Loudness

    The sound we hear results from vibration in the air. The amplitude, or breadth, of the vibrations produces our sense of loudness, or volume. Film sound constantly manipulates volume. For example, in many films a long shot of a busy street is accompanied by loud traffic noises, but when two people meet and start to speak, the volume of the traffic drops. Or a dialogue between a soft-spoken character and a blustery one is characterized as much by the difference in volume as by the substance of the talk.

    Loudness is also related to perceive distance, often the louder the sound, the closer we take it to be. In addition, a film may startle the viewer by exploiting abrupt and extreme shifts in volume, as when a quiet scene is interrupted by a very loud noise.

    Pitch

    The frequency of sound vibrations governs pitch, or the perceived “highness” or “lowness” of the sound. Nevertheless pitch plays a useful role in picking out distinct sounds in a film sound track.

    Pitch can also serve more specific purposes in a film. When a young boy tries to speak in a man’s deep voice and fails (as in How Green Was My Valley), the joke is based primarily on pitch. In the coronation scene of Ivan the Terrible, Part I, a court singer with a deep bass voice begins a song of praise to Ivan, and each phrase rises dramatically in pitch-which Eisenstein emphasizes in the editing, with successively closer shots of the singer coinciding with each vocal change. When Bernard Herrmann obtained the effects of shrill, birdlike shrieking in Hitchcock’s Psycho, even many musicians could not recognize the source: violins played at extraordinarily high pitch.

    Timbre

    The harmonic components of a sound give it a certain “color” or tone quality-what musicians call timbre. When we call someone’s voice nasal or a certain musical tone mellow, we are referring to timbre.

    Filmmakers manipulate timbre continually. Timbre can help articulate portions of the sound track, as when it differentiates musical instruments from one another. Timbre also comes forward on certain occasions, as in the clichéd use of oleaginous saxophone tones behind seduction scenes. More subtly, in the opening sequence of Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight, people starting the day on a street pass musical rhythm from object to object-a broom, a carpet beater-and the humor of the number springs in part from the vary different timbres of the objects.

    As fundamental components loudness, pitch, and timbre interact to define the overall sonic texture of a film. At the most elementary level, these three acoustic factors enable us to distinguish the various sounds in a film. For example, these qualities enable us to recognize different characters’ voices. At a more complex level, all three components of film sound interact to add considerably to our experience of the film. For instance, both John Wayne and James Stewart speak slowly, but Wayne’s voice tends to be deeper and gruffer than Stewart’s querulous drawl. This difference works to great advantage in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, where their characters are sharply contrasted. In The Wizard of Oz the disparity between the public image of the Wizard and the old charlatan who rigs it up is marked by the booming bass of the effigy and the old man’s higher, softer, more quavering voice.

    Citizen Kane offers a wide range of sound manipulations. Echo chambers alter timbre and volume. A motif is formed by the inability of Kane’s wife Susan to sing pitches accurately. Moreover, in Citizen Kane the plot’s shifts between times and places are covered by continuing a sound “thread” and varying the basic acoustics. A shot of Kane applauding dissolves to a shot of a crowd applauding (a shift in volume and timbre). Leland beginning a sentence in the street cuts to Kane finishing the sentence in an auditorium, his voice magnified by loudspeakers (a shift in volume, timbre, and pitch).