Jan Roberts-Breslin’s Foundations of sound and image production was very much a big long chapter of technical terminology and what stuff is and sound production for dummies. Which is great, and useful if you don’t know your sound terminology but I’m a musician for lemon’s sake and I’ve used all the mics there are from studio condensers to shotgun mics in my film projects, so the question is how can I relate the technical reading to the other perspective reading? Well here goes.

When it comes to sound perspective your main goal is to recreate the dynamic of the space your injected subject is supposed to be in. What I mean is, if the audience is meant to be placed in an intimate moment with two characters, then you need to get close and clean sound, however, if you’re putting your audience in front of a Pod Racer in Star Wars, you’re not going to hear Jake Lloyd from a foot away (is it okay to make a Phantom Menace reference here… leave a comment if you think that was offensive).

The single most important indicator of spacial size is reverb. The more reflective a space is, generally, the larger it is and thus by introducing reverb you increase the size of the space HOWEVER there is more than one aspect to reverb and some reverbs recreate spaces differently, for instance some reverbs may add lots of reflection to the higher register but have effectively no reverb in the base. Secondly, reverb is not an echo! The number of times I have seen people confuse the two is ridiculous, never mind delay. Ugh, people frustrate me.

So even once you’ve carved out how large the space is, what kind of space it is and how reflective the space is, you still need to give the audience a clue as to how far away they are from the subject. This distance is not necessarily equal to the visual distance (i.e. if the camera is 4 feet away, the sound should sound like it’s coming from 4 feet away, NO! There are no rules! But using a lavalier on an EWS is probably not the best practise.) Distance is defined also by reverb but in a different way, generally it’s defined by the speed of the reverb, how instant the reverb is, defines how far the initial sound was captured in relative relation to the subject. The second aspect of distance is the sound spectrum itself. We all know the sound of a downstairs party or night club back room where all you can here is the muffled bass, that’s distance for you. The further from a subject you are, the lower the cut-off of high frequencies is. For instance 50 metres away, you’re not going to here the crisp pops of an actor’s “s” sound, probably you aren’t going to here all that much.

So altogether, what does it all mean? Well you want something to sound close, use minimal reverb (or none), with a late attack you want it to sound like the Mic picked up the original sound first before it picked up any room reflections, secondly, keep as much high frequency data as possible and therefore of course, if you want to make the sound, sound far away, do the inverse, more reverb, Lowpass with a low threshold.

Of course there is more to creating perspective but those are just some initial thoughts for anyone who is confused about the connection between technical aspects of sound and the meaning they create.