Sound check

Cinema has always challenged the perception of time due to its ability to arrest our senses, making us lose ourselves in a narrative that keeps us engrossed through sound, music and imagery.

It is easier for us to spot differences in the environment through our eyes due to the smaller bandwidth of our visual spectrum. Since the bandwidth of our hearing is very large, from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, differentiating and isolating specific sounds is much harder. We can identify some sounds by referring to our past experiences. In philosopher Don Ihde’s words, we become ‘domesticated’ to these sounds. We access this ‘sound dictionary’ subconsciously when watching films.

Foley is a technique used to magnify the quality of everyday sounds in a film, in order to bring attention to the environment, objects or characters present in the scene. Foley artistes study and apply textures of sounds after arduous experimentation with different objects, materials and recording techniques to enhance natural sounds and provide innovative sound effects. Shreyank Nanjappa, a sound designer based in India, worked as the production sound mixer for the Oscar-winning documentary The Elephant Whisperers (2022). He says that the proportion of the dialogue, music, sound effects, foley and background/ambience in the final mix deeply influence the audience’s attention.

While recording the dialogues of a film on set, sync sound engineers go to great lengths to isolate the spoken words from the background ambience. During the final mix, Shreyank carefully adds or reduces the ambient sound to draw the viewers’ attention to something important happening in the narrative. The ambience also determines the mood of the scene. Shreyank says, “there can be various recordings of night crickets that range from quiet and mellow to weirdly creepy, ominously scary and piercingly annoying. An appropriate one is chosen based on what mood we want the particular scene to evoke.” Along with the sound design, a layer of music then guides the audience to ‘feel’ with the character and get into the character’s head. A wise balance of natural sounds with music takes us one step further into the dreamy realism of films.

The expertise with which these aural moods are sculpted depends on our experiences of listening and how keenly we make a note of it. Explored extensively by philosophers like Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, the field of phenomenology involves a structured study of experiences. Eminent philosopher Don Ihde explored the medium of sound using this method in his book ‘Listening and Voice: a phenomenology of sound’ (1976). In the book, he communicates detailed experiences of listening to the world through a series of personalised generalisations. Since every human ear is different, each of us tend to have our own flavour of listening. This ‘signature’ of hearing builds our relationship with the outer world.

The technologies we use shape our perceptions and create a bridge between the listener and the world. Sound is temporal in nature and its dependency on time is something that is explored by practitioners of sound design. Frank Dufour works as a professor emeritus of sound design at the University of Texas at Dallas and as a pedagogical consultant at Université Côté d’Azur, France. Practising as a sound artiste and a philosopher himself, Frank considers sound, in general, to be an ensemble of technologies. He says, “Technologies are systems by which human thoughts are externalised, or made available to the world. The sounds we make by means of speech, or musical activity are expressions of our thoughts made available to the world in temporal, and therefore fugacious, forms.”

Between technology and the listener, there are translations that take place in relation to time. According to him, the first process is that of translating the temporality of thoughts to the temporality of sound. The listener synchronises his/her stream of consciousness to this stream of sounds. The second process of translation is the transformation of the experience of listening into a temporality of his/her thoughts. At this stage, we organise sounds, vowels, consonants, words or musical notes to create a meaning for ourselves in relation to the world. Frank says, “This is for me how perception of sounds is so different from other perceptions because it engages Time and the relationships between the inner time of thoughts and the time of the World. This is also why, in my activity of teaching sound design, philosophy is so important: understanding these two translation processes necessitates the understanding of being and the world ”.

By keeping an attentive ear at all times, we enhance our vocabulary of sounds and writing about it is essential to keep a track of a multitude of listening experiences. In this way, exploring the field of phenomenology of sound and applying its essence to sound design in creative mediums like music, podcasts, films or art, helps create an immersive non-verbal exchange between generations of listeners.