Arriving late to a movie theater provides a wonderful
experience. As you walk into the dark room, you hear the movie
before you actually see it.
In an age where THX digital sound is touted like a mallet
banging on your eardrums before the movies’ start, listening
is just as important as seeing. If you can’t hear it, then
it’s not real.
At the 2001 Academy Awards ceremony, Mike Myers sarcastically
introduced the Oscar for sound design as “the award
we’ve all been waiting for. … What I do know is that
what’s in this envelope is going to send shockwaves through
the Industry.” Taken at face value, Myers’ words may
not be far off.
One of filmmaking’s many unsung heroes, sound designers
make the film world palpable. Without the loud sub woofer thuds and
reptilian screeches, the computer-generated dinosaurs would be just
as flimsy as the stories and characters in the “Jurassic
Park” films. The rippling water in the cup seems real because
your ear drums are rippling from the sound, causing your whole body
to ripple with cinematic wonder.
Emerging sound technology has always been a status symbol, from
the early days of high fidelity and stereo to the current Dolby 5.1
Sound. While stereo is simply right and left, the 5.1 means that
you benefit from five small speakers (two on the left, two on the
right, one in the center) and a large subwoofer for the low end.
When the plane flies across the African Sahara, you can feel it
zoom through your living room and rumble the earth beneath you.
None of this is new, and Spielberg had already proved the power
of sound in “Jaws,” in which a dumb mechanical shark
became scary because of John Williams’ heart-pumping score.
Silent films weren’t even silent, because pianists were
brought in to underscore Charlie Chaplin falling down.
But using sound itself to tell the story is relatively new.
Originating in the 1970s, sound design has been the culmination of
improvements in recording equipment and speaker technology. While
old chopsocky films used the same slap sound for every punch,
today’s moviegoer is probably disappointed if Jet Li’s
punch doesn’t have an accompanying swoosh from the left
speakers to the right ones and lands with bass in the face.
For sure, South Campus efforts made breath-taking sound
possible. But North Campus artfulness is knowing how to create a
sound or even if a sound is needed. Jet Li’s pummeling is
actually done by a foley artist, who is beating up a chicken
breast. When Li breaks an arm, the foley people are breaking celery
and carrots. It may look stupid, but it sounds realistic.
Big-budget movies promise loud sounds, and when George Lucas
re-released “Star Wars,” it didn’t so much get
better, it got louder. Even cool Jet Li punches are made mundane
when all of them have otherworldly sonic properties.
Before “Star Wars,” Lucas made “American
Graffiti,” which showed how sound could create an
environment. In the film, sound designer Walter Murch
revolutionized “worldizing,” where different layers of
sound are created. Murch found that sound could be in focus or out
of focus, just as a picture has foreground and background. When a
dog barks from the street, notice how it sounds fuzzy and far away,
and thank Murch for his contribution.
In “The Godfather,” before Michael Corleone murders
two people, we hear the drone of a loud elevated train rushing
unstoppably by on its tracks just as the unstoppable Al Pacino
races toward his violent destiny. The train, which you never see,
is unrealistically loud, but it serves as a sonic metaphor for
what’s going to happen.
Next time you play “Counterstrike,” listen to the
symphony of gunshots, bomb explosions and rifle cockings. Then turn
it off and realize how empty the game is and would be without the
sound shockwaves.
Ho’s North Campus Avenger column runs Mondays.