Introductory description

This module introduces students to the key debates around film sound, from the role of the music, to the status of the voice, onscreen and offscreen sounds, sonic perspective, effects and ambience. From here we will embark on an advanced analysis of film sound beyond music and dialogue, looking carefully at the ways that sound design can structure how we read environments, events and characters. Along the way we will develop an awareness of the history of sound technologies and their entanglement in discourses of the recording of the 'natural' world.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Week One: Classical scoring and diegetic sound
All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955)
Reading: Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (John Wiley & Sons, 1987)

Week Two: Sound and Place 1; Narrative through Popular Song
Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939)
Reading: Richard Dyer, In The Space Of A Song: The Uses of Song in Film (London: Routledge, 2011)

Week Three: Critics of Sound; the Sonic Index
Enthusiasm (Dziga Vertov, 1931)
Reading: selection of short texts by Sergei Eisenstein, Vselevod Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov, Jean Epstein, Béla Balázs, Siegfried Kracauer.

Week Four: Sound Technology and Aesthetics; conventions of ‘reproduction’
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian, 1931)
Boudu sauvé des eaux/ Boudu Saved From Drowning (Jean Renoir, 1932)
Reading: James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2000).

Week Five: The Voice in Cinema
Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952)
Reading: Mary Ann Doane, ‘The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space’ in
Yale French Studies, No. 60 (1980), pp. 33-50.

Week Seven: Sound and Place 2; Wild Sound
Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975)
Reading: Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

Week Eight: Soundscape, Modernity, Rurality
Silence (Pat Collins, 2012)
The All-Hearing (Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 2014)
R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester: Destiny Books, 1994).

Week Nine: Wild Sound/Wild West
Lonely Are the Brave (David Miller, 1962)
Reading: Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann, Gunfight at the Eco-Corral: Western Cinema and the Environment (University of Oklahoma Press, 2012).

Week Ten: Texturality and Sound
Le Quattro Volte (Michelangelo Frammartino, 2010)
O que arde / Fire Will Come (Oliver Laxe, 2019)
Reading: Elena Past, Italian Ecocinema Beyond the Human (Boomington: Indiana University Press, 2019)

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• command a wide range of theories of film sound, and employ skills for the textual analysis of film and other audio-visual media, enhanced by an informed attention to the soundtrack.
• understand the theoretical and formal distinctions and entanglements between film music, sound design, and location sound, and be able to apply this knowledge to the analysis of complex film soundtracks.
• grasp critical debates around the role of film music across cinema history, as well as more recent debates around sound design beyond music.
• talk and write about sound with precision and critical clarity.
• engage critically with the history of recorded sound; its technologies and discourses.

Indicative reading list

Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (John Wiley & Sons, 1987)

Richard Dyer, In The Space Of A Song: The Uses of Song in Film (London: Routledge, 2011)

James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2000).

Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

Rick Altman (ed.), Sound Theory/Sound Practice (London: Routledge, 1992).

John Belton and Elisabeth Weis (eds.), Film Sound: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, Sound Design is the New Score: Theory, Aesthetics, and Erotics of the Integrated Soundtrack (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

Jay Beck & Tony Grajeda (eds.), Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008).

Kathryn Kalinak, Sound: Dialogue, Music and Effects (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015).

Jay Beck, Designing Sound: Audiovisual Aesthetics in 1970s American Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016).

James Buhler, Theories of the Soundtrack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Kevin J. Donnelly, The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and Television (London: British Film Institute, 2001).

Charles O’Brien, Cinema's Conversion to Sound: Technology and Film Style in France and the U.S. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).

View reading list on Talis Aspire

Subject specific skills

This module develops skills of audio-visual literacy, through close textual and contextual analysis in relation to the moving image and sound. It also develops understandings of historical, theoretical and conceptual frameworks relevant to critical understanding of the representation of environments through sound and on screen..

Transferable skills

• audio-visual literacy
• critical and analytical thinking
• enhanced ability to critically analyse sound and sonic cultures
• ability to talk and write about sound with precision and clarity
• independent research skills