In the words of not Jaden Smith (probably) “there are no earlids”, and by golly gosh is he right! (Although there is tinnitus, so watch out!).
We live in a world where we are constantly surrounded by sounds, and all of these combined do take a toll on us, consciously or not. Due to the fact that we don’t ‘have earlids’, even sounds that we may not be intentionally trying to listen to may still be heard. This can be anything from that one terrible neighbour you have who likes to mow his lawn at 5 in the morning, just when you got in bed from a Netflix marathon, to the chirping of birds on a sweet Spring afternoon, or even that little shrew Ashleigh in grade 3 who you accidentally overheard her talking about you on the bus (I HEARD YOU!!!). Though we may not actively paying attention to the aforementioned things, we still do hear them and they do take their toll on how we interpret things around us. This brings us to the identification of ‘listening vs hearing’. Hearing can simply be described as background noise, the ambiance track to our lives if you will ( probably doesn’t apply to Ashleigh, but still), whereas as listening is what we intentionally focus on, the foreground of our hearing, such as speech or music.
As I sat in class taking notes, I realized one of the secondary teachings of today’s lecture; some of us goof up and overlook non-diegetic sound and its value in the production of our pieces. It makes a difference. Let us rejoice in this wondrous knowledge bestowed upon us, let’s give them films some feeling, yo! Peace.