Making Waves : The Art of Cinematic Sound

Before we were born, you're looking at darkness.

Sound is the first sense that gets plugged in.

Six months, seven months into the womb.

It's hearing the mother's heartbeat.

It's hearing her breathing.

It's hearing Dad shouting from the garage...

It's making sense of the world.

You have emerged into a kind of consciousness

using only sound.

And then you're born.

Sound affects us in a deeper way almost than image does.

It goes deeper.

Oh.

And yet, we're naturally, seemingly oblivious to that.

Film sound is an illusionary art,

as if you're just hearing the natural sounds...

...happening in the world on screen.

It's subliminal

and a purely emotional way of thinking about a movie.

It's stealthy, sound work.

It's flying under the radar.

It's understated.

But what sound adds to the picture

is so exhilarating that I just was hooked,

and pretty much never looked back.

You're depressed, it's not working, then the sound design comes in...

The feeling of scale that the sound was giving...

And I think that sound, in many ways is more tied to imagination.

If you're born to be artistic, sound is going to be part of the deal.

It's part of being human.

Movie is sight and sound.

You only express it with sight and sound.

People always talk about the look of a film.

They don't talk so much about the sound of a film.

But it's equally important, sometimes more important.

I am not an animal.

The point is to convey an emotion.

Everything is in service of that.

And sound is half of the experience.

I've always been of the belief that

our ears lead our eyes to where the story lives.

When designing sound on a film today,

like "Saving Private Ryan",

you're bringing together a rich complex orchestration of sounds.

On every film I've worked on with Steven Spielberg,

he gives a gift of here's a scene, here's a moment,

and I'm counting on sound to help tell the story. Here you go.

What strikes me most about,

especially the opening of "Private Ryan",

is that it was designed to use sound

to tell a part of the story it's not showing you.

So a scene like that fully takes advantage

of how a soldier takes in war, which is a pretty narrow point of view.

- (Gunshots) - (Bomb explodes)

Move. Move.

Sound got to handle the scale of it.

We spent a lot of time on that first 25 minutes.

It was weeks and weeks of just balancing all the sound effects

that Gary and his crew provided.

I kind of came up with a certain pattern or rhythm

of cutting these machine guns for the background battle.

So that there was some form to this battle.

There's always a rhythm. Even to chaos, there's a rhythm.

- (Gunshots) - (Bomb explodes)

Point of view is great for sound

because it allows you to go inside the head.

So I designed a sequence,

where when an explosion hits near Captain Miller,

all the sound goes out.

That came from an actual veteran

that told me that was how it affected him.

So it put you deep inside his experience.

If you look at it, it never has, until the battle is over,

a wide shot, that gives you a grand scale "Longest Day" style of D-Day.

It doesn't do it. It's all very intimate.

And very importantly, there's no score.

John Williams would've done a beautiful score with a whole different feeling,

but without score it tells you this is real.

When the score comes in, the score is often used...

I think of it as like a life raft.

You have an emotional moment and the score comes in.

It just gives you something to hold onto.

These different elements of sound in movies -

music, sound effects and voice,

are similar to the instrument groupings of an orchestra.

But film sound work wasn't always like that.

You know, with dozens of sound editors editing thousands of tracks.

It ultimately took people like Ben Burtt on "Star Wars"

and Walter Murch on "Apocalypse Now",

to get us to the full immersive soundtrack

that the audience has come to expect in movies today...

...created by a team of sound artists, a circle of talent.

No!

But when it all started, movies were silent.

Mary had a little lamb Its fleece was white as snow

And everywhere that Mary went The lamb was sure to go

The invention of the phonograph

was a monumental step for humanity.

We could now capture sound forever.

Edison originally developed the motion picture camera

because he wanted images to go along with his phonograph.

So the audio came first.

But picture works at one speed.

Sound is at another.

They had no way to put it in sync,

which is why the whole project was abandoned.

They were just so eager to put sound to movies

because everybody knew this would elevate the experience.

Films were projected with a full live orchestra.

They could be projected with people talking behind the screen.

There were actually people that travelled around

doing sound effects live to silent films.

There's films like "Wings" when it played in New York,

and its big premieres, it had performers on stage

doing live sound effects for airplane engines,

and using percussion instruments for the boom of artillery and explosions.

They could do wind, galloping horse hooves...

- (Galloping horses' hooves) - (Gunshots)

There just wasn't technically a way of capturing and recording the sounds,

and attaching them to the movies yet.

Until 1926.

Warner Bros. did "Don Juan" with John Barrymore.

It actually had a synchronised music track,

which was mechanically connected to a projector.

Then in 1927, they actually recorded dialogue on the set,

and so "The Jazz Singer" had spoken portions of it.

Warner Bros. Theater in New York City,

where "The Jazz Singer" is now playing,

is sold out for many weeks in advance.

What struck people most was Al Jolson's speaking voice,

not his singing voice.

That he spoke was revolutionary to audiences.

That's what they wanted to hear.

Wait a minute. Wait a minute.

You ain't heard nothing yet.

Wait, I tell you.

You ain't heard nothing.

- (Applause) - (Orchestral music)

It was a gigantic sensation,

so Hollywood was faced with what to do now.

They had developed a way of shooting movies without sound,

and that involved certain freedom on a set

to be in a noisy place because it didn't matter.

Suddenly, there was this revolution when they had to start

entombing the productions in sound stages,

so all sound was blocked out from the outside world.

All right. Here we go. Quiet.

- Quiet. - Quiet.

Roll 'em.

But the microphone's ranges were so short,

the actors couldn't even move.

She's got to talk into the mic. I can't pick it up.

Don't you remember, I told you,

there's a microphone right there, in the bush.

It was very limiting.

Cut.

But despite the limitations, audiences loved sound.

And I think it's because even in the sound of a human voice,

we carry emotion.

Antonio?

Nein, nein, nein!

It's alive!

But the addition of the voice was not the only thing

that changed in movies at that time.

Filmmakers began to realise

that sound effects were also an important part of cinema.

They discovered that you don't get all the sound effects you want

by just hanging a microphone out over the set.

The sounds aren't there.