After our first lecture with Jessica I found myself mulling over the many different ways in which sound affects, alters, modifies and adds new meaning to moving image. After touching on the French film theorist and experimental music composer, Michael Chion’s book Audio Vision, I decided to rent it out from the library in order to build on the terms we’d been introduced to.
One of these was ‘Acousmetre’, A sound that is heard but not seen, therefore shrouded in mystery and given an air of omniscience, much like in the Wizard of Oz. What I found interesting was the loss of imagined power when the source of an acousmatic voice is revealed to its audience and how this could be wielded for creative effect.
Another was ‘Synchresis‘, referring to the forging between something one sees and something one hears, and how this syncing of sound and image allows for its reassociation. A better way to put it would perhaps be how the combination of sound and image will become one perceived thing and not two separate entities playing in unison. Examples are seen in the film ‘Mon Oncle Tati’ where ping pong balls and glass objects were used for the noise of footsteps. “Certain audiovisual combinations will come together through synthesis and reinforce each other”.
From what I have gauged, Chion tried to communicate the importance of how effects are perceived by the audience as a whole, instead of solely concentrating on the individual components of a film. One of the more intriguing terms of his I found was ‘Sound en Creux‘. Directly translated to ‘Sound in the Gap’, Sound en Creux points to the silence we hear in between the sounds in a film and how it is the sound designers duty to recognise the intimacy and emotional intensity of these ‘gaps’. The silence in between music/ dialogue is what sets the scene, and glues the film together and thus through these gaps we are given the opportunity to subtly compose the overarching theme of the film.