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9 The Sound Stage & The Superimposition of SpacesWith the advent of multitrack recording it became easier to record and overlay multiple spaces within the same aural time frame. With close mike recordings able to deny natural room acoustics, mixes could dynamically reconstruct new configurations of space with some instruments impossibly proximate and others emanating from virtual or electronic spaces. The practice itself was not new- multiple miking had been at play since the introduction of electric recording- but with its ease of use, the practice became more pronounced.
By the 1970’s, with the widespread adoption of multitrack recording and a proliferation of stereo music production, despite the growing number of aesthetic options, certain conventions for constructing the sound stage began to emerge, particularly in terms of stereo panning.
Stereo music albums had been available since the 1950’s but these tended to be expensive and primarily marketed for the audiophile, more so in a post-war Europe still in economic recovery. As mentioned previously, often that early stereo ‘product’ was concerned with content that panned dramatically to draw attention to the replay medium, or to musics that tended to be recorded with the ‘romanticist’ aesthetic, such as orchestral or jazz music, where producers aimed to reproduce the concert space in the living room.
In popular music, the change to producing and mixing The Beatles recordings in stereo is an illustrative one. Essentially, until the last few albums, material was produced and mixed primarily for mono playback, with stereo remix sessions taking place almost as an afterthought and often conducted in the absence of the producer, and most certainly in the absence of the band. The ‘mono first’ approach could create some challenging issues for the stereo remixer- for example, during the definitive mono mixdown of “I Am The Walrus”, a live BBC-Radio broadcast of ‘King Lear’ had been recorded onto the master over the playout, necessitating the stereo version to be spliced with a mono ending. Listening to the stereo mixes from this period, for example “Hello Goodbye”, one is struck by the extreme panning of musical elements- drums, piano, bass to the left, backing vocals, strings and electric guitar to the right, and with the lead vocal shared between the two channels to achieve a mono centre. What is somewhat surprising, given that the limitations of 4 track recording and de rigueur hard panning, is how cohesive and spatially coherent the whole picture sounds when played back, despite a very different arrangement of the sound stage to what would come to be regarded as ‘conventional’.
Despite improvements in the technology, even by the final album, Abbey Road (1969), one can still hear similar spatial arrangements of instruments on the sound stage. For example, on “Come Together” the drums and electric piano are still panned hard left, the rhythm guitar to the hard right albeit the bass and lead guitar are now starting to take a more central stage position or are more finely panned, while on other tracks a more finely arrayed spread of elements has begun to be implemented, most evidently in songs like “The End”. It’s interesting to note that these stereo geometries were being produced at a time when the band had decided to make a ‘record’ that sounded more like the band performing on a stage- in other words they were being drawn away from their world of acoustic fictions back to a ‘romanticist’ aesthetic.
Yet, if at first sight the trend in these spatial geometries seems to suggest a reversion to the pursuit of the facsimile, in popular music production, what evolves is something more complex, for encapsulated on the sound stage within the veneer of a seemingly ‘realistic’ spatial arrangement were the multiple layers of acoustic codes that had come before.
If, for example, one looks at a microhistory of drum recording practice in terms of changing fashions in spatial geometry and spatial construction, one can clearly see profound changes in aesthetic approaches, particularly regarding the arrangement of the kit on the sound stage. In earlier times a ‘good’ drum kit sound was ‘out there’ in the room. For example, Gene Krupa’s big band drum sound of the late 1940-s early 1950’s, which is distant in the mix (except in solos) and always reverberant without any close miking. The bass drum is difficult to discern and the sound is spatially chaotic, relaying the kind of explosive exuberance that presages the rock ‘n’ roll spaces of the 1950’s.
By the time of Ringo’s solo on Abbey Road, the drums had become drier, much closer and more isolated (multiple miked and compressed) and had begun to be panned across the sound stage, with the respective distance between the tom toms impossibly wide. Somehow, as an image, in the same mix, we can hear the drums both intimately and yet spread out further than was ever physically possible on a real stage.
Of course, it was also question of style- at the same time that Ringo was measuring his beats, a wildly reverberant Keith Moon was recorded with a liberal addition of room sound creating spatial chaos in The Who. What is certain is that the ‘realist’ audiophile stereo techniques employed in recording for example an orchestra were nowhere in sight- instead a vast rhythmic mechanism was in the process of being constructed, that would ultimately lead to the massive sounds of Public Image and later Nine Inch Nails.
By the end of the 1960’s what seemed to emerge was what has become the classic textbook method of arranging a drum kit across the soundstage. As Stanley Alten describes it in Audio In Media:
‘The bass and kick drum go in the middle of the mix, along with the snare that sits right on top of the kick. The hi hat is placed off to the right side. The tom toms are panned across the stereo field.’(Alten 1981: pp 571-72)
Indeed, a conventional mix- and nothing like Ringo being panned to the extreme right of stage. In actuality, what he seems to be describing is a subset of drum recording practices founded on the sounds and geometries of classic rock drummers such as Charlie Watts and John Bonham that have pervaded much of rock production both live and recorded ever since. Indeed, if one adds the other instruments following the rest of the recipe, the essential ‘classic rock’ spatial arrangement seems complete:
‘‘The lead vocal is in the centre of the mix and up front.. The background vocals.. are making a line behind it.. The string sound.. works best as a long, smooth line way in the back.. Acoustic piano is panned to 7 o’clock and 5 o’clock positions.. The rhythm guitar fills the space about 9 o’clock and 3 o’clock. A lead guitar, sax or synthesiser fits just to the left or right of centre. The lead instrument is kept a short distance from the bass and central drums..’ (Alten 1981: pp 571-72) and so on.
Important to recognise, as is not usually pointed out in the various texts, is that this arrangement might in fact be considered a single scene in what might be a much more dynamic spatial arrangement of the elements. Moreover, it is an arrangement that conceptually looks upon the mix as a construction of a band on stage where of course the instruments and players are essentially in fixed positions and very framed by a theatrical proscenium arch where the actors rarely change position.
Much to Alten’s credit, he does recognise “there are many options in positioning various elements in an aural frame” and “each musical style has its own values”. (Alten 1981: p p571-72) Indeed, and those options might include dynamic constructions of the sound stage, where some elements may be fixed but others move, a little like changes of lighting set arrangements, as well as the superimposition of spaces (conceptual as well as physical). In broader terms the idea of a dynamic spatial and temporal configuration is resonant with how Serge Lacasse ‘likens the concept of vocal staging to the broad theatrical notion of mise-en-scène, and that of setting to a particular effect of mise-en-scène occurring at a given time or lasting for a given duration.’ (Doyle 2005:29)
Perhaps one of the best examples of this dynamic mise-en-scène would have to be Tony Visconti’s production of David Bowie’s vocal track on “Heroes” at Hansa Studios in Berlin in 1977:
‘'Heroes' was apparently recorded with three different mics — one close, one a few feet away and the third at the other end of the room — the latter two of which were gated with different thresholds in order to introduce increasing amounts of room ambience as Bowie sang louder.’(Sound on Sound 2001)
Bowie’s voice, like the rock ‘n’ roll shamans of the Chess and Sun Studio era before him, roams across several spatial domains- from that of the close intimate crooner to the explosive outsider, from the subterranean cathedral to all stations between. Ironically, Visconti achieved this effect principally through mike placement techniques, albeit complemented by various processes, yet the effect would be much emulated in the post-digital processing era to come- by Tom Waits, for example on ‘When The Earth Dies Screaming’ or by Nick Launay in his production of Peter Garrett’s voice on the Earth and Sun and Moon album.
As Launay explained:
‘'From the point of view of creating moods, if a vocal was just a narrative about some external subject not a personal one then the vocal could be a bit more distant and treated. When it's a personal lyric, then you often find it's better to mix vocals up close so that it sounds like you're having a conversation.’(Horton 1993)
Between verse and chorus, between one line and the next, even between words, producers would more than ever before encode changes of space in the vocals as part of the emotional grammar of the arrangement.
It is useful to consider, too, how unlikely technical considerations at times seemed to predetermine some of the spatial strategies involved in arranging elements within the sound stage. One can almost certainly in part trace the bass/bass drum centre dominated mixing convention to problems in the disk cutting process (no longer an issue in the digital domain although bass management can create other issues).
According to Bobby Obwinski (1999): ‘Because music elements tended to be hard panned to one side this caused some serious problems: if a low frequency boost was added to the music just on that one side, the imbalance in the low frequency energy would cause the cutting stylus to cut right through the groove wall when the master lacquer disc (the master record) was cut. The only was around this was to either decrease the amount of low frequency energy from the music to balance the sides, or pan the bass and kick and any other instrument with a low frequency component to the centre.’ (Obwinski 1999: pp 21-22)
Similarly, the coming of multitracking gave rise, in some quarters, to a strong denial of acoustics in recording.
As Mark Cunningham (1998) points out: “the additional flexibility given to engineers through the use of sixteen-track machines explains the sudden clarity of rhythm tracks, particularly drums, which came to fruition in the early Seventies-a period when strict close miking was the order of the day and little or no room ambience would creep into the mix.” (Cunningham 1998)
This of course would be over-corrected with the coming of digital processing in the late 1970’s by the addition of artificial reverb and may well help explain why it was done so extremely.
From the late 1970’s forwards, coincident with the introduction of digital delay and digital reverb, the growing practice of superimposition of space became more pronounced. Drum kits would come to have several spaces enfolded within their domain or be impossibly scaled- a myriad of otherwise dry drum kits would resound with Yamaha Reverberated snares while Phil Collins’ seemingly gigantic’ snare drum [6][6] became a prime example of a spatialised signature sound identified with the time.
Indeed from this time, in popular music production, it is not unusual to find many contexts in which in ‘spaces’ are layered – for a more subtle example one only need listen to some of the beautiful music mixes by Daniel Lanois, such as The Neville Brothers album Yellow Moon, where different reverberant treatments on various instruments are superimposed and subject to change structurally throughout the various songs to create changes of intimacy and mood and evoke different abstract senses of ‘place’. Alternatively one might consider the layers of re-reverberance that Eno and Budd and their collaborators used to spawn the ’new age’ ambient aesthetic of oneiric soundscapes. Both Eno and Lanois, who have collaborated on many projects together, not only practice techniques of superimposition but expanding on Puttnam’s ideas of sending a sound to the echo or reverb and varying its return to the mixing console, send the ensuing reverberated signal to a second processor mixing out the original (dry) sound and in so doing building more complex superimposed spatial textures while simultaneously effacing the acoustic sources.
From the 1980’s on, the sound of drums has been completely redefined, with the introduction of synthetic and then sampled instruments. From their non-acoustic origins, synthetic sounds brought new electronic geographies to the sound stage, while sampling meant that encoded spaces could be recaptured, reconfigured and overlayed with new spatial codes. The “record” of the drum kit could be replayed as an instrument, the performance could become another loop. The loop could then be granulated, its space collapsed and bits and bytes of it reassembled with other elements amidst the noise of new spatial arrangements. Moreover these virtual instruments, having not necessarily originated on an acoustic sound stage, could be given credible spatial geometries completely unrelated to physical space.
Indeed the idea of an acoustic space for some such as Trent Reznor, from Nine Inch Nails, became increasingly irrelevant:
“Everything was programmed. My idea of a drum is a button on a machine. When I hear a real drum kit...when someone hits a kick drum, it doesn't sound to me like what I think a kick drum is. Any time I've been faced with, 'Let's try miking up the drums', well, you put a mike up close, you put another one here, 300 mikes, gates, bulls---, overheads, bring 'em up and listen to it and it doesn’t sound at all like it did in the room. It sounds like a 'record-sounding drum kit.' It doesn’t sound like being in the room with live ringy drums. You read these interviews where producers will say, 'It sounds like you're in the room with the band'. No it doesn't. Nirvana's record doesn't sound like you're in the room with them. It might sound sloppy, and it sounds interesting, but it's not what it sounds like in the room, to me, anyway.”(Moorefield 2005:55)
Virgil Moorefield (2005:67) offers the following insightful response:
“This blurring of the distinction between recordings of real instruments and recordings of recordings is an interesting game”, says Moorefield, “ and fits right in with Reznor's overall strategy of playing a kind of push-and-pull with the two poles of record production, the illusion of reality ("this was played by real people in a real setting") and the reality of illusion ("this doesn't exist in the real world; we're making our own universe".’(Moorefield 2005:67)
This convergence of sampling, superimposition techniques, and the use of microsound, glitch and noise elements, has seen the production of musical soundscapes by such a diverse range artists as Christian Fennesz, Matmos, Pan American, and David Toop, with their mediated spaces at times sounding like cinematic atmospheres and at others like post-apocalyptic fallout from a dysfunctional matrix. These post digital spatial tropes ‘thick with imaginings, memories, utopias, foreboding’ (Toop 2004:54) have found their way into the musical spaces- the ‘universes’ or ‘acoustic fictions’- conceived by mainstream artists including U2, Radiohead, Björk, and even alt rock bands such as Wilco on albums such as Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
10 Representing Space in Cinema
‘The cinema is a dream we all dream at the same time.’
Jean Cocteau. (Bergen 2005)
In cinema, indeed even before moving picture was technically possible, the idea of synchronised sound and image being able to produce a facsimile of the world was being mooted. In their first review of Edison’s phonograph Scientific American (1877) would declare:
'It is already possible by ingenious optical contrivances to throw stereoscopic photographs of people on screens in full view of an audience. Add the talking phonograph to counterfeit their voices, and it would be difficult to carry the illusion of real presence much further.'
Even before the coming of film sound, two basic attitudes have dominated the history of film theory and practice, a realist approach ‘celebrating’ the raw materials and an ‘Expressionist’ approach focusing on the power of the filmmaker to modify or manipulate reality. According to James Monaco (2000):
‘The first dichotomy of film aesthetics is that between the early work of the Lumière Brothers, August and Louis, and Georges Méliès. The Lumières had come to film through photography. They saw in the new invention a magnificent opportunity to reproduce reality. On the other hand, Méliès, a stage magician, saw immediately film’s ability to change reality- to produce striking fantasies.’
Behind these two principles lies on the one hand a desire to garner audience participation and on the other a desire engender detachment. A major force in early American cinema, D. W. Griffith described the two major ‘schools’ of film practice:
‘The American school “says to you: ‘Come and have a great experience!’* Whereas the German school says: ‘Come and see a great experience.’ (Monaco 2000:287)
The idea of immersing the film spectator in the experience of the narrative has remained a significant part of the rhetoric of Hollywood film content marketing to the present day, particularly extending the role to create that illusion to the sound mechanism. Yet like any good magic show the director as magician/illusionist has ever endeavoured to efface the apparatus.
‘In this economic sense’, says Monaco, ‘movies are still a carnival attraction- rides on roller coasters through chambers of horror and tunnels of love- and Realism is totally besides the point.’(Monaco 2000:385)
Except perhaps when you are selling the picture or the home theatre technology!
Initially the development and economic success of film sound was dominated by a primary concern for synchronised dialogue. Early sound film had little concern with spatial information and it would be many years before atmospheres would become an integral part of the film narrative. Yet while early sound films were principally talking films intended to convey a sense of drama on a naturalistic level, in reality they functioned by way of what Eisenstein described as "highly cultured dramas" and other photographed performances of a theatrical sort (Eisenstein, Pudovkin & Alexandrov 1928) while the audio was reduced to a semblance of the reality it pretended to portray, and, as mentioned previously, early on directors learned to violate aural perspective in order to maintain audiovisual continuity and aural intelligibility.
Indeed, the space of lot of early film sound was very ‘boxed’ and theatrical without atmosphere or ambience due to technical limitations (e.g. the microphones were poor, the camera themselves were noisy and the early sound recording stages had poor acoustics and/or isolation). Indeed, perhaps because of those limitations, directors learned that the omission of sounds, including the use of silence, in lieu of synchronised sound could be employed as powerful evocative cinematic tools. Russian film theorists recognised and argued early that film sound could be served as well by the use of asynchronous and counterpoint of sounds.
Prior to the arrival of sound in late 1920’s, film had developed a complex visual grammar particularly through the use of montage Moreover, perhaps because it took so many years to implement – the phonograph was around fifty years old by the time of the first film sound feature [7][7]- an understanding of the use of sound symbolically through the use of live music in the silent cinema theatre had become intrinsic to the dramatic form with a well developed system of leitmotifs providing a wide range of available codes. Indeed an entire tradition of non-diegetic sound superimposition had been employed during the silent era- from the use of the voice-over, to music and off-screen sound effects. With a parallel understanding in the non-literal use of sound developing in radio, by the time of the arrival of film sound, a non realist tradition was evolving ready to underpin the synchronised dialogue once the technical means were available.
The early introduction of a separate film sound camera was a major ideological breakthrough, for it meant that sound and image could be separated and recombined with different elements, and with this reassociation came a fundamental realisation of the symbiotic relationship between sound and image, the idea that sound could modulate the meaning of image and vice versa. As Walter Murch describes it:
“This reassociation should stretch the relationship of sound to image wherever possible. It should strive to create a purposeful and fruitful tension between what is on the screen and what is kindled in the mind of the audience.. by virtue of their sensory incompleteness — an incompleteness that engages the imagination of the viewer as compensation for what is only evoked by the artist. Every successful reassociation is a kind of metaphor, and every metaphor is seen momentarily as a mistake, but then suddenly as a deeper truth about the thing named and our relationship to it. The greater the stretch between the "thing" and the "name," the deeper the potential truth. (Jarrett October 2000)
Indeed, Murch argued it was in the manipulation of ‘incompleteness’ either visually or aurally that the true power of cinema lay:
‘That’s the key to all film for me—both editorial and sound. You provoke the audience to complete a circle of which you’ve only drawn a part. Each person being unique, they will complete that in their own way. When they have done that, the wonderful part of it is that they re-project that completion onto the film. They actually are seeing a film that they are, in part, creating: both in terms of juxtaposition of images and, then, juxtaposition of sound versus image and, then, image following sound, and all kinds of those variations.’(Jarrett Spring 2000)
A good recent example of this of is the film Inland Empire (2007) where director David Lynch repeatedly underscores seemingly innocuous visual settings with deep bass drones to insinuate the eerie, uncanny and nightmarish undertones in the narrative. Elsewhere during the interrogation scene in Holden’s office in Bladerunner (1982) the electronic sounds of the ambient atmosphere are transformed by the play of audio and vision in the narrative into a reflection of the internalised consciousness of the replicant.
When this ‘reassociation’ was further facilitated in the mid 1930’s by the introduction of ‘looping’ (post synch dialogue) and the possibility of ‘multitracking’ the audio by using multiple strips of sound film with a synchroniser, the basic technical elements were in place to complete an ideological shift from the ‘capture’ of a live filmed performance in synchronisation with the image to the ‘building’ of an idealised soundtrack to be created after the picture had been edited.
At first with a minimum number of tracks available to superimpose, and a narrow bandwidth and dynamic range due to optical film constraints, much of that role of ‘composing atmospheres’ was given over to the music soundtrack to play in addition to any essential sound effects –with its own recorded spatial tropes encapsulated and drawing on a well-codified system of leitmotifs from the silent film era to construct intimations of emotional and dramatic space. However, it would only be a matter of time and the enabling technology for more a wider range of sound sources and more complex spatial tropes to be used, both as an underscore and as an integral part of the narrative.
Directors came to understand the unravelling of the mind space of film could in fact be more like a dream and the landscapes they were creating aurally were oneiric ones.
Indeed, as film editor/sound designer Walter Murch notes in explaining how film cuts work:
‘Well, although ‘day-to-day’ reality appears continuous, there is that other world in which we spend perhaps a third of our lives: ‘the night-to-night’ reality of dreams. And the images of dreams are much more fragmented, intersecting in much stranger and more abrupt ways than the images of waking reality- ways that approximate, at least, the interaction of cutting. In the darkness of the theatre, we say to ourselves, in effect, ‘This looks like reality but it cannot be reality because it is so visually discontinuous; therefore it must be a dream.’ (Murch 2001: 55)
11 Channeling Voice, Channeling SpaceIf, however, the film soundtrack has come to a great extent to be liberated by the possibilities afforded by the reassociation of sound and image, the cinema sound field that has evolved from a mono optical soundtrack with a narrow bandwidth and limited dynamic range, to a digital multichannel ‘superfield’, as Michele Chion describes it (Chion 1994:132), is still dominated in the mainstream by a centre channel dialogue convention best summed up in the phrase ‘dialogue is king.’ In other words the space of the voice in cinema is primary and one where it must be intelligible, and every other sound subservient to it irregardless of the acoustic ‘realism’.
Indeed according to Rick Atman:
‘So deep-rooted is Hollywood's dedication to dialog intelligibility, that nothing but perfectly understandable dialog could possibly satisfy spectator expectations.’ (Altman 1995)
Ostensibly, in both film sound and music production, this ‘vococentrism’ or privileging of the voice is a convention rarely deviated from albeit it may occasionally be moderated. On the rare occasions when the code is fully transgressed the effect is profound and can be disturbing. In Elem Klimov’s Come and See, Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas, or in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan narrative events justify these profound moments of loss of intelligibility with great effect, while in Jean Luc Godard’s films, such as in Masculin Feminin, changes in visual perspective accompanied by hard cuts in aural perspective with a resultant loss in dialogue intelligibility, dramatically jolt the audience’s sensibility making them aware of the mechanism of the medium in lieu of the content of the film.
‘Vococentrism’ pervades in music mixes, too, paralleling the fixity of mainstream cinema. One might ask where for example are the Jean Luc Godards of pop and rock music mixing? It is hard to find examples. Apocryphally, the ‘Glimmer Twins’, Jagger and Richards, once claimed in an interview they used vocal masking to create a desire in the audience to hear a song again in order to discern the lyrics, but this is a more a matter of nuance than extremes. These nuances however can be rich in meaning, particularly given the authoritative power of the voice. For example in cinema the voiceover presents a character outside the time-space of the diegesis in film and at times a similar thing happens in music mixes when a processed or dry proxemic voice distances the singer from the space of the band or the narrative of the song.
With the dialogue given its centre channel pedestal, it is informative then to look at how the use of the other channels in cinema has evolved. It is important to consider that alternative channel configurations may have been used quite differently and resulted in an entirely different cinematic aesthetic.
Indeed the original Vitaphone system in 1926 deployed a speaker configuration that did not endeavour to emulate the diegetic sound space of the film but instead attempted to replicate the silent film theatre experience:
“While one speaker is maintained behind the screen--in order to reproduce infrequent speeches.. the other is located in the orchestra pit, pointing upwards, simulating the sound of the orchestra it has displaced.” [my emphasis](Altman 1995)
When by 1929 this paradigm had shifted to one where sound emanated solely from behind the screen, abandoning the orchestra pit model, it meant from henceforth the space of non-diegetic music in cinema would co-exist with the screen space- in other words the paradigm moved towards an even more symbolic mode of representation of audio with less roots in the real world correspondences of sounds.
Despite the constraints of mono, directors, drawing on age-old theatre traditions of ‘voices-off’, quickly learned to make use of off-screen sounds to extend the narrative space and work as powerful dramatic devices. From the motivic off-screen whistle that alerts the audience of the identity of the child killer in Fritz Lang’s M (1931) to the iconic off-screen coyotes and a cock’s crow which recalls New Testament betrayals and extends the narrative world in Sergio Leone’s The Good The Bad And The Ugly (1966) as he amplifies characters faces in close-up, directors created subjective audio spaces to heighten the dramatic tension rather than simply echo the location of the visual space. Alfred Hitchcock, who would come to regard the use of sound effects as the equivalent to dialogue, would in Psycho (1960) use different kinds of rain for structural dramatic effects and most notably in the aftermath of the famous shower scene use the relative silence of the stark motel atmosphere to amplify Anthony Perkins visual revulsion at his grisly ‘discovery’. In these effects were the beginnings of the truly fleshed out multichannel atmospheres that were to follow, albeit in later decades.
In the late 1930’s experiments began to take place with multichannel audio [8][8], most notably with Fantasia (1940) – more a novelty of panning in an animated film than concerned with realism- but it was not until the 1950’s that the first commercial efforts to present a ‘3D’ experience took place in Hollywood cinema with the introduction of Cinerama, followed by the Cinemascope and Todd AO formats.
Yet, if using the 3-channel stereo that Bell labs had heralded in the 1930’s might usher in the age of the facsimile, Cinerama’s five behind screen channels augmented by three additional speakers in the auditorium, was less concerned with fidelity to the screen image and more with providing spectacle. Indeed with the centre channel still concerned with the primacy of the dialogue, the auditorium speakers were ‘used only intermittently, usually to reinforce spectacular visual effects, [and] surround sound worked directly against the ideal of spatial fidelity applied to the three directional front speakers’. (Altman 1995)
With little atmosphere to produce a 3D verisimilitude (not that it was ever the point) it was really the function of the grandly orchestral music soundtracks and the widescreen to give the audience a sense of spectacular scale in their cinema experience. Indeed, in films of this period and over the next two decades one can find more interesting constructions of space created by use of a single mono channel in imaginatively codified ways.
Perhaps the most powerful and influential evocation of spatial scale by the use of the orchestral score comes with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001(1968), where the space of the screen is ‘upscaled’ by the all consuming orchestral score that leads us into the film and masks the noiselessness of the vacuum. In reality, space may be silent but in 2001 the non-diagetic music expands the void and indeed seems to create visual space as well as weightlessness, It also is used structurally with great narrative impact, with its absence a powerful dramatic contrast when HAL cuts the astronaut’s lifeline on his spacewalk and true silence marks the deathly profound.
The 1970’s saw the introduction of Dolby Stereo in cinema. It is important to stress that stereo does not mean two-speaker replay (indeed even in the 1930’s early stereo was envisaged with a minimum of three speakers) and Dolby Stereo was in fact a four-channel system with a left-centre-right front plane and a single surround channel. It reveals a great deal about the underlying aesthetics to realise that it was regarded as an extended stereo system. [9][9]. In other words, like the 1950’s construct, a front plane complemented by ambient augmentation, as opposed to a fully immersive surrounding field. At first however:
“ A new generation of sound specialists labored mightily to employ the surround speakers to enhance spatial fidelity. Having failed to learn a lesson from the mistakes of Fifties stereo technicians, the sound designers of the post-Star Wars era regularly placed spatially faithful narrative information in the surround channel. Recalling the 3-D craze in the mid-Fifties, for a few years every menace, every attack, every emotional scene seemed to begin or end behind the spectators. Finally, it seemed, the surround channel had become an integral part of the film's fundamental narrative fiber.”(Altman 1995)
Yet, in practice, it was found that despite being able to localise sounds around the audience and add spatial sonic movement to them as in real life, the result really wasn’t the ‘fidelity’ that the sound specialists were ‘labouring mightily’ to achieve.
Instead ‘through its usage as an element of spectacle and through its identification with the genres of spectacle, stereo sound became associated for audiences not so much with greater realism as greater artifice.’ (Belton 1992)
The outcome of this realisation was that by 1983: ‘in most Hollywood cinema production “all narrative information would henceforth emanate from the front speakers, with the surrounds used for spectacular (but nonessential) enhancements. Thus freed from any responsibility to present narrative events or even spatial fidelity, the surrounds began a new career (especially in fantasy or horror films) as purveyors of spectacular effects… the surrounds were being liberated from the demands of spatial fidelity or narrative relevance.”(Altman 1995)
In this context, with the coming of Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound in 1979, it is vital to note that of the first two cinema releases in that defining format (Superman has claim to be the first) it is the sound design approach of Walter Murch for Apocalypse Now which establishes a dynamic spatial sound design model that essentially underscores much of the aesthetics of Hollywood cinema sound today.
At the same time, certain geometries or channel configurations and conventions for their use had become codified- the cinema surround stage with its ‘vococentric’ centre channel, ambient surrounds and special effects LFE channel, would endeavour to keep all essential sounds in the front plane and music and atmospheres usually out of the centre channel. Ironically it was not the spatial arrangement of the speakers that had the most effect on the perceived ‘realism’ of the cinematic experience but the addition of the .1 LFE channel which accentuated the visceral experience by forging a tactile link between the audience and the events on the screen, or by way of counterpoint adding a note of dread or awe.
Interesting to note, in the opening surround sound sequence of Apocalypse Now the space is an surrealistic one, with synthetic helicopters creating an oneiric geography, while real ‘space’ Saigon’ (in reality Manila) is established by way of a detached voiceover. The time-space of the film is established by the non-diegetic soundtrack of the Doors. Meanwhile, the subsequent jungle atmosphere superimposed over Willard’s hotel room aims to convey a ‘mind space’ that sound designer Murch is seeking to evoke that sets the tone for the protagonist of the film.
It is a long way from the facsimile, but imminently engaging.
12 A Dynamic Audiovisual Mis En Scene
In cinema aural space had become an integral part of the narrative mis en scene. It had come to have a power akin to that ascribed by Louis Gianetti to the visual arrangement of elements within the frame:
‘Space is one of the principal mediums of communication in film. The spatial structure of virtually any kind of territory used by humans betrays a discernable concept of power and authority.”(Gianetti 1972-66-67)
Indeed, with the introduction of multichannel audio in cinema, according to Michel Chion, cinema space has been transformed, and a consequence of the resultant ‘wraparound superfield’ on ‘multitrack cinema’, Chion argues, has been to ‘progressively modify the structure of editing and scene construction,’ undermining, for example, the importance of the establishing or long shot. (Chion 1994: 150)
Some of the best audio practitioners make judicious and considered use of spatial ‘gestures’ as a form a dynamic mis en scene construction i.e. moving from mono to stereo to surround fields and other multichannel configurations. Rather than thinking of a constant field that one seeks to emulate in detailed verisimilitude to our everyday audio/acoustic experience, they create a series of permutating spatial signifiers including, but not limited by, those similar to our ‘real’ world experience, realising that real world experience too is the result of a subjective and cognitive activity.
Almost certainly one of the first directors to construct a dynamic audiovisual mis en scene, albeit working in mono, was Orson Welles. Welles with his previous radio background had an acute understanding of the evocative powers of sound, having produced the ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast in 1938 about an alien invasion that saw parts of east coast USA in panic and even led to several suicides.
A fantastic example of how changes in the sound space can act as a plot device is demonstrated in Welles’ film Touch of Evil (1958) where in the climax of the film, Sgt Menzies who is wired for sound with a radio mike is crossing a bridge in conversation with the antagonist bad cop Hank Quinlan who is being recorded by the hiding fugitive Mike Vargas hoping to get evidence on Quinlan to exonerate himself.
Quinlan suddenly hears his voice echoing and distorted by the recording under the bridge and realises he is being taped.
As Walter Murch describes it: ‘So that echo – that particular quality of sound- causes the plot to unravel: Quinlan accuses Menzies, there is a struggle, Menzies is shot, the n Quinlan goes after Vargas, and then is shot himself by the dying Menzies. Welles hung the whole ending of the film on the ability of the people in it, and the audience, to understand a subtle nuance with the sound. That it’s the wrong echo.’(Ondaatje 2002: 195)
Murch’s work on the prototypical Apocalypse Now shows us how we can profit by thinking of a dynamic construction of space in terms of an integrated audiovisual mis en scene where every sensorial input is an element that furthers our engagement along the narrative journey. An excellent example of this is the ‘Do Lung’ sequence described by Murch at a London School of Sound lecture in 1998:
“The scene begins with the realistic sounds of bridge construction. You hear
arc welders, flares going off, machine guns and incoming artillery. As the scene
continues, though, you'll notice that the explosions and the machine guns are
gradually replaced by sounds of construction - the machine guns become rivet
guns, for instance, so there's already a subtle warping of reality taking place. Francis
called this scene 'the fifth circle of Hell' Once the scene gets into the trench, the
dilemma is explained: there's a Vietnamese soldier out there, a sniper taunting the
Americans, and they're shooting wildly into the dark with an M50 machine gun,
but they just can’t get him. Finally, out of frustration the machine gunner asks for
'The Roach'. He turns out to be a kind of human bat; someone who has precise
echo-location instead of sight: if he can hear the sound of the voice, he can then
pinpoint his target, adjust his grenade launcher and, in the dark, shoot the sniper.
As 'The Roach' approaches the camera, the rock music that has been reverberating
in the air of the scene, coming from all speakers in the theatre, concentrates itself
in the centre speaker only and narrows its frequency range, seeming to come from
a transistor radio which Roach then clicks off, taking all the other sounds with
it. After a brief rumble of distant artillery, there is now silence except for some
kind of unexplained, slow metallic ticking and the calling of the sniper. Visually
you see the battle continuing - flashes of light, machine gun bursts, flare guns
- but there is nothing of that at all. You have entered into the skin of this human
bat and are hearing the world the way he hears it. He echolocates, shoots, there's
an explosion and then a moment of complete silence: even the metallic ticking is now gone. Willard asks Roach if he knows who's in command, and Roach answers
enigmatically: 'Yeah.' Then the scene is over, we shift location and the world of
sound comes flooding back in again.’(Murch: 1998)
The effect of these dramatic spatial shifts in perspective can be dramatic, as sound designer Gary Rydstrom describes it:
“You can shift focus on a cut instantaneously and it has the effect of a Godard jump cut. There’s something that shocks you and jumps you into the next sound.”’(LoBrutto 1994)
It is a technique that has now been well integrated into the sound designers’ repertoire and, indeed, been employed not only in film but also in television including even the Simpsons.
Indeed, the “Treehouse of Horror VI” (1995) episode where Homer accidentally steps into a 3D dimension is a neat encapsulation of how changes in space may be encoded in an audiovisual medium. From a mono and ‘dead’ flatland cartoon world devoid of music and atmosphere, Homer transits to the stereo ‘Tronland’ replete with its aircon-like atmospheric noise and wind loops and incidents of stereo high frequency movement to map the geography of the stereo space. Between worlds Homer talks to Marge through the reverse gated reverb, while in an abject denial of astral physics the black hole is designed as a large reverberant cavernous space to denote its immense scale. At the end, the sound of ‘the worst place yet’ – downtown L.A.- is produced as an atmosphere of highpass filtered traffic, a mediated sound reminiscent of the actuality of a newscast or documentary but a poor stylised facsimile of the real world.
A more elaborate but equally dynamic interplay between space and image occurs in Mike Figgis’ film Timecode (2000). While the screen is divided into four quadrants each with an ongoing part of the narrative shot on four cameras in real time, the single unifying factor of the film is the soundtrack. From the outset of the film, the gaze of the audience is trained by the multichannel audio tracks. Dialogue, breaking the vococentric convention, without an accompanying synchronous image, starts in a surround channel but snaps to the right front speaker as the image of the actor appears in the top right quadrant, matching the visual space with the sound source. In the nuanced drama that unfolds, Figgis will use movements of sound to direct the audience’s attention between quadrants, essentially using sound in a kind of quasi-editing process, creating tensions in the audience as the screen actions at times elicit a desire to eavesdrop on conversations unheard at the expense of those present in the mix. Three earthquakes ‘realistically’ rumbling from the LFE channel, structurally unify the action on the three screens whilst viscerally connecting the narrative space with the viewer.
In each of these examples what becomes clear, is that, in modern cinema, a dynamically constructed mix of elements not only representing the space but amplifying character and playing part of the narrative flow of events, indeed in directing our gaze, is of far more importance than recreating a simple ambience that has been recorded in synchronisation with the action. Indeed these are seldom used. Instead what we experience is a dynamic interplay of constructed spaces.
Even Saving Private Ryan, which in the press made much of its authenticity, may have used, in the main, real sound sources but the sound design was still a constructed world moving between selected, focussed points of view, marked as much by the omissions of sounds as their inclusion. In the selective dialogue of the landing boats, in the underwater filtering, in Hank’s shell-shocked tinnitus, in the LFE rumble of the approaching tanks, the effect is one of profound evocation but not reproduction. The spaces are multiple, constructed and intermixed, and ultimately cohesion, consistency and credibility are far more important than realistic reproduction.
This dynamic audiovisual mis en scene, uses, in the main, the same technologies as pop rock musics, yet it draws on a different set of conventions and grammars, principally because every sound is framed with respect to image and vice-versa in a symbiotic relationship.
In terms of multichannel production and composition of popular music, which has been pursued at least since Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon in 1973, aesthetic approaches tend to be idiosyncratic, while discussions are often are distilled into simple issues of geometries and channels that can be summarised as five basic choices:
a) A stereo sound stage with its phantom centre, planes and horizon;
b) The cinema surround stage with its ‘vococentric’ centre channel, ambient surrounds and special effects LFE;
c) The extended stereo model with essentially a stage-to-audience perspective;
d) The ‘in the band’ music mix- with an immersive, often quadraphonic approach;
e) True spatial /multichannel experimentation (from pyrotechnic panning to variable soundstages.
In addition one could include the audiophile approaches of ‘realist’ techniques such Ambisonics, but this is the main has been used for orchestral and jazz recordings.
Often, simplistically, the aesthetic can be as simple as a basic two-channel front plane mix, with instruments and effects moved around in space to achieve a sense of dynamic excitement. In other words while there may be a dynamic spatial mis en scene it tends to be operating within a stereo, or at best extended stereo plane, as opposed to a multichannel aesthetic. It is hard to find an example where the spatial shifts are as dramatic as those mentioned from cinema where the sound transitions from mono to stereo to surround fields and other multichannel configurations in a structured way.
Perhaps, because the market for the majority of music recordings is still primarily in a stereo format, and because music tends to be re-mixed for surround sound formats usually with accompanying video, usually concert footage or video clips, if at all, the situation in some ways resembles that time when The Beatles in the 1960’s first encountered stereo, where a spatial aesthetic had yet to be fully appreciated and formulated, most certainly at the level of ‘making a record’, that is, at a compositional and production stage.
Thus far there a few rare exceptions- Frank Zappa’s Quadiophiliac is one although hardly mainstream and quite eccentric in his approach to space, while Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka is another project that comes to mind but then again the rich underlying and dynamic multichannel aesthetic that one finds in film sound design still appears to be absent. Moving away from work produced primarily for an audio only multichannel experience, works such as Daniel Lanois’ 5.1 remixes of Peter Gabriel’s Play The Videos tend toward a film aesthetic yet have a sense of artificiality about them and a lack of coherence as consequence of not being originally, specifically designed either visually or aurally for a surround sound replay medium.
13 The FutureThe technologies for recording and post producing spatial audio and audiovisual work has become far more economically accessible and begun to widely permeate audio, audiovisual and music practice. For example, the growing availability of impulse response based reverbs makes it not only possible to replicate the acoustics of wide range of spaces, including electronic ones, as well as dynamically switch between them, but it is also now possible to emulate prior recording practices previously unfeasible or impracticable. For example, when Jimi Hendrix recorded ‘The Wind Cries Mary,’ the recording engineer, finding his guitar level was distorting, instead of turning down the guitar amplifier moved the microphone to the far side of the studio resulting in the signature sound we know today. Using an impulse response of the studio one can virtually replicate that room sound exactly and use that spatial code in an entirely new context.
Looking beyond the legacy of the twentieth century, much discussion of future spatial audio practice has centred on the technical means of transmission and reproduction such as Holman’s 10.2 and NHK’s 22.2 systems, yet if the past has given us one strong indication of future trends it is that change will be driven as much by the consumer’s desire for content. To that end the creative use of multiple LFEs and spotlight speakers, the production of immersive environments for a range of contexts, surrounding screens such as those used in i-cinema may prove of interest not only in new forms of cinema but also in principally audio only production contexts.
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