The role of sound in the film industry

The role of sound music and sound effect in film industry

Sound and music or the absence of it has a profound impact on film and TV. It is extremely rare for a film or TV programme today to not contain sound. Sound helps to develop drama within scenes and create tension. It can also be used to manipulate the feelings and sentiments of a viewer. Automated dialog replacement also known as ADR is used to improve the quality of the dialog, this is because when filming the surrounding noises are normally picked up to and can create volume or quality problems, so normally the dialog needs to be redone so enhance the quality of the audio. This is also done with other sounds within shots and not just audio, many car noises and background noise is replaced to improve the overall quality of the sound, as some noises can come out quite muffled and distorted when filmed on set. Music has a massive impact on films, as Victoria Jeffery states in http://www.helium.com/items/783888-the-role-of-sound-music-and-sound-effect-in-the-film-industry she speaks about how music guides emotions in a film, for example movies just as Psycho and Indiana Jones, the music in these serve a powerful guide to show the viewer how to feel and react to certain elements that are happening on screen. Victoria also states that ‘ Music brings a film to life like nothing else can and that music has its own language that can signal a certain theme, mood, a quality in a certain character or giving landscapes in a film a character like quality’. I find this statement extremely interesting and agree with what she is saying, music and sounds help created a character and help the viewer understand the role that character is playing within the film, without sound I think that films wouldn’t have that same link to the audience.

The article that i am looking at is by Helen Abbott (19/06/07) the article speaks about the three elements of sound in film, which are music, dialogue and noise. Music in early cinema productions were mostly created by a theatre orchestra who would play music of their own choosing. ‘The function of music accompanying silent films was to affirm and legitimate the silence'. She goes on to speak about ‘As technology developed to allow more advanced sound techniques in film, the soundtrack became an integral element of a production. For Walt Disney's Fantasia (Algar et al, 1940), the animation is an interpretation of the music itself. With the score as a starting point for the visuals, the sound is integral to the impact of the film; the visuals are orchestrated to the sound and therefore hold less impact if exhibited in silence. Leopold Stokowski recorded the score on nine separate soundtracks, one for each orchestra section, which was mixed into four master optical tracks. With impressive synchronization and directionality, Fantasound' was an early example of surround sound. However with a cost of $85,000 to equip each theatre with over sixty-five speakers Fantasound' was abandoned until 1982 when it was re-mastered in Dolby Stereo. Although film scores were popular from the beginning of cinema it was not until around 1967 that popular music was included on a soundtrack. The Graduate (Nichols, 1967) was one of the first films to include old songs from records as a major part of its musical soundtrack'. After the success of American Graffiti (Lucas, 1973), a nostalgia film with a continuous soundtrack, using popular music became standard practice (Schoener, accessed 01/12/2005). O'Sullivan et al describes music soundtracks in terms of synergy and that it was not until the spectacular success of the Bee-Gees' disco-based music score for ‘Saturday Night Fever’ in 1977 that the commercial potential of such soundtracks was fully realized.' For producers therefore, sound is an important element in film in terms of financial gain, for example The Bodyguard (Jackson, 1992) is the best-selling film soundtrack having gone platinum. What interests me in this article is how sound has developed over years with the improvement of technology within the film industry, From having theatre orchestras playing to using soundtracks within films, what this has also showed me is the development in the type of music created and the financial gain because of the importance of sound in film.