CINEMA SOUND

 CINEMA SOUND

By

Dr.NIVEDHITHA

and

A MEMBER OF

METAPHYSICAL HOME

  SOUND: 

Sound exists everywhere, and every time; with so many variations and verities; all living beings live integrating with sound. Till we listen the morning sounds, dawn and dusk sounds, night sounds, a sparrow’s chirping, a baby’s cry we too are intervened with Nature. The language of Nature is sound, and till today it is unchanged; it is common to all living beings; it is universal and simple. We human beings, who have the efficiency to learn, adopt the language of Nature and build our own language that is inherent to the geographical and sociological environment where we live. Language is sound with so many variations; and we have learned to create millions of sound to give millions of meaning. Language is encoding and decoding of sound variations. When we gave symbols to language, sound has denoted in to alphabets to form writings; except syllabary. Writings are the sign of sounds created in language, (any alphabet can be used for any language) as we have notation for music. In fact the first recording of sound is writing, with the facilities of encoding and decoding from language to sound and sound to language. But this recording is done only for the linguistically meaning of sound, but it missed to record all the other factors that sound has in its myth. That is why Writing and Reading exist as a separate art from sound. There, not only the writer, but also the reader is an artist. When a Reader reads he identifies his emotion in the text or in other way he adds up his emotion and feeling and reads; to individual identity.

          

SOUND RECORDING:

Sound recording is an art as well as science. To become a good sound recordist one needs the knowledge of science of sound and creativity of its infinite myths at different applications. The first qualification to become a sound recordist is to be a good listener; in the sense, one should be able to differentiate the difference between two cuckoos when they sing together. The quality of recording depends upon the knowledge over the recording techniques and aesthetics of sound.

The knowledge of sound recording techniques is;

o       Understanding the physics of sound

o       Understanding the nature of sound

o       Understanding the science of sound

o       Understanding the texture of sound

o       Understanding the atmosphere where it is created

o       Understanding the atmosphere where it is played back

The knowledge of aesthetic of sound recordings is;

§     Understanding the feel of sound that triggers the sprit

§     Understanding the representation of sound

§     Understanding the ontology of sound

§     Understanding sound and space

§     Understanding the relativity of sound

§     Understanding the correlation of sound

§     Understanding the perspectives of sound

§     Understanding the phenomena of sound

§     Understanding the anthropology of sound

§     Understanding the silence

Mind and sound:

Sound is metaphysical, so it is mystical; an unseen force that triggers the emotion of all living beings, than any other force in the world. It is multi dimensional, even then there is a common understanding depending the culture, environment and experience that reaches different people in different angle.  The human brain identifies the sound mostly to the nearest of an identification and relates it to the immediate and earliest identification. The listener is the most important part of sound because sound is depicted on listener’s mind, where the listeners’ mind is not uniform. That is why, even though the approach of sound is mass it affects and effects personally. The unique quality of sound is that, other than the listeners’ ears, it doesn’t affect any sense to feel the nature of it. Sound is a moving element; it is always moving; quickly, rapidly, and repetitively. So a listener is gathering sound with the same movement and with the same speed to maintain the order. Another unique quality of ear is, it is unreserved and Omni directional and easily susceptible to loudness. Time space and sound is much integrated to procure the mind without mind’s knowledge. Mind is always ditched by time space and sound to make better understanding. When the space extends sound gets stopped.  When sound is stopped it reaches the origin where it started, that is silence. Silence is the mother of sound. Silence is the space where sound creates its path to travel and reach atlas.

silence:

 Silence is the most beautiful part of sound. It communicates so many meanings. As an effect of sound it is terribly heavy, as well as deadly cold. It is peace; it is understanding; it is joy; it is acceptance; it is romance; it is thrill; etc….etc…It is the place where sound takes rest. In western music notation, silence is noted as ‘rest’. In fact ‘rest’ in music means the existence of the musician but without music.  The rest of the sound and its existence without sound is an important role in all our life.  The sound of the dinosaur is much thriller than the sound of a dinosaur when it is unheard. When your lover walks without sound of an anklet, it rings the chimes of your heart. The existence of sound in silent movies of our great directors is still unforgettable. Silence is one of the great arts of conversation, as allowed by Cicero himself, who says, “there is not only an art but eloquence in it”. The modes of speech are scarcely more variable than the modes of silence.” Blair. The rest of sound in any application of art has got it is own elaborate meaning.  Technically silence means in different way. The human ear has got a limit of Listening; its range is between 20HZ and 20,000HZ for a young person. Any sound below 20HZ is called subsonic and any sound above 20,000HZ is called supersonic or hypersonic. So what we are listening is only between20HZ and 20,000HZ of sound. A human ear needs a pressure to listen sound. The minimum pressure what we need to listen is called 0 dB. So, 0 dB is not absolute silence, but the threshold of hearing. That is the lowest sound pressure level that an average listener with good hearing can detect. We can say technically the unheard sound is called as silence.

Physics of sound:

When an object vibrates it generates sound

1.             Plucking a string

2.             Bowing a violin

The generated sound needs a medium to travel whose molecule can set in motion

·               Air

·               Solid particle

The medium transmits the vibration in the form of changes in pressure

When a string is plucked- vibration happens-this vibration passes in the air-so the molecules of air get compressed with the pressure passed on from one molecule to another

aesthetic of sound:

Every art is shaped, not only by political philosophical and economic factors, but also by its technology. The relationship is always clear. Sometimes the technological development leads to a change in the esthetic system of the art; sometimes esthetic requirements call for a new technology; often the development of the technology itself is the result of a confluence of ideological and economical factors. But until artistic impulses can be expressed through technology, there is no artifact. The invention of photography in the early nineteenth century marks an important line in division between the pre technological era and the present.

The development of printing technologies has caused too many influences on the art of writing. Stage dramas were readily altered when new lighting technologies came. The invention and development of oil paint provided a wonderful versatility to the artist. But cinema expelled from all these as a great single artistic contribution of the industrial age, the recording arts- film, sound recording and photography are inherently dependent on a complex, ingenious, and even more sophisticated technology. No one can ever hope to comprehend fully the way these effects are accomplished with a rudimentary understanding of the scientific and systemic procedures that make them possible

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The invention of photography in the early nineteenth century makes an important line of division between the pre technological eras and the present .The basic artistic impulses that drive us to mimic nature were some essentially both before and after that time, but the augmented technical capacity to record and reproduce sounds and images of the twentieth century presents us with an exciting new set of choices. Previously we were limited, in a sense by our own physical abilities: the musicians created sounds by blowing, strumming or singing; the printer who captured real images entirely on his own eyes to pursue them; the novelist and the poet not engaged in strictly physical arts, were nevertheless limited in describing events or characters by their own powers of observation. The technology of sound and image now offers us the opportunity of recording sounds, images and events and transmitting them directly to the observer without the interposition of the artist’s personality and talents. A new channel of communication has been opened, equal in importance to the development written language.

 

ANTECEDENTS OF MOTION PICTURE:

Although the camera did not come into practical use until the early nineteenth century, efforts to create such a magical tool, which would record reality directly, dated much earlier. The invention of paper negative gave a lead to modern photography of negatives recording and positive reproduction. The paper negative was soon replaced by the flexible collodion film negative, which is not only marked a distinct improvement in the quality of images but also suggested a line of development for the recording of motion pictures. The magic lantern, capable of projecting an image on the screen, was quickly adapted to photographic use in the 1850s.Praxinoscope came in 1877, a practicable device for projecting successive images on a screen. And in 1889 George Eastman applied for a patent on hi flexible photography film developed for the roll camera and the last element of cinematography was in place. By 1895 all these elements had been combined and cinemas were born.

CINEMA WITHOUT SOUND:

Even though sound recoding was invented much earlier than cinematography; cinema was invented without sound. The reason behind was the invention of cinema rooted out with the existing material of photography and printing. So still cinema is called as film, motion picture, video or television; undemanding the incorporation of audio concept. When filmmaker received synchronizing sound, they found sound as an added quality to cinema. It was considered as the aesthetic quality to cinema. Cinema was cinema before the sound track was added, they said, so the sound cannot be fundamental component of cinematic experience. Historically sound is add on, an after that, and thus of secondary in importance. Ironically it is precisely because of insufficient historical knowledge and reflection that these avengers err. There is a valuable argument that silent films had never been without sound; it had always confirmed to the mid twenties model of standarised organ or orchestral accompaniment. On one side there are ethereal cinema of silence, punctuated by carefully chosen music; on other side the talkies with their incessant anti poetic dialogues. Too heavily dependent on the practice of the twenties this is an unacceptable assessment of the first thirty years of cinema history. Camera phone, chordophones, cinephone, and dozens of competing systems were not only invented in 1910s; during the end of the century and first decade they were installed in hundreds of theatre, across Europe and from coast to coast in the United States. Their completion came, by the way, not from silent films, with or without musical accompaniment but from the road shows with extremely sophisticated and carefully synchronized effects and from many “wheels” of human voices behind the screen. In short the world did not want until Don Juan and the Jazz Singer to discover the entertainment value of synchronized sound. Anyhow silent film changed the form into talkie; that is an entirely new form; there the cinema changed; even the theory for cinema also changed by the influence of sound. Still cinema changes and the action of sound is one of the prime reasons for the changes.

CINEMA WITH SOUND:

 Edition’s phonograph, which does for sound, what the camera/projector system does for images dates from 1877. The desire to capture and reproduce still picture pre dated the development of moving picture by many years. But there is no such thing as a “still” sound; so the development of sound recording, of necessity, took place all at once. In many ways, it is more extraordinary than cinematography, since it has no antecedents to speak of. Because of technical problems posed by Edition’s mechanical recording system, mainly synchronization – the effective marriage of sound and images did not occur thirty years later; but the desire to reproduce sound and image in concert existed from the early days of cinematography history.

THE REPRODUCTION OF SOUND:

The recording of sound from its very beginning has been very fascinated; whereas an image that is photography clearly reduces the three-dimensional original into two dimensions. Sound appears to reproduce the original faithfully, in its full three dimensionalities. By and large, critics remain convinced that sound is literally reproduced by high quality recording and play back system. Sound, cannot be constructed independently of the volume of air in which it is heard. Typically we notate sound (through writing or musical notation) as if sounds were ideal entities. But volume, frequency and treble cannot exist independently of several material factors, which preclude reproduction as such. To be sure in sense, G is G, whether it is played at home or in stage, but that does not make the two sounds identical. All we want to know about is, that it is G then all the Gs are the same; but if we care about the material difference between the two sounds and the spatial configuration that are present there, then we must recognize that no recording is possible to reproduce an original sound. Recording do not reproduce sound, they represent sound. According to the choice of recording location, type of microphone, recording system, amplification, postproduction, manipulation, storage medium, playback arrangement, and playback location each recording proposes an interpretation of the original sound. To be sure, one of the common strategies involved in this process is to attempt to convince the audience that they are listening not a representation but reproduction. Considered as reproduction, recording seems to fall under the aegis of technology and engineering construed as a representation. However sound inherits the double mantle of art. Simultaneously capable of misrepresentation and of artistically using all the possibilities of representation, sound thus recovers some of the fascination lost to its reputation as handmaiden of the image. Indeed it is recording’s very ability to manipulate sound that makes it so apply worth of our interest.

REALISM AND INDIVIDUALISM:

In order to show that recording cannot possibly reproduce the original sound, critics have regularly made the following points:

Sound exists as pressure within a volume.

It is possible to collect all the sound of a particular performance, since it disperses differently into various part of the theatre or other surrounding space.

Even at a live performance different spectators hear different sound, depending on where they are seated and which way the performers are turned.

Sound system always enforces a particular set of volume in selecting microphone, location, frequency response, volume levels and many other recording and playback characteristics.

Playback back involves in the same set of differences and choices involved in recording. For example there is a difference between the sound heard in the orchestra and same as heard in balcony.

This is a problem of communication having heard the ‘same’ sound to overcome that they actually perceived physically different sound. This is precisely where we stand today sound. Every audition of the same performance actually hears different sound; we need actually to interrogate the cultural phenomena that permit us to communicate about the sounds, which are heard. It is more important to remember that signification can occur only through repression of the signifier and to call for increased sensitivity to the many strategies adopted by various cultures to assure the differences in favor of language’s communicative value.