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14 Conclusions
As more artists move toward remixing or creating their material in surround sound, it is perhaps worth asking: will the dominant spatial arrangements in mixing evolve or have the essential alternatives already in practice been established?
Sound designers and music mixers tend by necessity to be pragmatic (‘whatever it takes’) relying in the main on tried and true formulae for success (swayed by commercial as well as aesthetic concerns)- yet scratch the surface and one usually finds some deep and serious thinking about the motives for their technical decisions.
What at first glance would appear to be in practice a fairly straightforward choice of recording and mixing strategies is, when one looks more closely, a complex language with a long history that even touches on ontological issues regarding the representation and evocation of reality in art.
The advent of audio has been accompanied a long history of promises and appeals to notions of ‘realism’.
However, as we have seen, an evocation of space is not simply a question of reproducing or creating physiological cues and ‘real world’ spatial geometries.
While some of the means of creating an apprehension of space are physical such as using speaker placement, panning, reverb, delay and echo, others are associative involving symbols and metaphors. As opposed to music production, with sound for picture this process becomes more complex not least because we can have possible asynchronous and/or counterpoint relationships between sound and image spaces, and one modulates the other.
Moreover, in both modes, there can be the employment of proxemic or hyper-real perspectives, particularly with voice: the ‘in your face’/ ‘in your head’/ ‘radiophonic’/ ‘telephonic’ or ‘filmic’ voiceover or vocal line. Intimate radio voices are often employed both in sound for picture and also in music recording. The spatial zones they occupy are otherwise usually reserved only for our closest most intimate friends.
Still very much the underlying basis for Hollywood script writing is Aristotle’s classical narrative model, which is very much about transcending the self by immersing our attention- not in realism but escapism- by being ‘detached’ and ‘out there’- identifying with the ‘other’ and experiencing catharsis. This still dictates much of entertainment production and shapes the way we approach our construction of narrative and/or musical space.
Yet it is two-way- there is an interactive element even in the most passive of modes. The spectator contributes, interfaces and refashions the message according to their own unique model of the world.
In sensory incompleteness, they fill in the gaps. In sensory overload, they omit or select details to do the same- and so detach from other elements of the content.
As such the representation of space is as much about evocation as it is about imitation for even producing the best available facsimile can only result in a subjective version of the truth.
Finally in both modes, of course, there is the site where Walter Murch asserts the highest fidelity sound resides- in silence, where the imagination creates the perfect space in the mind of the listener- between the ears.
Acknowledgements
This paper would like to acknowledge that it is particularly indebted to Peter Doyle’s text Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording 1900-1960 cited in the references below for its invaluable rich and detailed analysis of early popular music recording.
Notes
[1] The bandwidth (between around 160-2000 Hz) favoured male voices and brass instruments.
[2] It is interesting to note there was a commercial component to this as well. Steve Hoffman writes that ‘when electric recording came in (1925), some record companies like Columbia and Victor, recorded in an ambient environment (churches, meeting halls, etc.) but, when Jukeboxes came in, the Jukebox operators demanded that the record companies deaden their sound. The metallic sound of the Jukeboxes made the records sound too thin. So, the record companies (hurting from the depression) did just that, just in time for the swing era.’ (Hoffman www.stevehoffman.tv)
[3] Achieved not by chamber reverb but by positioning instruments further off-mike in the room.
[4] There are on-line references to ‘the original echo chamber at EMI's Abbey Road Studios in London was one of the first in the world to be specially built for recording purposes, when the studio was established in 1931’ but correspondence to the studios has, as of the time of this writing, not revealed any further details as to its use. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber
[5] A sound generation system patented by Thaddeus Cahill- designed to be played over telephone lines. It weighed over 200 tonnes.
[6] First used in 1983 on Peter Gabriel’s track ‘Intruder’ and then on Phil Collin’s hit single ‘In the Air Tonight’, using the compressed talkback mike in the drum studio of the Townhouse.
[7] Early synchronised sound for picture was delivered on several different mechanisms - either on a separate disk (sound on disc) e.g. Vitaphone or via an optical track on the filmstrip (sound on film).
[8] The first stereo film was Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938) produced by MGM but released in mono.
[9] Michael Gerzon in 1971 talks about the idea of the extended stereo system as ‘spatial stereo’. See Michael Gerzon “A year of surround-sound.” Hi-Fi News, August 1971
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