Audio Reflection
When you think about music and miscellaneous audio, you don’t realize the impact it has on things in the world especially television and film. Sound is a key component to many stories and sets the tone for almost everything. Whether it’s just music in the background or purely a scene of a character and only music being the sound, audio is essential in everything. Sound drives stories in that it is the backbone to the mood of everything. Sound will create suspense, passion, horror, or even comedy. You really can do anything with sound.
I did some research to see what others had to say about how music and sound impacts film. I stumbled across an article from Stuart Fischoff. He starts his article with a quote from film composer Bernard Herman and it explains everything perfectly.
“I feel that music on the screen can seek out and intensify the inner thoughts of the characters. It can invest a scene with terror, grandeur, gaiety, or misery. It can propel narrative swiftly forward, or slow it down. It often lifts mere dialogue into the realm of poetry. Finally, it is the communicating link between the screen and the audience, reaching out and enveloping all into one single experience”
He also makes a point that “The general feeling about film is that it is singularly a visual experience. It is not. While we certainly experience film through our eyes, we just as surely experience it through our ears” which I could not agree more with. Herman argues that having a film without music is nearly impossible, and the ones that do are horrible and “dead”. There are a few that have purely sound effects but they just don’t make a statement.
www.calstatela.edu/faculty/abloom/tvf454/5filmmusic.pdf
Touch of Evil Opening Shot comparison:
To be honest I liked the (No-retored version) much more than the other version. I found that the music in the no restored version set up what was going to happen much more than the other version. The opening shot of the restored version was all over the place and I think the music/sound effects didn’t make much of a clear statement. The no-restored version was fuller of suspense and you could sense of what was to come. Even the first 30 seconds of each, the no-restored was more dramatic tune and the restored version you had no clue of what was going to happen.