Soundtrack, The - Volume 13, Issue 1, 2021

Godard revisits in Le mépris (1963) the Hollywood genre of the melodrama which enjoyed a large popularity in the 1950s. For this self-conscious reflection upon the genre of the melodrama, Godard hired Georges Delerue to write the music. Due to the involvement of the powerful mainstream cinema producers Carlo Ponti and Joseph E. Levine, Le mépris grew into a sizeable Hollywood-style production. Under the looking glass of these producers, Godard was expected to abandon his eccentric small-film budget habits and to comply with standard film production procedure. Pertaining to the music (and against his usual modus operandi), he conceived, together with Delerue, a detailed musical concept, spotted the film with Delerue present, integrated each and every cue Delerue composed into the film and respected the placement of the music cues as discussed with the composer. Nevertheless, behind the back of his producers, he was frequently tempted to diverge from the accepted norms and played with audience expectations. He introduced unexpected twists into the placement of the cues, which invite the audio viewer to question the established film music standards. Despite the rigid brief Godard received from his producers, he managed to dissect – with the assistance of Delerue’s lush, Hollywood-style score – the worn-out mechanics of the cinematic apparatus. The over-emphatic, idiomatic and stereotypical symphonic score inspired him to break the illusion of the artificially staged narrative.

The article explores the ways in which the boundaries of cinema are being tested by the transformation of historically formed lip-synching conventions by recent pop music films. While films based on computer-generated imagery rely on the familiar conventions of synchronizing images with the embodied voices of recognizable singer celebrities to regain an impression of corporeality, films created by and starring these same popular musicians choose to forgo this cinematic synchronization aesthetics. This asynchronization is not presented as an interruption within the film, as was often the case in the past, but rather as an alternative to sound cinema’s established vocal conventions of gender and race, as well as its hierarchies of technologies, industries and platforms.

The art of location-based sound recording specifically has been a neglected area of academic research. I seek to address this by drawing critical attention to the intricacies and skills involved in location sound recording within realist filmmaking – both scripted and unscripted. I show how this art continues to be central to the creative process of production, in driving the narrative and shaping the text’s influence, within the pro-filmic space. I hypothesize that the realist sound recordist’s role has an authorial voice and a creative agency. I seek to reimagine and develop an ontological redefinition of location sound recording by proposing that a reinvigoration of the realist genre – unscripted in particular – can be achieved by connecting the storytelling skills in recording for single camera with the new opportunities afforded by the emerging technologies of immersive field sound recording – ambisonics being a vital part of that development. I argue that deploying an ambisonics-centred location sound recording methodology, fused with the existing art of recording actuality sound will offer new creative opportunities for realist makers and audiences, now presented with an exciting ability to experience a sense of the geographical place and physical event that immersive audio delivers.

Sound design with the goal of immersion is not new. However, sound design for immersive media experiences (IMEs) utilizing spatial audio can still be considered a relatively new area of practice with less well-defined methods requiring a new and still emerging set of skills and tools. There is, at present, a lack of formal literature around the challenges introduced by this relatively new content form and the tools used to create it, and how these may differ from audio production for traditional media. This article, through the use of semi-structured interviews and an online questionnaire, looks to explore what audio practitioners view as defining features of IMEs, the challenges in creating audio content for IMEs and how current practices for traditional stereo productions are being adapted for use within 360 interactive soundfields. It also highlights potential direction for future research and technological development and the importance of practitioner involvement in research and development in ensuring future tools and technologies satisfy the current needs.