Chapter 7: Sound

Essay: Vocal Performances in Film: Recording Technology and Techniques

To capture and combine the various kinds of sound within a film, including dialogue, music, and sound effects, filmmakers employ multitrack recording. This system enables them to record each sound on a separate track, which can then be manipulated on its own and mixed together with other sounds, of the same type or different types, for coherence and dramatic effect. If a character takes off a leather coat in one shot, rustles a newspaper in another one, and walks down a gravel road in a third, for example, sound technicians will record each sound separately in the studio. If two or more of these things were to happen at the same time, the sounds would be mixed in some way that would enhance the storytelling.

If you have ever listened to a nonprofessional tape recording or listened to the sound track of someone's home movie, you know that recording equipment exercises no judgment over what it captures. Some inconsequential noise might end up louder than an important conversation, just by chance or because of unfortunate microphone placement. Accidents like that don't—or shouldn't—appear in feature films, however. If on a movie sound track traffic noise overwhelms a character's speech, or music drowns out the sounds of a birthday present being unwrapped, the filmmaking team will have created that "obstruction." While feature films generally aim to create sound tracks that are "realistic" and comprehensible and sounds do not typically draw attention to themselves as sound effects, film sound tracks are, in fact, elaborate creations involving dozens and sometimes hundreds of filmmaking professionals, countless hours of work, and hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.

Because each sound exists on a separate track, filmmakers can employ a tremendous amount of control and artistic discretion in creating a final sound mix for the film. For instance, a director might ask a sound mixer to make the sound of a door closing not only louder but deeper, more "sinister," or even "old-fashioned sounding." A director might ask that an actor's breathing become more noticeable even as her words become quieter and begin to fade away. As film scholar Bruce Kawin explains, the Munchkins' dialogue in Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz (1939) was recorded and then played back at twice the speed to give it that high-pitched sound, and director Ingmar Bergman rerecorded dialogue tracks in reverse to create baffling and threatening environments in some of his late-1960s films (46).

Film dialogue comes from two main sources: the first and most obvious is the live sound recorded on set during a performance; the second is postsynchronized sound, which is captured in a recording studio and added in postproduction. To improve the comprehensibility of poorly recorded or poorly enunciated dialogue recorded on the set, to add or change information through dialogue (as when a story changes during postproduction), and also to improve on actors' vocal performances, sound technicians use a system called Automatic Dialogue Replacement (ADR), popularly known as looping or dubbing. As film scholar Elizabeth Weis explains,

Looping originally involved recording an actor who spoke lines in sync to "loops" of the image which were played over and over along with matching lengths of recording tape. ADR, though faster, is still painstaking work. An actor watches the image repeatedly while listening to the original production track on headphones as a guide. The actor then re-performs each line to match the wording and lip movements. Actors vary in their ability to achieve sync and to recapture the emotional tone of their performance. Marlon Brando likes to loop because he doesn't like to freeze a performance until he knows its final context. (People have said that one reason he mumbles is to make the production sound unusable so that he can make adjustments in looping.)

Looping played another major role in Brando's career: In the screenplay for Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), Brando's character was called Colonel Leighley, and during scenes shot before Brando's arrival on the set, the actors used that name. Once Brando arrived and, at Coppola's urging, read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the novella that inspired Apocalypse Now, he insisted that his character be named Kurtz, as in the book. Walter Murch, sound designer of Apocalypse Now, notes, "We had to re-record the dialogue. The actors' mouths are saying 'Colonel Leighley,' but in fact we hear them saying 'Colonel Kurtz.' It's very carefully done. Listen and watch the scene" (Ondaatje 69).

Voice Narration in Apocalypse Now

Voiceover narration often seems an inorganic component of fiction films, not arising out of particular stories—that is, not dramatically necessary—but rather helping the filmmakers fix plot and character problems or simplistically delivering exposition. Perhaps because it was inspired by Conrad's first-person narrative, Apocalypse Now successfully uses voiceover narration to evoke character, establish tone, and underscore important themes. In the film, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), a secretive army officer, has been sent to kill fellow officer Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who has stopped operating under the command of the U.S. Army and has begun to fight his own war deep in the jungles of Cambodia. Willard's narration throughout Apocalypse Now is both informative and haunting, providing the viewer with special access to a journey into war and madness. In their book-length conversation about the making of this film and others, writer Michael Ondaatje and Apocalypse Now sound designer Walter Murch discuss the voiceover:

Michael Ondaatje: I love the narration. Not just for what it's saying, but also the way we are made to hear it. What was done to create that very intimate, inner voice?

Walter Murch: I asked Marty [Sheen] to imagine that the microphone was somebody's head on the pillow next to him, and that he was just talking to her with that kind of intimacy.

Michael Ondaatje: Was it mixed and re-recorded in any special way?

Walter Murch: In the final mix we took the single soundtrack of his voice and spread it across all three speakers behind the screen, so there's just a soft wall of this intimate sound enveloping the audience. The normal dialogue between characters in the film comes only out of the centre speaker. So aside from the intimacy of the original voice recording itself, there's a distinct shape to the sound as it hits the screen, and it's very different from the rest of the dialogue in the film. (64–65)

For Further Reading

Kawin, Bruce. How Movies Work. New York: Macmillan, 1987.

Ondaatje, Michael. The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

"Production Sound" and "Dialogue Recording." www.filmsound.org.

Weis, Elizabeth. "Sync Tanks: the Art and Technique of Postproduction Sound."