Soundtrack, The - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2011

This article explores multichannel sound and hypersonic audio and investigates the impact that cinematic technologies have had on our sonic perception and appreciation. The core methodology of these explorations has been through practice, and the evolution of a 7.1 surround sound and hypersonic composition and installation: auditoryum (Sarah Atkinson and Marley Cole, 2010). Through reflection upon this practice, this article addresses the ways in which auditoryum has foregrounded and extended theories of the soundscape and aural architecture. It will also discuss the impact of audio-related technological developments on soundtrack and sound design aesthetics, principles and practice.

Since its release in 2008, Steve McQueen’s Hunger has received critical acclaim for its powerful and uncompromising portrayal of the 1981 ‘dirty protest’ and subsequent hunger strike by Irish Republican inmates in Northern Ireland’s infamous Maze prison. In most instances, the focus of critics’ attention has been on the film’s political connotations, its set pieces – in particular the much talked about 22-minute dialogue scene at its heart – and, perhaps unsurprisingly given McQueen’s background as a visual artist, its visual language. Yet it is the film’s use of sound, so widely acknowledged by writers yet left relatively under-discussed, that is perhaps its most intriguing aspect. The relatively sparse use of dialogue in much of the film affords space for a rich and prominent use of sonic material – including musical cues – and an attention to aural detail that mirrors that of the film’s visual imagery. In addition, a closer reading of the film reveals a more integral use of sound in the form of a series of recurrent sonic motifs that, over the course of the film, serve as an important structural tool, framing its narrative content while seemingly playing on established political associations to simultaneously affirm and nullify the sectarian divide of its characters. By exploring the motific content and context of both Hunger’s sound and composed, musical components, this article aims to provide an insight into one of the most striking cinematic works to emerge in recent years.

This article explores and proposes a model of hearing based upon an emergent line of thought known as the ‘enactive’ or ‘embodied cognition’ approach. This approach views the various modes of perception (sight, hearing, etc.) as styles of relating rather than processes carried out in the brain. Put another way, these approaches envision experience as constituted by embodied, perceptual relationships to the world. According to the phenomenological perspective of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, every self is constituted by perceptual, embodied relations within a lifeworld. For Merleau-Ponty, and for scholars like Francisco Varela, Alva Noë and Shaun Gallagher, this is no metaphor. It is a material description of the ordinary and everyday relations that constitute our selves in the world. As Noë reports, breakthroughs in neuroanatomical and neuropsychological research methods have led to considerable excitement and energy being poured into cognitive studies. It is thought that by these means we might even be able to ‘see’ consciousness at work. Yet Noë is highly sceptical of this ambition because an ‘explanatory gap’ remains between the data (images of brain activity, etc.) and true understanding of perceptual experience. Working from this critique, Noë and Kevin O’Regan have argued convincingly for a sensory-motor account of vision and consciousness. Currently, there is virtually nothing written on the possibilities for an enactive model of hearing. Therefore, my goal in this article is to initiate a sketch of such a model. I contend that this alternative approach may prove to be very enlightening with respect to studies of film and television reception, which otherwise tend not to notice the meaning-making activities of the body.

This article investigates the early historical context of the relationship between sound and image in film, and how contemporary theorists have drawn on this to suggest new creative aesthetic modes. The practical realization of such suggestions will be illustrated primarily by an analysis of my own film No Escape (Cox, 2009), which explores the combination of live piano music, diegetic sound and image. It draws on my collaborative work as sound designer and composer with film-maker Keith Marley, whereby we have attempted to challenge the perceived relationship between sound and image in documentary film (e.g. Cider Makers, Keith Marley, 2007 and A Film About Nice, Keith Marley and Geoffrey Cox, 2010), a relationship seen as stratified or hierarchical in the sense that sound is often treated by film-makers as subordinate to image in a genre that is dominated by what Bill Nichols calls a ‘discourse of sobriety’.