Tag Archives: sound

Cinema Studies

Sound and Vivre sa vie

The following is a blog post written for my Introduction to Cinema Studies class, re-published here so all my work is in one place.

Conventionally, sound is used to support or reinforce the visual and narrative elements of a film. In Vivre sa vie (1962), director Jean-Luc Godard plays with the conventions of sound just as he and other French New Wave practitioners often experimented with accepted cinematography and editing techniques.

The perceptual properties of sound (volume, pitch and timbre) as well as the dimensions of sound mixing and sound editing (rhythm, space, perspective and time) are all manipulated in calculated ways so that the sound track actively engages the audience, rather than remaining perceptually invisible as sound tracks often do.

As just one example, under the opening titles we see Nana (Anna Karina) shot in close-up with an orchestral theme that abruptly stops after a few seconds, with the rest of the shot continuing in silence. Silence, or a close approximation to it, occurs in odd or unconventional places throughout the film. By drawing such prominent attention to elements like dynamic volume and nondiegetic music and sound, Godard foregrounds the sound track’s unreality and further provokes his audience to question the rules and limits of cinematic form.

In a film thematically concerned with performativity and the parameters of cinema, featuring a number of nondiegetic elements that draw attention to the fact that Vivre sa vie is a piece of art, manipulation of sound in this way has a significant impact on the experience of the film.

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Media 1, Workshops

The elements of a podcast

In our Workshop this week we spent some time listening to the “Sleep” episode of Radiolab, a science/discovery podcast produced by WNYC Studios, and noted down some of the elements that make up narrative audio:

  • Music
  • Narration
  • Interviews / conversations
  • Sound effects
  • Atmosphere / sync sounds
  • Archival recordings
  • Vox pops

Apart from archival recordings and vox pops, the Radiolab episode used every single one of these elements — and in fact, often several were in use simultaneously.

Personally, I’ve tried to listen to Radiolab in the past (because the subject matter interests me), but in general I find their style far too busy and overly constructed to comfortably listen to. Compared to a show like This American Life or Planet Money, which are relatively unadorned and mostly let subjects/interviewees speak in full sentences, Radiolab barely goes a second without using some kind of audio edit, either by the host chiming in to lead the narrative, or an inserted sound effect, music, etc. This cacophony of sounds overwhelms my ears and I lose track of the narrative thread, which is a cardinal sin for documentary podcasts like Radiolab.

This episode of Planet Money, which aired this week, seems by comparison much easier to follow:

It still uses all the same elements as Radiolab (plus vox pops), but they are layered in a far more spacious way so they don’t conflict with one another.

A narrative documentary podcast is one format my group is considering for the audio essay in Project Brief 4, so seeing and dissecting how the professionals do it will help immensely.

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Media 1, Workshops

Week 4 Exercise: Favourite Place on Campus

In this week’s Workshop we used the ZOOM H2N audio recorder to make a short audio piece and familiarise ourselves with the equipment and process for editing sound.

We were extremely constrained by time and barely managed to record any sound at all, but I managed to layer what we got into a (simple) piece in which I discuss my favourite place to sit and chill on campus. There are three layers of audio in this piece.

Editing sound is something I’ve done in the past (see my podcast here) so I didn’t learn too much from the editing part of this exercise, but it was good to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of the ZOOM recorder for future reference.

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