Performing Fragility

2021 ◽  
pp. 157-172
Author(s):  
Milena Droumeva

This chapter argues that the vocal performance of Lara Croft’s character in Tomb Raider 2013 manifests a particular type of media femininity requiring her fear and fragility and contrasts with similar games featuring male leads. Extending the discussion of the male gaze to sound brings new insight to the relationships between a character’s look, her movements and mechanics, and her vocalizations, to embody the character’s gender or act as gendered corporeality. The chapter argues that by virtue of being sound “effects,” women’s voices and feminized sounds in games draw on and solidify some of the most deeply entrenched gendered norms of sound design and voice-over work. Lara Croft’s excessive breathiness, as well as the overuse of environmental reverberation, codes her gendered sonic position as “feminized.” Players experience Lara Croft’s vocalizations as coded with abundant emotionality and fragility—sounds of strain, inner monologue, gasps, reactions, and battle cries—especially when compared with a similar narrative and game character, Nathan Drake, from the Uncharted series. By comparing the gendered sonic positioning of Lara and Nathan, the chapter shows her embodied vocal fragility by linking these characteristics to a transmedia historiography of feminized vocal typologies.

2020 ◽  
pp. 91-102
Author(s):  
Noah Kellman

Each video game has its own unique, visual aesthetic, and it’s up to the composer to complement this visual world by creating a sonic atmosphere. Many of the greatest games have incorporated musical elements into their sound effects and ambiences. As the field of game music continues to grow, so does the importance of sound design as part of the composer’s skill set. This chapter explores how music and sound effects have interacted throughout the history of game music, defining these relationships for the reader in understandable terms with clear distinctions and accessible examples. This chapter explores FEZ (2012) as an example, along with a variety of other examples in which the music and sound effects were conceived with different levels of interconnectivity.


Animation ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-147
Author(s):  
Paul Taberham
Keyword(s):  

From the inception of sync sound in the late 1920s to the modern day, sound in animation has assumed a variety of forms. This article proposes four principal modes that have developed in the commercial realm of American animation according to changing contingencies of convention, technology and funding. The various modes are termed syncretic, zip-crash, functional and poetic authentication. Each one is utilized to different aesthetic effect, with changing relationships to the image. The use of voice, music, sound effects and atmos are considered as well as the ways in which they are recorded, manipulated and mixed. Additionally, the ways in which conventions bleed from one period to the next are also illustrated. Collectively, these proposed categories aid in understanding the history and creative range of options available to animators beyond the visual realm.


Author(s):  
Laura Anderson

Sound design is a relatively recent term, first used to credit Walter Murch’s work on Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). Murch has frequently drawn an analogy between how he perceived his role as decorating the three-dimensional film theater with sound and the work of an interior designer who decorates an architectural space (LoBrutto 1994, p. 92, cited under Key Practitioners: Compilations). Sound design is also a topic of increasing interest within film music scholarship, particularly its history and how it might be analyzed. The history of sound design is inextricably bound up with the history of technology, notably the emergence of Dolby in the 1970s. In his Oxford Bibliographies article “Music and Cinema, Classical Hollywood,” David Neumeyer noted in the introduction that the end of the Classical Hollywood era could be situated c. 1972 when the “contemporary era of sound design began in earnest,” and this particular period is indeed crucial. Yet, this is not to suggest that the history of film sound design is brief; in fact, it has a long history of antecedents that have shaped the role of the sound designer into a somewhat fluid concept. As of the early 21st century, no consensus has been reached on the definition of “sound design” in current research; however, the distinction between sound design as the work of one individual as opposed to a mode of practice is apparent. Furthermore, “sound designer” also has a professional meaning; in the United States the labor union defines the sound designer as a person who designs the sound effects. Some scholars expound this relatively narrow definition of sound design as akin to sound effects editing in the post-production process, whereas others see it as a broad undertaking, concerned with every aspect of the sonic environment. Murch encourages a broader definition of the sound designer as “someone who plans, creates the sound effects and mixes the final soundtrack, and thereby takes responsibility for the sound of a film the way a director of photography takes responsibility for the image” (Murch 1995, p. 246, cited under Key Practitioners: Articles). Sound design can encapsulate all components of film sound, including music, dialogue, sound effects, and voiceovers. This holistic understanding of the term is reflected in a significant interdisciplinary edition that takes the concept of the integrated soundtrack as a central theme (Greene and Kulezic-Wilson 2016, cited under Analyzing Film Sound Design). Sound design can involve conceptualization and practical efforts as well as cooperation with the director, producer, composer, editors, and other creative personnel. Sound designer Randy Thom has highlighted the importance of developing opportunities for the creative use of sound when making a film and has appealed for filmmakers to design their films for sound (Thom 1999, cited under Key Practitioners: Articles). The combination of creativity, technical expertise, and the ability to conceptualize innovative interactions between sound and image inherent in the concept is reflected in the very title of “sound designer,” a label that is not officially recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awards. With the growing popularity of the term among some industry professionals, it is becoming common for sound artists to claim the credit “sound designer” in addition to those for recognized roles such as “sound editor” or “re-recording engineer” (Whittington 2007, p. 26, cited under Histories and Definitions of Sound Design). Within film music studies, the concept of sound design is increasingly used as a filter for analysis of a film’s soundscape, and thus publications now address how to analyze more complex film soundtracks. The focus of this article is divided into three broad strands: textbooks that give practical and technical direction for film sound design or aspects of it, literature on the history of sound design and the purview of the sound designer, and publications about and interviews with key practitioners.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 132
Author(s):  
Maximilian Kock ◽  
Christoph Louven

The art of sound design for a moving picture rests basically on the work experience of pragmatists. This study tries to establish some guidelines on sound design: In an experiment 240 participants gave feedback about their emotions while watching two videos, each combined with four different audio tracks – music, sound effects, full sound design (music and sound effects) and no audio (as the comparative "null" version). Each participant viewed an audiovisual combination once to prevent habituation. The lead author employed a tablet-computer with the emoTouch-application serving as a mapping tool to provide information about the emotional responses. The participants moved a marker on the tablet's touch screen in a two-dimensional rating scale describing their felt immersion and suspense. A 3-factor-ANOVA showed significant increases of the median (and maximum) values of immersion and suspense when the participants listened to music and/ or sound effects. These values were always compared to the induced emotions of the participants who watched the videos with no audio at all. The video with full sound design audio tracks increased the median immersion values up to four times and the median suspense values up to 1.4 times. The median suspense values of the video with either music or sound effects dropped by 40 percent compared to the median suspense values of the null version. In contrast, the median immersion values were increased up to 3.6 times. The findings point to the importance of sound effects in an appropriate mix with music to enhance the viewers induced immersion and suspense.


2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (s1) ◽  
pp. 251-262
Author(s):  
Svein Høier

AbstractThis article looks at surround sound in contemporary cinema, with the aim of discussing practices of sound design and, more particularly, pinpointing a ‘best practice’ of surround sound today – focusing here on the practices in the US. The empirical starting point for the analysis is a study of ten Oscar-nominated movies, analysing their soundtracks and especially comparing their stereo and surround versions. The method can be described as a ‘directional’ listening mode, analysing how the different channels and speakers are used when presenting sonic elements like voices, music, atmospheres and sound effects.


Author(s):  
Laurel Westrup

This chapter encourages scholars to listen again to music video. While music videos are often defined as moving images synchronized to a song, they have frequently incorporated sounds associated with cinematic sound design—sound effects, dialogue, and score—that are not part of the featured song(s). Even when a particular song remains central to a music video’s sonic address, it is often rearranged or extended to emphasize elements within the audiovisual mix. Through case studies featuring Logic, Janet Jackson, and the work of Jonathan Glazer, this chapter explores three key functions of cinematic sound in music video: building a fuller narrative, reinforcing the atmosphere or mood of the song, and subverting or challenging the song’s ostensible meaning. These motivations are not mutually exclusive, nor exhaustive; rather, this critical framework is offered as a means of opening up a larger conversation about the interplay between music video and cinematic sound.


2010 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 250-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
ADRIAN CURTIN

This article examines the sonic elements of Antonin Artaud's 1935 production of Les Cenci, Artaud's infamous attempt to realize his proposed ‘theatre of cruelty’. The aim is to qualify the critical opinion that Artaud was a failed theatre practitioner by analysing the conceptual complexity and potential effectiveness of the sound design for this production. Artaud utilized new sonic technologies and an aesthetic arguably derived in part from Balinese gamelan music to affect audience members on a physiological level, prefiguring the vibrational force and ultrasonic ambitions of modern sonic warfare. This analysis engages a range of primary and secondary materials, including an extant recording of music and sound effects used for the production, and is situated with reference to an estimated acoustic ‘horizon of expectations’ of Artaud's audiences and to neuroscientific conceptions of how the brain processes auditory input.


2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-81
Author(s):  
Natalia Nikolaevna Efimova

The article pinpoints peculiarities of sound editing in movies basing on analysis of partitions of popular films of40-90s; the most frequent principles of sound track arrangement are examined for the first time. The stuff selection is conditioned by measure of popularity of screen works in question. Due to talent of such famous composers as I. Dunaevsky, S. Prokofiev, A. Khachaturian, A. Pakhmutova, A. Petrov et al and their ability to hear plastic imagery, to comprehend filmic atmosphere music plays an extremely important part in these films. Many songs from these films are still in circulation even now. Thorough sound design and editing are of great significance in film production. The author comes to conclusion, that rondo as a musical form and leit-motif as a principle of musical stuff development form a dominant principle of sound stuff arrangement. The two fundamentally tighten the structure of the film. Since original music affords to accentuate sound effects in the most adequate way, it seems perfect to call to a composer for creating original music. The author assumes, that the choice of sound arrangement principle in cinema depends on deliberate conception of the film, wrought out by the helmer, composer, and supervising sound editor. The screen works property is closely bound with attentive partition editing.


Author(s):  
Martin Dawson

In a 2003 production of Jean Racine’s Phèdre, the director Patrice Chéreau introduces into the play a bevy of sound effects. The sounds range from solo cello accompaniment to electronically produced crackling noises. This use of sound bears a resemblance to the way music functions in operas of Jean-Philippe Rameau and Richard Wagner. By interpreting these sounds according to models in recent work in operatic analysis, this paper shows how Chéreau’s sound effects achieve new significance as leitmotifs and as commentary on the events of the play. The study of theatre semiotics also provides a pathway for interpreting these sounds as symbols of fate and indications of Hippolyte’s death at the climax of Phèdre. Chéreau highlights the relationships among the tragedy’s characters by surrounding certain words and phrases with specific sound effects, or by inserting sound effects at particular moments of turmoil and at the dramatic climax. In particular, Chéreau emphasizes the themes of forbidden love and deceit in connecting these moments throughout the play. This analysis provides a way for expanding research in sound design by incorporating methods traditionally used for analysing opera.


Author(s):  
Oleksandr Lishafai

The purpose of the article is to study the main components of the technological process in the formation of the soundtrack of the audiovisual space. The research methodology is based on the use of methods of source search, systematization, and comparative analysis. The scientific novelty lies in the representation of the attempt to create a theoretical concept concerning the importance of technological processes in creating the sound design of works. Conclusions. The article presents the concept of technological processes for creating sound in the audiovisual context, as a scientific and practical phenomenon, in the form of a panoramic figure. The research will serve as an incentive to search for updated options for combining existing elements of the background composition, as well as to create previously unused sound effects. Keywords: sound design skills, background composition, sound field unit, sound recording techniques, sound design.


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