Soundtrack, The - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2008

From the point of view of a film editor, it is important to consider the details of picture and sound in tandem when editing a film. What is visible and audible in the finished product necessarily obscures the work done to reach that point. However, the archaeology beneath the surface is worth investigating if only to confirm how effective or otherwise the symbiosis has been. I will refer to examples taken from both personal experience and observation of the methodology of others.

This article examines aspects of how sound (especially music) integrates with animated images and, especially, how synchrony between sound and image offers the viewer focal points of attention within the animation. It examines synchronic gestures in two animations one abstract, the other representational and compares the use of synchronous sound in both. It places these two works in the context of animation generally and offers reflections on aspects of the relationship between sound and image in animated film.

Links to the audio and video material described are offered in the body of the text.

The artists who created the conventions of comic strip graphics invented a way of visualizing noise that no predecessors had attempted. Since Popeye first landed his fist to a resounding Splat! or Batman and Captain America laid about them to accompanying sound effects, visualized noises have become a defining feature of this storytelling medium. This article explores the noises that material things make. In this article, Marina Warner offers insights on how sounds play a crucial part in defining the unique quality of objects, with reference to comics, Schwitters, Beckett, Dante and Tacita Dean.

This article explores different forms that can be assumed by the dissociated voice. Of Mother is a film essay reconstructing a situation Shewring experienced. Speaker and V are films made with an observation of the dissociated voice in mind; the former being the use of recorded voices in Beijing, the latter a written account of the author's experiences during filming, and a discussion of the notion of the uncanny.

Readers' responses to the article on H.H. Zweck in our last issue (Soundtrack, 1: 1) have prompted us to include another extract from the work produced by the late Professor Charles Forsythe (193589) of the Wessex Institute of Higher Vocational Education (now Wessex University), Department of Forensic Musicology. Forsythe located and analysed all of Zweck's 547 known compositions and recorded over 1,000 hours of interviews with Zweck between 1972 and the composer's death in 1979. It is of particular interest to musicologists that as with his contemporary, Leonard Zelig, there seems to be no other documentary evidence that Hermann Zweck ever existed. Forsythe's work is the only document in which Zweck appears or is mentioned.

This extract is of a transcription of an interview recorded at the composer's home in Pinner, Middlesex, on 23 July 1975, and concerns his relationship with Fritz Lang.