Week 7 - READINGS

- I read the chapter 5 from Alten about the consoles and control surfaces, but I found it difficult to understand for two reasons : first, I am a visual person so I would have need to physically BE around a console to really get the way it works. Second, there are a lot of technical terms at the same time for a person who does not know everything about the sound. But it was important for me to read it and to get a general image of how it works, what it looks like and what are the things you have to deal with when you use these kind of consoles. The parts about the features of a prod console, the meters, the patching and the plugs will probably be useful for us if we continue in this field. To sum up, week by week I understand a little more about how the sound is transformed and/or modified to give the best result it can. - I think I always say the same thing about this second question, but it is still true after the readings I did in the last two weeks : the more you learn about this medium, the more it changes your way to think and to work with it. For example, just with the assignment that we did, I understood how many sounds are there in our life and how much we do not pay attention to it anymore. When you have to completely construct an atmosphere with non-verbal sounds, you see that our ears miss a lot. Also, I read the parts in Chion and Alten where they talk about the music and the sounds in movies and other media and it makes me realize that sound is a big part of the creation. But I will talk about it in the next question ... - First of all, in Chion, I learned a lot of new different terms. The author taught me that sound really enriches an image. A sound, given with a particular image, can make you feel something, learn something, see something differently, etc. It changes our perception of what is just there. When he talks about empathetic and anempathetic effects (music), it makes us realize that music is there for a reason (to participate to the feeling of the scene, which is empathetic, or to intensify the emotion in progressing in a steady manner, which is anempathetic). He explains how without the sounds, we would be lost in the frames (ex. in a kung-fu scene, maybe if there was not any BANG BING PAF sounds, we would not understand that it is a fight happening). Then he talks about music in horror movies, telling that it is really important for the ambiance, and he gives a lot of important terms. A few of them that I find particularly useful : - offscreen sound : sound whose source is invisible - onscreen sound : the opposite (ex. we see someone walks so we hear steps) - non-diegetic : sound source is external to the story (ex. narration) - ambient (or territory) sound : envelops the scene - objective-internal sounds : sounds of breathing, moans, heartbeats - subjective-internal sounds : mental voices, memories - pit music : music nondiegetic - screen music : music arising from a source in the space and time of the action - active offscreen sound : acousmatic (sound we hear without knowing where it comes from) sound that raises questions like ''what is this?'' ''what's happening?" - passive offscreen sound : creates an atmosphere that envelops and stabilizes the image ; it provides the ear a stable place There are, of course, lots of terms like these. Let's finish with my readings from Alten about sound design. The author talks about similar things, but he uses a more technical language, I believe. For Alten, sound design is : the process of creating the overall sonic character of a production, which I agree with. He explains that speech, sound effects and music are all produce with the same elements : pitch, loudness, timbre, tempo, rythm, attack, duration, decay. He says that the ear sees and the eye hears, sentence that I like, to make us realize that when we look at a movie, we do not really separate the sound and the image. For us, it is a whole. According to the sound, we understand what we see and when you mix both, it gives you a result. If you change the sound, it'll give you another result. If you change the image but keep the sound, it'll give you another result, and so on. What I really liked from this chapter of his book, is the part where he gives all the functions of sound effects. I cannot summarize all of them because there are 14, but it is amazing to see what it can do (breaks the screen plane, defines the space, focuses attention, establishes locale, creates environment, emphasizes action, intensifies action, depictes identity, sets pace, provides counterpoint, creates humor, symbolizes meaning, creates metaphor, unifies transition).