Book Review: Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen

The year 1979 marks a historic moment in film sound: For the first time ever, on-screen credit was given to a Sound Designer. The title was given to honor the work of Walter Murch on Apocalypse Now by director Francis Ford Coppola, a film which brought a new level of creativity and attention to the power of sound with true Dolby 5.1 surround channel soundscapes. This and future advancements in the 1980s resulted in an accelerated interest in sound technology and aesthetics, which solidified Sound Design as an art form in the filmmaking process.

Today, the term has become widespread across all forms of visual and interactive media with increased development of sound design for video games and virtual reality. New audio programming tools and workstations allow for the creation of more intricate and specialized soundscapes, contributing to the growing field of sound art an independent medium. But for all the advancements in audio technology, the study of sound and its elusive relationship with the visual image is often avoided by filmmakers and theorists.

French film theorist Michel Chion’s text Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen stands out in this field as a comprehensive guide to examining or re-examining the many assumptions we have about film sound, and provide a new framework for audiovisual analysis.

Chion has been writing on the subject of film sound studies for many years with several published texts focusing on film sound (La Voix au cinéma, Le Son au cinéma, La Toile troupée). Sadly, Audio-Vision is the only title in this listing which has been translated into English (the English edition is translated by Claudia Gorbman, and includes an introduction by Walter Murch). While it is the sole English-language translation of Chion's work available, he specifically created this book as a culmination/synthesis of his work in audiovisual analysis (it also includes some added material on the state of sound in music videos, television, and video art). At around 200 pages, the book is a quick way to get quite a lot of information on the subject and begin listening to films in a new way.

Starting out with what is called “The Audiovisual Contract”, Chion gets to work describing his critical assertion that the way we perceive images and sound in cinema revolves around their relationship and interaction instead of independence. Instead of simply throwing out a series of terms and definitions to confuse the reader, he begins with a series of simple examples from the classic opening sequence of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and a beach scene from Mr. Hulot’s Holiday by Jacques Tati. He begins by looking at the Bergman film with and without sound for analysis and comparison. As a silent film, the sequence seems to lose its sense of rhythm, meaning, and even visual construction as the perceived shots separate and lose their unity. Then, he does the same comparison with Tati’s film - this time, removing the image rather than the sound. The sounds of bored and stagnant beach goers on vacation becomes an enjoyable soundscape of children playing without any image to guide the meaning of what we hear.

Chion is using these two examples to illustrate several new terms he created to clarify the relationship between our perception of sound and image. The most apparent is that of added value, the “expressive and informative” value that sound brings to an image - this creates the impression that information gained from sound comes from what is seen by nature of the image. He points out that people often take this as meaning that sound simply replicates meaning already found in the image, however the nature of sound as a time based medium allows for important relationships to arise between sound and image with creative new meanings. Synchresis is involved in much of this magic, the powerful relationship formed in the immediate pairing of sound and image which adds sensory depth and realism to what you see (think explosions and punches). However of all Chion’s new terminology, I found myself most fascinated by his concept of rendering sounds. You might think that the most “realistic” and fitting sounds for a film would be exactly what is recorded on set with the action. This is rarely the case because sounds often do not convey or render the emotional characteristics which we connect with them. This has created an entire field of Foley artists who use whatever recording methods and tools may be necessary to deliver sounds which support the director's artistic vision. Understanding how films use cultural codes in sound is key to using rendering effectively; people will almost always take a sound with clear definition as being more “realistic” than direct location sound.

Plowing through almost every form of relationship between image and sound along with its creative potential, Chion moves on to discuss how the hierarchy of sounds has shifted throughout history to recreate more elaborate soundscapes and embrace noise. He credits this shift largely to Dolby technology, which created much of the tools which films and interactive media use today for the highest sound definition. While his look into the history of film sound may seem somewhat limited, there exist many further texts which go into great detail and depth on the advancements of sound through each decade (more on this in a moment).

Chion has created a very fitting guide for this history - one which allows the theorist and casual film enthusiast alike to understand sound in a more meaningful way. The journey may be laborious with terms and concepts which may seem initially paradoxical, but I believe that Michel Chion’s vision of sound in films is the worthwhile place to begin that journey.

The journey is a trip whose itinerary is enriched by several other texts that may be of interest. Here's a short list of a few of them.

Looking into mainstream film literature reveals a (visually-biased) way of thinking about sound which points back to its origins, since many theorists believed the introduction of sound in the 1920s heralded the destruction of film as a pure art form. Of course, some filmmakers promptly ignored this claim and went on to pioneer the aesthetics and technology of film sound over the course of several influential essays by directors such as Sergei Eisenstein and René Clair.

Their works - along with the theories and writings of sound innovators in the years since - have been collected together in the dominant anthology Film Sound: Theory and Practice. This text, along with the more revised and neglected perspectives included in Sound Theory / Sound Practice edited by Rick Altman and the most current collection of sound work Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound edited by Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda, comprises much of the current literature on film sound studies. While these collections offer a detailed look into the evolution of film sound, I think a reader on this subject will greatly benefit by starting with Chion and complementing their reading with one or more of these titles.