Week 3 – graphing film sound

1. Analysis
1.1. What is analysis?
1.2. Why is it useful?
1.3. How might it help you?
1.4. What form might an analysis take and what can it show?
2. Interpretation
2.1. What is interpretation?
2.2. Where do we find it?
2.3. How is it useful to you?
3. Presentation
3.1. How do you show what you’ve learned?
3.2. What effect does representation of your findings have on the findings?
4. Reinterpretation
4.1. Choosing what to reveal
4.2. Committing to an interpretation

What films should I be watching (listening to?)

Check this out as a good starting place
www.filmsound.org/QA/milestones.htm

How should I approach sound design for moving image?

First impressions count.
Watch the footage and make notes straight after.
What impresses you about the footage?
Where can it go?
What is special or mundane in what I am seeing?
How much do I need to add sonically to make the space convincing and believable?
How many layers are there in the material of the film?
What is foreground? What is background?
Watch the footage a second time and make notes as you watch
Watch the footage a third time and draw a graph of “visual energy”
Will the graph of “sound energy” be the same?
Develop a “scratch” track, perhaps by improvising live as you watch the footage.
Maybe make several versions and choose the best elements of each.
One sonic thread will probably excite you so start to develop that first.
Next, chase up other threads until you have a working track.
Walk away.
Come back – anything unnecessary, irrelevant, over the top, slightly naff?
Get rid of it.
Have a random screen test. Ask for opinions.

Designing a film for sound
Randy Thom
www.filmsound.org/articles/designing_for_sound.htm

Sound Design for animation
www.filmsound.org/animation/

Dogme Manifesto
www.dogme95.dk/menu/menuset.htm

Film Sound Clichés
www.filmsound.org/cliche/

www.criticalimprov.com/index.php/csieci/article/download/462/992?inline=1

datavisualization.ch/showcases/

Road-Timescales (pdf) Curtis Roads’ diagram of sonic timescales.

Stockhausen-p2 Stockhausen-p1 (pdfs) Pages from Klavierstük VI

Resources for Graphing Sound

• Sonic Visualiser – Free annotation / analysis tool. Gets more powerful with plugins.
• Praat – Free tool, originally for speech research, lots of different analysis methods.
• Izotope RX – Commercial, but produces lovely spectrograms.
• Acousmagraphe – Free nagware, allows annotation of spectral / signal display with shapes and markers
• SpectrumView (for iOS, h/t Nick G).
• Pen and Paper