The Sound Edit and Creative Sound

Many decisions about the sound track are made during the rough cut. The first steps toward creating a sense of believability are taken then. However, that believability must be enhanced and amplified. In the final phase of sound editing, the punctuation of dramatic and narrative elements is central. Is all of the dialogue presented in the rough cut necessary? No more dialogue than is absolutely necessary should be used. The sound effects tracks are enhanced so that the appropriate atmosphere is established. Character credibility is another important concern.¹ A music track that translates the underlying emotions of the film is created and added in this last phase. This chapter looks at this final stage of sound editing and the creative opportunities it offers the editor.

When punctuation and articulation are the goals of the sound edit, the assortment of creative devices used can range from synchronous sound to asynchronous sound. As Pudovkin so clearly stated in his book, Film Technique and Film Acting, asynchronism offers the opportunity for enhanced depth.² The counterpoint of sound and visual are the perfect vehicles for asynchronism.

   PUNCTUATION

During the rough edit, a meaning was established, and it has been corroborated visually and aurally. The sound editor's task is to punctuate that meaning during the final stage of the editing process. The goal may be to establish without question a specific point in the scene, or it may be to emphasize the ambiguity of the scene through the addition of a particular sound. In either case, the addition of sound effects or more dialogue will help the editor accomplish that goal.

The opening sequence of Vincent Ward's The Navigator (1980) offers an excellent example of punctuation. A young boy wanders off. A subtitle suggests the period: the Dark Ages and the Bubonic Plague. The images of the boy are strongly affected by the sound Ward chose to accompany them. A bell tolls, and liturgical music supports images of the sky. The sound of water drops gives way to a torch falling through the air. A man's voice seems confined to a cave. There is a powerful echo.

All of the sounds have a dreamlike quality unconnected to the visuals. The effect is to create a dream state around the boy. The pitch and timbre of the sounds and their separation from the visuals provide the dreamscape for the balance of the film. What Ward has done is to aurally convince us that the story we are about to experience is a dream. Perhaps it's a boy's fear of nature that provokes the dream; whatever the cause, the emphatic character of the sound sets a tone for the balance of the film. This is punctuation.

A very different but nevertheless effective example can be found in Nicolas Roeg's Performance (1970). A criminal (James Fox) carries violence too far, betraying his boss. He runs away. He rents a room from a rock performer only to find that this hiding place and its proprietor result in a blurring of his sense of self. The jagged picture edit creates an overmodulated, emotional milieu in which something must explode. In this case, it's the main character, Chas (James Fox). He is a hoodlum who does not accept his identity as a hireling.

To give the society Chas inhabits a sense of disorder, Roeg created a montage of sound. Cars, particularly cars in motion, are accompanied by loud rock and roll music. These shots are intercut with the silence of the main character during a sexual encounter. Roeg used machine sounds—computers and movie and slide projectors—to disorient us. Sound is used to emphasize the confusion of society and of the main character (this foreshadows the later blurring of his identity with the character played by Mick Jagger). Unlike the dreamlike sound in The Navigator, the sound in Performance emphasizes the confusion that is central to the character's actions and reactions in the film.

One final example of punctuation illustrates how a sound motif can be used repeatedly to create the core of an entire scene. Philip Kaufman's The White Dawn (1974) tells the story of the clash of the white culture and the Canadian Eskimo culture in the late nineteenth century. Three stranded sailors from a whaling boat are rescued by Eskimos. When they recover, they watch the chief of the village fight and kill a polar bear.

The scene is constructed in terms of three sources of sound: one is human and primarily verbal, and two are animal—the bear (who seems supernatural) and a dog pack. The dog pack provides the emotional base for the scene. The dogs growl and howl, alerting the village to the presence of danger. As the Eskimos prepare, the dogs become more aggressive. As the attack on the bear begins the dogs go wild. The bear's response when stabbed by a spear is anger, but the bear remains supernatural. As the thrusts continue, it becomes more bellicose, but it never attacks the Eskimo chief. As the bear dies, the dogs are wildly belligerent.

In this sequence, the supernatural gives way to the natural. The struggle between the supernatural (the bear) and the natural (the dogs) continues to be a theme throughout the film. It is established by the noise that the bear and the dogs make. The struggle between the supernatural and the natural is punctuated through the sound effects.

   AMPLIFICATION

The process of amplification can expand the realism of the film to embrace emotional as well as physical realism, or it can alter the meaning of the visuals to suit the intended vision. The process, then, is not so much emphasis as it is expansion or alteration.

AMPLIFICATION TO EXPAND MEANING

Perhaps no task of the sound editor is more important than the decision about physical realism versus emotional realism. The opposite extremes are present in two cinema verité documentaries. Roman Kroitor and Wolf Koenig's Lonely Boy (1962) uses natural sound and music to reinforce the credibility of Paul Anka and his audience and to suggest that Anka is an ongoing phenomenon in the North American entertainment industry. Clement Perron's Day After Day (1965) features an exotic narration voiced by a character who pretends she is a flight attendant on a plane to Montevideo as well as a poet reflecting on children's nursery rhymes. The physical world that is presented visually is a Quebec paper-mill town in winter. The sound track alludes to the spiritual desperation of the citizens of the town rather than to the physical world that they inhabit and that we see. These two examples present the spectrum of options for the amplification of the sound. It is in nonsynchronous sound that asynchronism is most creatively applied.

The same sound can serve both the physical and the emotional meaning of a film. Akira Kurosawa's use of the noise of a subway train in Dodes'Ka-Den (1970) is one of the best examples of a sound that comes to have more than its literal meaning.

Editors and directors are usually more modest in their goals. In The Train (1965), for example, John Frankenheimer was content to use the sound of the train to support the action/adventure elements of his story. Set in France during the last days of World War II, the film details the efforts of a German colonel (Paul Scofield) to move the great paintings of France from Paris to Berlin. A French railman (Burt Lancaster) thwarts his efforts. Because almost all of the action occurs on or around the train, the noise of the train is one of the critical sound effects in the film. Although great emotion is expended on the attempt to stop the train, those sounds are never used for anything other than physical realism. This is appropriate in an action/adventure film.

For an example of an action/adventure film in which the sounds of the train take on another meaning, we need only look at Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935). The coupling of a visual of a woman screaming as she finds a corpse with the sharp whistle of a train as it passes through a tunnel gives the train a very human quality. Indeed, from that point on, it is difficult to experience the train purely as a mode of transportation. Other filmmakers have used trains and the noise of trains in this expansive way. David Lean with Doctor Zhivago (1965) and Andrei Konchalovsky with Runaway Train (1985) are two examples.

In the action genre, John McTiernan used sound to support the physical realism of Die Hard (1988). This police story, set in a modern high-rise in Los Angeles, pits a New York policeman (Bruce Willis) against a group of international terrorists. The action scenes are presented dynamically, and the sound always supports the physical character of the action. When a terrorist blasts a window with automatic-weapon fire, the sounds we hear are the gunshots and the shattering glass. We rarely (if ever) hear the breathing of the characters. The sound throughout the film confirms the most obvious physical action that takes place. The emphasis is on physical reality, and the goal of the sound is to amplify that reality.

Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971) suggests a different goal for the sound. Like Die Hard, Straw Dogs is a film with a great deal of action. An American mathematician David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) and his wife, Amy, are spending a year in her hometown in England. The townsfolk are a troubled bunch. Taunted and teased, the mathematician is finally pushed to defend his home against the attack of five men from the town. The local five ne'er-do-wells include an elder, Tom Venner; his son, Charlie; Norman Scott; and Chris Kawley. The attack on the isolated house is the long action sequence (25 minutes) that concludes the film. Earlier in the film, one of the men, Charlie Venner, raped Amy, Sumner's wife (Susan George), and now the men are on the hunt for Henry Niles, the slow-witted member of the community (David Warner) who they fear has molested Tom Venner's daughter.

Peckinpah included sounds of gunshots and shattering glass in Straw Dogs, but he was looking for more primal feelings than excitement about action. Two scenes are notable for their use of sound to expand the sense of realism within the scene.

Before the violent confrontation at their farm, the couple attend a church social. All of the main characters attend: the couple, the Venners, their friends, Henry Niles, the young girl whose disappearance will cause the action, the town magistrate, and other residents. For the mathematician's wife, the scene is fragmented by a cutaway to her memory of the rape, and she is so overwhelmed that she and her husband leave early in the evening. The young girl and Henry Niles do likewise.

Aside from the rapid editing of this sequence and the destabilizing camera angles that Peckinpah chose, there is also a special sound in the extended introduction to this scene. Peckinpah carried the sound of children's noisemakers through the scene. No matter what the visual is, the sound of the noisemakers pervades the scene. The shrillness of the sound gives the opening segment of the church social a relentless, disturbing quality.

If physical realism were the goal, the sound would be very different. Peckinpah was more interested in expressing the woman's emotions about being in the same room as the men who raped her. Peckinpah was also interested in using sound to foreshadow the emotional and physical violence that would follow. The pitch and tone of the noisemakers play a critical role in establishing this emotional plane.

Later, once the attack at the farm has begun in earnest, Peckinpah relied on rapid cutting less than he did in the church sequence. Instead, Peckinpah relied on a counterpoint of sound and visual action to deepen the terror of this extended sequence.

The sounds are the sounds of attack and defense: gunshots, shattering glass, the squeal of a rat thrown through the window to frighten the couple inside, and, of course, screams of terror and pain. These are the expected sounds: the sounds of the physical reality of the sequence.

During this extended scene, the main character is metamorphosed from the mathematician-coward of the first two-thirds of the film into a man who defends his home with all the guile and will he can muster. Peckinpah used the sound to announce this emotional transition. Peckinpah amplified the sequence by superimposing this emotional realism over the physical realism of the scene. Part way through the scene, the mathematician puts on a record of bagpipe music. This music plays continually over the next third of the sequence. The introduction of the orderly bagpipes into the chaos of the action signals his intentions to take control of the field of action. No longer the coward, he uses his intelligence and will to defeat a superior number of armed adversaries. The bagpipe music amplifies the emotional reality of the main character and of the scenes that follow. By playing against the tone of the visual action, the sound makes the visuals that much more powerful.

In nonaction sequences, the issue of physical realism versus emotional realism is no less compelling. In L'Enfant Sauvage (1970), François Truffaut recounted the true story of the Wild Child of Avignon. The child does not speak or relate to humans normally. The film describes the capture of the 10-year-old and his induction into civilized society in the late eighteenth century. As the film opens, we see the child in the woods, scavenging food from an abandoned vegetable basket. He eats and drinks by a stream and then is pursued by a hunting party and their dogs. His efforts to elude the dogs and their masters suggest that he is more animal than human. The sounds of this opening are entirely natural: the sounds of the woods and of the chase. Nothing on the sound track implies more than the physical reality of the scene.

Bertrand Tavernier's A Sunday in the Country (1984) illustrates the expanded use of sound. The scene is rural France before World War I. An elderly painter lives in the country where he is attended by his middle-aged housekeeper.

The scene opens with natural rural sounds, particularly of the fowl in the yard and beyond. As the camera tracks, we hear an old man, Monsieur l'Admiral. We hear him singing before we see him. He hums a tune as he opens the curtains. He continues humming and singing as he opens the shutters. He walks about and puts on his shoes. The camera tracks, observing his paintings, and his movements. When he hears a female voice, the point of view changes to the base of the stairs that he will descend. The woman's voice, we soon learn, belongs to his housekeeper, Mercedes. She sings, too, and the camera shifts to follow her movements in preparing breakfast and cleaning. They speak only when he asks where the shoecleaning kit is.

Before the dialogue begins, we are introduced to the place, the time, and the characters through the tone and pitch of their voices. Their voices are relaxed and steady, confident in greeting the day. They establish an emotional character beyond the physical reality of the awakening in the country. Their voices imply that all is well. The informal singing and humming set the tone for the film and establish an attitude more complex than the feeling we have for the child in the opening of Truffaut's L'Enfant Sauvage. A different sense of realism is established in Tavernier's film. Sound and camera movement are the key elements in guiding us to two vastly different film openings.

AMPLIFICATION TO CHALLENGE MEANING

Occasionally, the realistic sound will not do justice to the effect that the editor and director seek. When this is the case, they resort to a sound effect that challenges the implication of the visuals. By doing so, they do more than challenge the scene's sense of physical realism; they also begin to alter that sense of realism.

The alteration can be simple. In James Cameron's Aliens (1986), not only are the monsters visually grotesque, but they accompany their attacks with a high-pitched squeal. Whenever the aliens are present, the squeal can be heard. Late in the film, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) rescues a young girl and fights to escape from the aliens. A deep rumble foreshadows her introduction to the mother alien. Ripley and the girl have inadvertently stumbled into the breeding area. The rumbling signals danger, but it's a vastly different danger than Ripley faced from the aliens. The shift from high-pitched squeal to deep rumble foreshadows a change and alludes to the different magnitude of the danger.

This example provides a simple illustration of how a change in sound effects can alter meaning. Another science-fiction film demonstrates how the quality of tone and pitch can alter our response to a character. At the beginning of Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), E.T. is visually presented as a mysterious, even foreboding, character. The response of the human characters suggests a danger. However, the sounds that accompany the images—E.T.’s hand, for example—are childlike. Rather than a dangerous killer, E.T. sounds like an out-of-breath cartoon character. Instead of feeling threatened, we feel sorry for him. The friendly replaces the dangerous perception of the extra-terrestrial in Cameron's Aliens. The shift in our perception of E.T. is accomplished strictly through sound.

Another approach to using sound to give the visuals new meaning is to withdraw the realistic sound and replace it with sound that achieves the intended meaning. In John Boorman's Excalibur (1981), King Arthur's struggle to bring idealism and power into balance is given a screen treatment that includes physical realism, and the world of magic and superstition. In fact, the physical realism is superseded by the influence of magic and the power of superstition. Aside from using a vivid visual style, Boorman had to find ways to evoke with sound the pivotal events in the legend of King Arthur. For example, when the magical sword Excalibur is yielded to Merlin by the Lady in the Lake and when it is returned to the lake by Percival as Arthur dies, Boorman lowers the volume of the obvious sound effects: the water, a hand rising out of the lake, metal rising against the resistance of the water. These would be the obvious sound effects if the scene were intended to emphasize naturalism. However, it is the supernatural that the scene needs to create. Boorman chose to emphasize the music, in this case, Wagner's version of the Arthurian legend, “Parsifal.” The music and the images transcend the physical reality of the action.

The replacement of the expected sound with a sound effect that shifts the meaning of the visuals to the opposite extreme alters the effect of the visualsound juxtaposition. Examples mentioned earlier in this chapter include the polar bear in The White Dawn. It is transformed through nonrealistic sound into a supernatural force when it appears in the village. Another example is the use of a humanlike voice for HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In this film, HAL becomes an excessively human computer that works with humans who are devoid of signs of their humanity. In both The White Dawn and 2001: A Space Odyssey, the unexpected sound quality enhances the contrast that is sought. The principle of asynchronism, or counterpoint, strengthens the dramatic impact of the scenes described.

   TRANSITION AND SOUND

Dialogue, sound effects, and, occasionally, music are used as bridging devices to unite scenes. Transition is necessary to imply continuity when changes in location or time are involved. A dialogue overlap between scenes or a sound effect dissolve from one scene to another will imply that transition. Editors often rely on repetition, or the echo effect, to achieve this transition. A word is repeated at the end of one scene and at the beginning of another, or a sound effect may be used. For example, in Cries and Whispers (1972), a ticking clock can be heard, and as we move to another room, the clock chimes as it strikes the hour. The tick of the clock is cut to the chime of the hour; both sound effects relate to time. The continuity provided by the two sounds masks the shift in location from one room to another.

   MUSIC

The mood and emotions on which a screen story is based are translated by the music track. This track is added to the fine cut of the picture, though musical ideas are developed through the production and post-production phases.

The music can be direct in its emotional invitation like Maurice Jarre's music in Doctor Zhivago (1965), or it can be subtle like Christopher Komeda's music in Rosemary's Baby (1968). In the latter example, the music for this horror film is an extemporaneous lullaby that adds irony to the visuals. Komeda's music strengthens the impact of the film with its irony.

The process of translation amplifies the dramatic material, such as Charlie Parker's performance pieces in Bird (1988). This is often the practice when the subject matter is performers or performance. Mark Rydell's For the Boys (1991) is another example of this approach to the music track. Beyond the authenticity that this music brings to the subject, there is also an elevating impact because the music, independent of the film, has a meaning for the audience. This is the reason for the nostalgia tracks in such films as Martin Scorcese's Mean Streets (1973), Carl Reiner's Stand by Me (1986), and Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill (1983). They help place the film in an era, as much as do the characters of the film.

In most films, however, the filmmaker looks for a direct emotional interpretation through the music track. It needn't be solely romantic. It can be enigmatic, like Bernard Herrmann's music for Vertigo (1958), or it can be stylized, like Quincy Jones's music for The Pawnbroker (1965).

Another factor is the degree of orchestration. John Williams composed full orchestrations for such films as Empire of the Sun (1987). The results are an enveloping complex of emotions that seems to suit the scale of Steven Spielberg's work. Ry Cooder, on the other hand, provided a very simple instrumentation for Paris, Texas (1984). This minimalist approach does not invite the audience to become involved with the film. The orchestration decision is made to suit the material. The key is to try to create a suitable emotional context for the screen story.

The coordination of the music with the fine cut of the film is controlled down to the beats of the musical score. Once this is accomplished, the music track—whether stylized or directed, heavily orchestrated or simplified, lyric—intensive or instrumental, referential or original—invites the audience to become engaged in the film. As Eisenstein discovered with Sergei Prokofiev and as Mike Nichols discovered with Simon and Garfunkel, when the music track works with the visuals, the sum is greater than the parts. This is the power of editing and, when it works, the art of editing.

   NOTES/REFERENCES