Sound Characteristics of Movie Sound

The space of a sound movie is shaped by light and sound. The working principle of the camera is with the help of light, lens and light-sensitive film, the reality of three-dimensional information in a documentary way into the two-dimensional plane, and then projected on the two-dimensional screen, resulting in three-dimensional visual motion illusion, the sound recorder can be faithfully recorded and also play the sound waves in the space (direct sound, reflected waves, diffracted waves, etc.). A mono recording system can faithfully represent the spatial characteristics of sound such as distance and depth of movement. A stereo system can also reflect lateral motion. Therefore it greatly enhances the three-dimensional illusion of the two-dimensional image on the screen. For example, the sound of the collision of cups and plates is not only a simple sound effect, it also depicts the space in which the sound source is located and conveys the emotional state of the user. The omnidirectional propagation of sound and the omnidirectional reception of the human ear form an infinite and continuous sound space, so in the event or narrative space as well as in the super-event or super-narrative space, there is no distinction between inside and outside space for the sound, but only between inside and outside space for the sound source.

The spaces embodied by sound are: event or narrative space, hyper-event or super-narrative space, and non-event or non-narrative space (such as narration or evaluative music). In the event or narrative space, the sound of the invisible sound source can form an extremely rich and varied spatial changes, and create a variety of emotional atmosphere. There are three temporal relationships of sound: the time of screening or viewing, the time of the event or narrative, and the psychological time of the audience's appreciation. The projection time and the event or narrative time is completely synchronized time is called real-time time, such as multi-camera shooting of a live performance. There are very few feature films that are truly "real time". The American film High Noon is a rare example. Its story is assumed to take place in 1 hour and 45 minutes, and its running time is also 1 hour and 45 minutes. The asynchrony between the projection time and the event or narrative time (e.g., a 20-minute event or the year 2000 is shown in a 90-minute projection time) constitutes a unique psychological time for the audience. Since the time of a cinematic work is a continuous flow with 1/24th of a second as the minimum time unit, its psychological time is more like the appreciation time of a musical work than the appreciation psychological time of a play, much less the reading psychological time of a novel.

The variable that constitutes the psychological time of appreciation is the time of the event or narrative. Within this temporal sphere, sound can manifest itself in three tenses, present, past, and future, as well as in various simultaneous combinations of these three tenses, such as in the Soviet film Sonata by the Lake, in which the doctor is resting under a tree, the sound of the past (flashbacks) is simultaneous with the sound of distant thunder in the present tense.

The combination of a period of coherent sound on the vocal cords (e.g., dialogue) and a series of images in disjointed time and space can create either the illusion of disjointed time and space or the illusion of coherent time and space, which is the basis for the forward/reverse shot pattern of dialog scenes in Hollywood films.

A sound can be repeated for dramatic effect. For example, in the American film Bonnie and Clyde, the sound of a bankrupt farmer pistol-whipping the glass window of a farmhouse that has been mortgaged out appears in two consecutive shots (the shot of the shooting and the shot of the glass window).

A single sound can link two different time periods. For example, in the Soviet film "Here the Dawn is Quiet ......", a female warrior in wartime hears a cuckoo call and another girl looks up and hears this cuckoo call more than ten years later in peacetime in the footage together, so that the two eras are closely linked to make a sharp contrast. At the beginning of the development of the understanding of the sound film, both the creative practice and the theory of the understanding of the sound is limited, so there is a "visual-oriented theory". There are two reasons for this view. On the one hand, it is historical, that is to say, it is believed that the sound film is the continuation of the silent film, the visual picture is added with the sound, and the movie should be a visual medium. Therefore, the German film theorist R. Einheim raised the "more fundamental question of whether the existence itself is justified" of the sound film. On the other hand, there is the question of the angle of understanding of the movie itself. It is generally recognized that the camera is superior to the sound recorder. The German film theorist S. Krakauer is a representative of this point of view. In his book The Nature of Cinema, he puts forward: "The visual image is in line with the spirit of cinema only when it occupies a primary position in it (meaning the movie). This requirement is logical, since the most distinctive contribution of cinema in fact indisputably comes from the camera, not the tape recorder."

The sound film after 60 years of development, scientific and technological progress, the formation and development of electronic-photoreceptor transmission media system, so that people no longer from the silent film to the sound film inheritance to understand the sound film, no longer think that the film is a visual picture plus sound, but that the visual and auditory effects of the art of cinema at the same time **** existence, interaction, mutual Dependence. The ontological point of view also changed, recognizing that the most distinctive contribution of the silent film came from the camera, that the most distinctive contribution of radio broadcasting (electroacoustics) came from the electro-acoustic recording and playback equipment, and that the tools used in the sound film were the camera and the tape recorder. This led to the idea of a relative balance between the audio and the visual, and further to the idea of audio-visual integration (or sound and picture integration). As a result, many of the terms for sound that are primarily visual have changed. For example, in the past, sound from a source that did not appear on the screen was called "off-screen sound". Since then, it has been argued that sound in a space is not limited by the frame, and that sound should not be categorized by whether it is seen by the human eye, but rather by whether it is heard by the human ear. A person hearing a type of music often causes a desire to see the source of the sound, but a person can hear his own voice but not see himself. A sound movie is an audiovisual perception of the external world. The human visual and auditory senses work with each other in different ways to perceive the outside world (along with the senses of smell, touch, and taste, of course). The retina of the human eye perceives light waves, it has a certain field of vision (angle), the pupil can adjust the luminous flux, the parallax of the two eyes can judge the distance and size of objects, and can identify colors. The human ear is different from the function of the human eye, the ear drum of the human ear can receive omnidirectional sound waves (sound information), there is no fixed limited angle. There is only a phase difference between the two ears when receiving sound waves, so the human auditory world is an infinite continuous sound environment at any given time, while at the same time it is possible to recognize the orientation, distance, and direction of motion of the sound source, but not as accurately as vision. The camera system and recording system of a movie can imitate the function of the human eye and ear and their mutual cooperation. This is the basis for the concept of sound and picture synchronization.

The speed of light waves (i.e., the visible spectrum of electromagnetic waves) is 300,000 kilometers per second, the speed of sound waves is 340 meters per second, the transmission speed of the human visual nerve is 1,200 to 1,400 meters per second, and the transmission speed of the human auditory nerve is 800 to 1,200 meters per second. There is a difference in speed between light and sound waves, and there is also a difference between the visual and auditory nerves, which constitutes an extremely complex and rich audio-visual relationship.

Film composers, for example, have found that a 15-second-long piece of music, which they composed on demand out of the picture, has a faster tempo when played against the action on the screen during mixing. Conversely, a highly action-packed passage that eliminated the synchronized sound seemed slower. This phenomenon, which produces the same effect on all viewers, is called the audiovisual physiological-psychological effect. Audiovisual effect is the lowest level of audiovisual combination. American director A. Hitchcock's films rely mainly on the audio-visual effect.

People with the accumulation of life experience to obtain a kind of muscle movement memory, shaking the camera, tilting and pitching can cause a certain sense of seemingly dynamic, which and the sense of space, orientation, the sense of movement can produce a strong combination of immersive feeling. For example, in the screen in the shadow of a face suddenly shouted, the audience will feel the face brighter. This is because the sound causes the audience to focus on the face in shadow, and the pupils readjust.

Another example is that a voice from an invisible source on the screen causes the person on the screen to turn his head to the left, so the audience has the illusion that the voice is really coming from outside the left frame. If the character further moves his head to the left side of the frame, the right side of the frame is empty, then the audience will move the center of vision to the left side of the frame of the face, resulting in the formation of the audience's field of vision of the right half of the screen falls in the left half of the left half of the screen, while the left half of the field of vision falls outside of the left frame, and so the formation of a strong sense of the space outside of the painting. This involves not only the cultural level of the viewer, but also the cultural characteristics of the viewer's or creator's nation or region.

The saturation of light, shadow, color and sound, especially musical sound, have a subtle psychological relationship, so what is considered in the film is the saturation of the audio-visual combination. For example, emotionally strong music can saturate a blanket of snow, while a color-saturated image can be enhanced without music. For example, the tone of the high register of a flute can lay a layer of bleak color on a visual image. Color can also change the mood of the music.

The combination of sound and picture can also be borrowed from the counterpoint of polyphonic music. For example, the American film "The Victors" in the Christmas shooting of deserters in the paragraph, the use of Christmas lyrical holiday songs and visual jumps on the shooting of deserters in the scene of the counterpoint of the technique, not only caused a strong impact on the anti-war thinking effect, but also to the melodious music covered with a layer of tragic colors.

Another method of counterpoint is to create audio-visual anomalies to arouse the audience's thinking. For example, the sound of an atomic bomb explosion and the sound of the shockwave on the soundtrack, but the screen is a quiet scene, so that the audience has to question: is there an atomic war?