Search Results

This chapter investigates a very different theme in live performance: the presentation of ‘acousmatic’ music, where sounds are produced to be listened to intently and ‘in their own right’, without any visual associations. The use of electroacoustical transmission is a crucial aspect of Pierre Schaeffer's concept of acousmatic music. The main difference between Schaeffer's original sense of acousmatic music and Michel Chion's adoption of the term ‘acousmatic’ for the cinema is that the main purpose of presenting sound acousmatically is to deflect attention from source while keeping the sound itself the object of intense scrutiny. R. Murray Schafer's concept of ‘schizophonia’ is also addressed. Chion is placed in the middle ground between Schaeffer's acousmatic ideal and the absolute banishment of electroacoustic technologies espoused by Schafer. The Xenakis portion of Hildegard Westerkamp's piece becomes the link point where abstraction and representation merge.

This chapter focuses on sound design and its potential to elicit an affective response in the spectator. Films discussed in this chapter include: Berberian Sound Studio, Inside, and 127 Hours. Building off of Michel Chion’s work on cinematic sound, the chapter explores the complicated relationship between image and sound, between seeing and hearing. Chion argues for a model of the human senses that is “transsensorial,” suggesting that sound can be used by films to appeal to other senses, such as vision, smell, taste, and touch. Thus, sound can elicit sensation in the spectator’s body. Extreme films wield sound as a weapon: high-pitched drones communicate the intense pain of characters on screen and, slipping between diegetic and non-diegetic registers, do violence to the image and the narrative itself. Drawing from the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Lisa Coulthard, the chapter explores how cinematic noise—screams, scrapes, and subterranean rumbles—are designed to resonate within spectators’ bodies.

This chapter attempts to examine the ethical relationship between self and other by way of focusing on the theme of estrangement in the New Hong Kong Cinema. In his study of the voice-over in cinema, Michel Chion creates a category of “acousmatic voices” or in French the acousmêtre. The acousmêtre refers to the image-voice relation in which one does not see the person one hears. Chion observes that sound film began with visualized sound but very soon it tried to experiment with acousmatic sound—voices without images, or voices divorced from images. These are not the voices of the disembodied, detached voice-over like that of documentary films because they have no personal stake in the film. This area of research has filled a lacuna in the study of cinema because the voice has often been considered as an inseparable and natural part of the image and thus it has seldom been examined as an independent category.

Bill Morrison’s Decasia (2012) and Peter Delpeut’s Lyrical Nitrate (1991) are collage works made up of decayed silent-era film fragments. The films approach sound in contrasting ways: Lyrical Nitrate uses old 78 rpm recordings of operatic music as musical accompaniment to its decayed images, whereas Decasia uses a specially commissioned score and exists not only in DVD format but also as an elaborately staged performance piece. This chapter is an investigation of the role of the soundtrack within both films’ repurposing strategy, comparing and contrasting their sonic approaches, using a Chion-esque idea of “audio-vision” in an effort to understand their aesthetic workings. Despite the material heterogeneity of film sound and film image, the spectator takes in the experience as a synthesis. Yet beyond representational strategies the materiality of sounds and images in the pre- and postdigital ages is arguably the subject of exploration unifying this comparative analysis.

Applying the theory of acousmatic sound presented in chapters 4 and 5, this chapter analyzes the role of acousmatic sound in philosophical accounts of the voice, from Husserl to Žižek and Dolar. The acousmatic voice’s source remains underdetermined or uncertain, provoking the question: “Who speaks?” The acousmatic voice can be heard in four other voices, around which the chapter is organized: the phonographic voice of recording technologies, the phenomenological voice of Husserl’s first Logical Investigation, the ontological voice of conscience in Heidegger’s Being and Time, and the psychoanalytic voice in Lacan (as developed by Mladen Dolar in A Voice and Nothing More.) Each of these four voices, and the philosophical work that each voice is intended to achieve, runs aground when it encounters the acousmatic voice.

Disembodied voices resound across the post-Vietnam Hollywood combat film. Some are heard in real time by way of military technology, such as radios which let soldiers and audiences experience battles which are heard but not seen (acousmatic battles, in Michel Chion’s term). Different wars present different technological opportunities to unify the dispersed nature of modern combat by way of the soundtrack. Disembodied voices also enter these films by way of tape recordings sent from home, allowing the voices and perspectives of women into otherwise all-male films. Letters heard in voice-over frequently deliver the voices of soldiers who died in the line of duty. When present, voice-over narration in these films is assigned to specific characters who offer their individual perspective on events. Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line takes this approach an extreme, combining voice-overs attached to specific characters with acousmatic voices that speak from a kind of soldier’s over-soul.

In 1966, BBC2’s anthology series Out of the Unknown broadcast an adaptation of E. M. Forster’s 1909 novella “The Machine Stops,” a story in which humans have abandoned both personal interactions and free will, leaving decision making to “The Machine.” In tone, the production clung faithfully to the Edwardian attitudes of the author, but in terms of sound design, it reflects the changing attitudes toward the role of television music, sound effects, and electronics in media in the 1960s. Realized using musique concrète techniques by Brian Hodgson at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the ambient sonic background functions simultaneously as sound effect and incidental music. Following Michel Chion’s notion of the acousmêtre, it is possible to understand the ubiquitous electronic music that suffuses the program as the ever-present threat of the Machine. But Hodgson nuances the radiophonic sounds so that they represent various levels of control, following traditional semiotic musical codes.