As I’ve found true for many topics we’ve explored in Media 1 so far, perspective and distance in audio/sound mixing are things you don’t really notice until you make a concerted effort to study them. When discussing visual media it’s easy to grasp perspective and distance – because we’re such visual creatures, we already have useful analogies for discussing and approximating the two dimensions involved:

• Distance is achieved by the “size of the frame”, i.e. whether a close-up, medium shot or wide shot is used, and the relative size of the subject within this frame
• Perspective has two axes, each of which defines a part of the relationship between the subject and the viewer:
  • Vertical axis determines power, e.g. top-down perspective places power with the viewer, bottom-up perspective places the subject in the position of power
  • Horizontal axis determines the level of “directness” in the relationship

But when it comes to sound, the mechanics of achieving perspective and distance are much more nuanced. For starters, as Theo van Leeuwen says in this week’s reading Speech, music, sound, audio is a “wrap-around medium” with no real concept of frontal or side-on sounds, or, in other words, no equivalent of the visual “frame” to mediate perspective. Though spatial positioning can be approximated in stereo environments with panning, hierarchically we perceive sounds as more or less equal regardless of the direction we perceive them coming from.

Distance, therefore, becomes much more important in determining the importance of sounds, with three levels of distinction:

• Figure – the main focus of interest (also called the foreground or immediate sound)
• Ground – the immediate setting or context in which the Figure sits (also called the midground or support sound)
• Field – the background, sits at the furthest distance from the listener

Whether a sound is in the figure, ground or field dictates the perspective of the listener, and can be manipulated to mediate the audience’s experience in much the same way that visual distance and perspective can be. I’ve noticed this many times in the past, but didn’t have the language to adequately describe it, so I’m looking forward to paying closer attention to this in the future.