Sounds Like Shmacoustics.

I think Chion’s classification of sound with images is really interesting. I definitely agree with what he says, sound really can completely change the meaning of images in film. My friends and I made an experimental film for Flicker Film Society last year, in which everything made a sound other than that which it usually makes. For example, eyes blinking were various animal sounds. We also added sound when there was no sound there, such as inserting the noises of a baseball game, the bat hitting the ball, to the image of a guy miming hitting a baseball. It also reminds me of an exercise I just did in Alex Markowski’s Sound Design class. We were asked to insert a song into a movie scene, when a woman turns on a C-D and takes a drink of wine. I first used Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get it On”, and then used Avenged Sevenfold’s “Trashed and Scattered”. The cliche’ sexy song obviously made it seem like she was trying to seduce the plumber that soon knocks on her door. When I used the hard rock song, it had almost an air of revenge, and you think she’s planning some sort of attack on the plumber. It also reminds me of the Kuleshov effect a little bit, because you’re still juxtaposing two separate elements to create a certain mood.

I also love how he describes anempathetic sound. It reminds me of the scene in Godfather Part II when the Corleone hitman kills Hyman Roth’s hitman. He comes out of the curtains and garrotes him, and the music does not change at all from what it was. It definitely feels indifferent like Chion says, and it also feels almost anticlimactic, and as if his death really doesn’t make that much of a difference to anything in the long run (which might just make it even more depressing).

The Cummings article made me really sad in the beginning, those poor finches! It’s really sad that human noise is so loud that they can’t learn their own species’ mating calls. He also reminds me of my Sound Design class, because our textbook instructs us to hone the art of “active listening”, which is basically just listening really carefully to all of the layers and levels of sound around us at all times, to help you create realistic soundscapes and spot any problem sounds when in a sound recording session such as equipment buzzing, etc. I also like the idea of classifying environments as having hi fi and low fi sounds. I’m all for city parks (Central Park is one of my favorite places ever!), and I think it’s really cool that it is taken into consideration when planning a city.