Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1500189
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 75 a dog barking, the recording may sound realistic when played back, but it won't be perceptually realistic until it is perceived the way it would be perceived in the context of the diegesis. Perceptual design actually happens throughout the sound post-production of a film and is concerned with all the elements in the mix and not only sound effects or Foley. When we are recording footsteps or car passbys and we're deciding on the distance from the microphone, type of microphone, and recording angle, we're actually doing perceptual design. We're deciding and informing, from that moment on, how the sound is going to be perceived. These divisions of sounds or food groups as we sometimes call them, between; dialogue, sound effects, Foley, and music are just a division of labour that is instrumental in the production of quality sounds and in our organisation of them. But once all of the elements are brought together for the final mix, any element or sound can be utilised and manipulated toward specific ends affecting the overall perceptual design of the film, that is, how the film world is sonically perceived. Interestingly, Lipscomb and Kim (2004) have shown evidence that perceived match between auditory and visual domains in films is higher when linking pitch with location, loudness with size, and timbre with shape. Examples of perceptual design are the decisions taken in the edit room and in the mix stage, from timbral characteristics in the dialogue, to deciding on major or minor keys in the music cues and deciding which elements of the mix are more salient in each particular moment, the sonic size of the elements in the film world, their localisation, the construction of off-screen sound in a scene, and the demarcation or expansion of the film world beyond the frame. Leo Murray points out that "The mimetic ability of the sound film, more than any other art form or medium, allows it to be taken as a realistic portrayal even where the audience knows that what is being seen is a fiction." (Murray, 2013) Perceptual design is akin to subtractive synthesis in that the creative process, specially at the mix stage is mostly subtractive in nature. Sounds, musical or not, are attenuated, filtered, and altered in timbre until the desired traits are achieved. Then synthesised together to form a perceptual reality that is coherent with the film. William Johnson says that "Sound always plays a part, even when reduced to a minimum, just as the image always plays a part, even during a fade or black-out. The basis of a film is a continuous interaction between sound and image." (Johnson, 1989) The level of nuance and complexity in the perceptual design of films changes depending on genre, director and can even shift depending on the scene. Experiential sci-fi films like Gravity (2013) and period dramas like Roma (2018) for instance, are films with an overall high level of nuance in their perceptual design, while comedy movies, for instance, usually don't exploit perceptual realism as a narrative tool as much. Without perceptual design, every element in the frame and the soundtrack would have equal salience and weight and that would create confusion and very little meaning if at all because that's just not how our perception works. While in the natural world, some sounds have precedence for us before others. In the movie theatre, every sound has the same loudness potential and can be meaningful. Like Michel Chion says, "Cinema, like the other arts, plays its role in this process of dehierarchising the world" ... "Film is an art that knows nothing of the natural laws of acoustics and can make tiny and titanic noises coexist on the same soundtrack." (Chion, 2009 pp 460, 170) Reference List •Bordwell, D. and Carroll, N., (2012) Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. University of Wisconsin Press. •Chion, M., Gorbman, C., (2009) Film, a Sound Art, Film and Culture. Columbia University Press. •Coëgnarts, M. and Kravanja, P., (2015) Embodied Cognition and Cinema. Leuven University Press (G - Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects Series). •Dumper, K., Spielman, R., Jenkins, W., (2017) Psychology. 12th Media Services. •Johnson, W., (1989) Sound and Image: A Further Hearing. Film Quarterly 43, 24–35. •Lund, Thomas and Mäkivirta, A., (2018) 'On Human Perceptual Bandwidth and Slow Listening,' in Audio Engineering Society Conference: 2018 AES International Conference on Spatial Reproduction - Aesthetics and Science. •Murray, L., (2013) Film sound: Applying Peircean semiotics to create theory grounded in practice. Murdoch University. •Ward, M., (2015) Ward, M.S. 2015, 'Art in Noise: An Embodied Simulation Account of Cinematic Sound Design,' in M. Coëgnarts & P. Kravanja (eds), Embodied cognition and cinema. Leuven University Press, Leuven, Belgium, pp. 155–186, in pp. 155–186. •White, G.D. and Louie, G.J., (2005) The Audio Dictionary. REV-Revised, 3. University of Washington Press. •Wixted, J.T., Serences, J., (2018) Stevens' Handbook of Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, Sensation, Perception, and Attention. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, Newark, United States.