by the practice of foregrounding the materiality of music and an increasingly integrated approach to the soundtrack.

The Part Is Greater Than the Whole

2020 ◽  
pp. 61-83
Author(s):  
Bruce Isaacs
Keyword(s):  
Sound Design ◽  
Seminal Work ◽  
Formal Systems ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Infinite Array ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Film Form

Pure cinema is defined in terms of the interrelationship of formal “fragments” that subtend an infinite array of formal systems within the work. In this model, the aesthetic philosophy of the fragment is developed through the seminal work of Raymond Bellour, one of the most astute of the classical Hitchcockian theorists. The fragment structures aesthetic form across mise en scène, montage, sound design, and narrative. The philosophy of the fragment is read in further detail and greater philosophical specificity through the historical tension between Eisenstein’s montage as whole and Deleuze’s attempts to read montage through the itinerary of the part. The resonance or vibration of the part is read as intensity, structuring the “excessive affect” that underpins the aesthetic of the fragment in film form. The aesthetic of the fragment is revealed in close formal analyses in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, Argento’s Suspiria, and De Palma’s Union Station sequence in The Untouchables.

Music You Can Hear

2020 ◽  
pp. 164-184
Author(s):  
Bruce Isaacs
Keyword(s):  
Sound Design ◽  
Harmonic Structure ◽  
Silent Cinema ◽  
Rear Window ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Harmonic Progression ◽  
Sound Image ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Film Form

Pure cinema and the aesthetic of the fragment is applied to the evolution of sound design in the avant-garde experimental silent cinema of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The chapter argues that sound design and production were conceived as an integral part of pure cinema, tracing the emergence and development of this philosophy within the avant-garde experimentation with film form. Hitchcock articulates a philosophy of pure sound cinema in a number of critical pieces from the early 1930s and is clearly influenced by European philosophies of the early sound image. Sound is read as a discretized contrapuntal aesthetic form, achieving the abstraction of noise as patterned pitch (melodic), harmonic, and rhythmic form, in close analyses of Rear Window, The Birds, the imitation of Vertigo’s “Madeleine” theme in Pino Donaggio’s score for Dressed to Kill, and Argento’s cutting of a narrative segment of Deep Red to a standard blues I–IV–V harmonic progression. The chapter concludes with a study of Bernard Herrmann’s concluding sonic motif in Psycho as the purity of sound form in its atonal harmonic structure.

scholarly journals Urban sound design – can we talk about it?

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 36-50
Author(s):  
Nina Hällgren
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Qualitative Methods ◽  
Sound Design ◽  
Spatial Practices ◽  
Noise Mapping ◽  
Environmental Sounds ◽  
Common Strategy ◽  
The Common ◽  
Acoustic Space ◽  
Quantitative And Qualitative Methods

This article intends to critically discuss noise-mapping as the predominant method for evalu- ation, communication and maintenance of urban acoustic space, as performed in a majority of urban spatial practices today. Discussing the common strategy for handling environmental sounds raises specific questions: How is it possible to extend the current way of managing urban acoustic space, and why should we do that? How can the integration of quantitative and qualitative methods for analysing urban acoustic space act as a complement to existing methods? Interdisciplinary strategies are required which directly focus upon the perspective and needs of design practitioners in architecture and urban planning. The article will also present an example of such an explorative strategy within the scope of the PhD project Urban Sound Design – methods for qualitative sound analysis, a practice-based project within the field of artistic research.

Scoring with Sound, the Aesthetics of Reticence, and Films of Peter Strickland

2019 ◽  
pp. 55-88
Author(s):  
Danijela Kulezic-Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
Electroacoustic Music ◽  
Emotional Engagement ◽  
Sound Design ◽  
Significant Development ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Musique Concrete

Chapter 3 focuses on methods of replacing diegetic sound with electroacoustic music and/or musique concrète, or their seamless merging, arguing that they represent a significant development in the practice of erasing the line between score and sound design. The main case studies—Katalin Varga and Berberian Sound Studio—come from the work of British director Peter Strickland, whose methods of “scoring with sound design” are informed by his interest in avant-garde and experimental music. Connecting Strickland’s methods with a growing tendency among some filmmakers to reject the conventions of traditional scoring and its values of passive spectatorship, this chapter introduces the aesthetics of reticence as a conceptual framework embraced by artists who encourage the audience’s active intellectual and emotional engagement with the text.

Sound Design is the New Score

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danijela Kulezic-Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Stimulation ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Electroacoustic Music ◽  
Sound Design ◽  
Sound Effects ◽  
Ambient Sound ◽  
Underlying Principle ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Musique Concrete

Sound Design Is the New Score explores film soundtrack practice that blurs the boundary between scoring and sound design, subverting long-established hierarchical relationships between dialogue, music, and sound effects. The new methods associated with this practice rely on the language and techniques of contemporary popular and art music rather than traditional Hollywood scoring and mixing practices, producing soundtracks in which it is difficult to tell the difference between score and ambient sound, where pieces of pre-existing musique concrète or electroacoustic music are merged with diegetic sound, sound effects are absorbed into the score or treated as music, and diegetic sound is treated as musique concrète. The book argues that the underlying principle that binds together all the different manifestations of this practice is a musical approach to soundtrack conceived as an integrated whole. The aesthetic concerns of this practice, demonstrated in a resistance to the familiar tropes of classical narrative and scoring, are illuminated through the concept of the aesthetics of reticence, which encourages an intellectual, affective, and sensuous engagement with film. The sensuous aspect of this practice is theorized using the concept of the erotics of art, arguing that the sensuousness of film form—its sonic and visual textures, composition, rhythm, movement, and flow—is much more complex and sophisticated than simply being an emphasis on excessive sensory stimulation facilitated by the use of digital technology or the aesthetics inspired by it.

Cognitive Biases in Estimating the Similarity of Environmental Sounds

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruno L. Giordano ◽  
Stephen McAdams ◽  
John McDonnell
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
Environmental Sounds
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