Joint Meeting AES/SGA 2003, Luzern (english)

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Sound Design for Film

Thursday, 22nd of May 2003, 16:45 at the Auditorium of SUVA, Rösslimattstrasse 39, 6005 Luzern
SPEAKER: Dr. phil. Barbara Flückiger

Around 50 participants gathered together in the large auditorium of the SUVA in Luzern. The arrangement of the seats was very suitable for film reproduction. To provide the right auditory environment, a 5.1 set of professional audio monitors was built up in the room. After a welcome of the chairmen of the AES and the SGA, Barbara Flückiger started her presentation, which contained selected topics of her Ph. D. Thesis.

Pointing to the history of film theory, it was explained that in early times all directors used or had to use besides music and dialogs the soundtrack of film just to enhance the picture. So a gunshot on the screen had to sound as much as possible like a gunshot on the street. Her study of the mainstream film has shown that, besides some early pioneers, in the late 80s this rule has been broken and almost vanished until now. The link between the picture and the sounds is no longer in the visual sense but has more and more been moved towards the subjective perception of the viewer. Further Mrs. Flückiger has analyzed the methods of this kind of subjectivities and categorized them. For instance, in science fiction movies, there are events, which cannot be made to sound like "on the street". Two examples of this were the liquid-metal man in "Terminator 2" walking through a iron-barred door or the movement of a laser sword in "Star Wars".

These sounds were created by dog-food and by moving a fluorescent tube around the antenna of a broken portable TV receiver as B. Flückiger explained to the amusement of the audience. Like this, many examples of these subjective links between picture and sound have been demonstrated. For her studies Mrs. Flückiger has further defined a term called "UKO" or "Unidentifizierbares Klangobject" which is an unidentifiable sound object which can neither be seen in the picture nor be identified out of the context. Excerpts of "Das Boot" or "The blair witch project" have been shown where a lot of "UKOs" could be heard. In a third part of her speech, methods of subjectivation have been shown, which are used by directors to make the spectator identify themselves with specific characters in the film. Elements like dissociation of sound and picture can subjectively tell a viewer that a figure in the movie is in a drunken or drugged state or hallucinating. Other often used elements like that are heartbeats, breathing or vanishing of the sound, which can involve the viewer into the fiction. A last demonstrated excerpt, where this was used very effectively was "The silence of the lambs", where agent Starling is in the cell with the murderer and the lights go out and her nervous breathing is audibly louder than in reality. A dinner in a restaurant nearby the SUVA building concluded this very interesting meeting.