Abstract
This chapter is focused on the philosophy of film sound in the analytic tradition and its limitations; drawing from current literature in other fields, it aims to complement some philosophical discussions typically centered on the image with their aural counterparts. Firstly, it provides an overview of early skeptical views on the contribution of sound to the artistic status of films and critically questions the status of sound in contemporary philosophical conceptions of film suggesting a revision that takes seriously the idea of film as an audio-visual medium. Secondly, it discusses a central topic in the philosophy of film, the idea of film realism, showing how the discussion of sound may open new directions along three different dimensions: illusion (where sound may stand as a counterexample to the claim that film does not generate perceptual illusions), likeness (where the notion of fidelity can be understood not as a matter of conventions but as based on recognitional capacities), and transparency (where sound recordings can turn out to be a more appealing case of transparent medium than photographic images).
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Notes
- 1.
Randy Thom, interview with Glenn Kiser and Michael Coleman, Dolby Institute Podcast Series, podcast audio, August 25, 2015. https://www.dolby.com/us/en/dolby-institute/podcasts.html
- 2.
Most of these critics of sound in film did not oppose to the use of music as an accompanying element of film. What they rejected was the incorporation of dialogue and, to some extent, naturalistic sound effects.
- 3.
Sergei M. Eisenstein, Vladimir I. Pudovkin and Alexandrov, “A Statement” in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 83.
- 4.
Sergei M. Eisenstein, “Beyond the form”, in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Taylor Richard (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 82–92.
- 5.
Hugo Münsterberg, “The Photoplay: A psychological Study”, in Hugo Münsterberg on Film: The Photoplay and Other Writings, ed. Allan Langdale (New York: Routledge, 2002), 117.
- 6.
Münsterberg, “The Photoplay: A psychological Study”, 129.
- 7.
Early critics of sound in film generally thought that the addition of sound in the form of dialogue and sound effects was a temporary trend eventually doomed to fail. However, if sound was indeed there to stay, they believed, the only way in which it could make an aesthetic contribution would be if it was not fully synchronized with the image (See Pudovkin 1985; Eisenstein et al., 1985).
- 8.
- 9.
Rudolph Arnheim, “The New Laocoon”, in Film as Art (California: California University Press, 1957), 224.
- 10.
Münsterberg, “The Photoplay: A psychological Study”, 145.
- 11.
Ibid., 83.
- 12.
Arnheim, “The New Laocoon”, 228.
- 13.
Ibid., 229.
- 14.
Ibid., 227.
- 15.
Béla Balázs, Erica Carter and Rodney Livingstone, Béla Balázs: early film theory: Visible man and The spirit of film (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 183.
- 16.
Ibid., and Siegfried Krakauer, “Dialogue and Film,” in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. Weis Elisabeth and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
- 17.
Balázs, Béla Balázs: early film theory: Visible man and The spirit of film, 185.
- 18.
Peter Green, Andrei Tarkovski. The Winding Quest (London: The Macmillan Press, 1993), 103.
- 19.
Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1.
- 20.
Gregory Currie, Image and Mind. Film Philosophy andCognitiveScience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3.
- 21.
Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 72.
- 22.
Carroll, Currie and Gaut do discuss certain issues related to sound in their works, but the main focus remains on the image.
- 23.
For a parallel argument, see Altman’s “Historical Fallacy”. See Rick Altman, “Four and a Half Fallacies”, in Sound Theory, Sound Practice (New York: Routledge, 1992), 35–37.
- 24.
For more insight on the issue of sound in silent film, see Rick Altman Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), xi; Rick Altman, “The Evolution of Sound Technology”, in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) and James Buhler and David Neumeyer, “Music and the Ontology of the Sound Film: The Classical Hollywood System”, in The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, ed. David Neumeyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
- 25.
Buhler and Neumeyer, “Music and the Ontology of the Sound Film: The Classical Hollywood System”19.
- 26.
In this sense, it would count strictly as film music under definitions such as Jeff Smith’s or Noël Carroll and Margaret Moore’s. See Jeff Smith, “Music”, in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga (New York: Routledge, 2009), 84–195; Noël Carroll and Margaret Moore, “Music and Motion Pictures”, in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music, ed. Theodor Gracyk and Andrew Kania (New York: Routledge, 2011), 456–467.
- 27.
Notice that this is, arguably, what Carroll does when he claims that conditions 3 and 4 of his definition are necessary for the definition of film: “(3) performance tokens of x are generated by templates that are themselves tokens; [and] (4) performance tokens of x are not artworks in their own right”. If sound of “silent” films was counted as a constitutive element of films, as I have argued, then there would be a part of certain films whose performance would not be generated by a template but by an interpretation and whose performance tokens could eventually be considered artworks in their own right.
- 28.
For a similar argument, see Altman’s “Ontological Fallacy”. Altman, “Four and a Half Fallacies”, 37–39.
- 29.
Ibid., 38.
- 30.
Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 60–62.
- 31.
See, for instance, the early experiment by William Dickson to synchronize sound in a short film for Edison’s Kinetophone project. This experiment dates from 1894–1895. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6b0wpBTR1s
- 32.
Altman, “Four and a Half Fallacies”, 36.
- 33.
Cited in Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 78.
- 34.
Kendall L. Walton, “Categories of art”, in Philosophical Review 79, 3, (1970): 334–367.
- 35.
This does not mean that the issue of sound is completely absent—see, for example, Andrew Kania, “Realism”, in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga (New York: Routledge, 2009), 237–47.
- 36.
Berys Gaut mentions up to seven distinct dimensions of realism. See Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 97. I restrict to these three because they are the most recurrent discussions.
- 37.
I restrict my discussion to these three approaches not because others are less interesting or worth developing, but for the sake of focus. This chapter concentrates mainly on the analytic philosophy of film, and it aims to complement current visual-centric discussions with the aural counterparts; for this reason, I discuss realism in sound following the structure of current literature in the field.
- 38.
The case of transparency is an exception. Although most of the discussion has focused on photographic images, the transparency of sound recordings has indeed been developed.
- 39.
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, “Fundamental Aesthetics in Sound in Film”, in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed., Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 193.
- 40.
At the time this chapter is written, the most recent technology is Dolby® Pro Logic® IIz, which introduces two front height channels, so as, for example, re-create the experience of rain falling one’s roof.
- 41.
Maria Pramaggiore and Tom Wallis, Film: A Critical Introduction (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2005), 209.
- 42.
Michael Chion, Audio-Vision. Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 5 and 12.
- 43.
Annabel Cohen, “Film Music. Perspectives from Cognitive Psychology”, in Music and Cinema, ed. James Buhler, Caryl Flynn and David Neumeyer (New England: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 361.
- 44.
Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 55.
- 45.
Currie, Image and Mind, 19.
- 46.
Kania, “Realism”, 238.
- 47.
A charitable interpretation could be that Cohen and Gorbman’s phrases are merely figures of speech or exaggerations of the phenomenon, and one should take them with a grain of salt. However, it is, nevertheless, worth clarifying the phenomena.
- 48.
Currie, Image and Mind, 24; Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make Believe (Harvard University Press, 1990), ch.5; Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990), ch.2. In addition to the argument from behavior, there are other arguments theorists put forward against the idea of suspension of disbelief or cognitive illusion induced by film. For the sake of economy, I restrict the counterexamples to the argument from behavior.
- 49.
Moreover, at least in the case of Cohen, it is plausible to think this idea is closer to what she is proposing.
- 50.
See Richard J. Gerrig, Experiencing narrative worlds: on the psychological activities of reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Melanie Green and Timothy Brock, “In the mind’s eye: Transportation-imagery model of narrative persuasion”, in Narrative impact: Social and cognitive foundations, eds. Melanie Green, Jeffrey Strange and Timothy Brock (New York: Psychology Press, 2013),315–341; Tom Van Laer, Ko De Ruyter, Luca M. Visconti and Martin Wetzels, “The Extended Transportation-Imagery Model: A Meta-Analysis of the Antecedents and Consequences of Consumers’ Narrative Transportation”, Journal of Consumer Research 40, no. 5, (2014): 797–817.
- 51.
See Lars Kuchinke, Hermann Kappelhoff, and Stefan Koelsch, “Emotion and music in narrative films: A neuroscientific perspective”, in The Psychology of Music in Multimedia, ed. Siu-Lan Tan, Annabel J. Cohen, Scott D. Lipscomb, and Roger A. Kendall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 118–138; Annabel J. Cohen, “Music as a Source of Emotion in Film”, in Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications, ed. Juslin, Patrik and John Sloboda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 879–908.
- 52.
See Walton, Mimesis as Make Believe and Currie, Image and Mind.
- 53.
Atencia-Linares, Paloma and Miguel Ángel Sebastián, “Narrative Immersion as an Attentional Phenomenon” (manuscript); See also Liao, Shen-yi, “Immersion is attention” (manuscript).
- 54.
See, for example, Münsterberg, The Photoplay, 79–88; David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art. An Introduction (New York: McGraw Hill, 2013), 268–269.
- 55.
This is consistent with an idea that Cohen herself suggests, namely that the increased activation of mental resources involved in processing the musical element of film “heightens our sense of diegetic film world”. In Cohen, “Film Music. Perspectives from Cognitive Psychology”, 366.
- 56.
Currie, Image and Mind, 28–9.
- 57.
- 58.
Chion, Audio-Vision, 12.
- 59.
Annabel J. Cohen, Kelti MacMillan, and Robert Drew, “The role of music, sound effects and speech on absorption in a film: The congruence-associationist model of media cognition” Canadian Acoustics, 34, 3 (2006): 40–41.
- 60.
Bjoern Bonath et al., “Neural Basis of the Ventriloquist Illusion”, Current Biology Volume 17, Issue 19, (2007), 1697–1703; Gregg. H. Recanzone, “Interactions of Auditory and Visual Stimuli in Space and Time” in Hearing Research, 258, 1–2, (2009): 89–99.
- 61.
Frantzolas, Tasos “Everything you hear on film is a lie”, TED video, 16:33, filmed February 2016, posted October 2016, https://www.ted.com/talks/tasos_frantzolas_everything_you_hear_on_film_is_a_lie?language=en
- 62.
Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art. An Introduction, 283.
- 63.
Chion, Audio-Vision, 98.
- 64.
Ibid., 107–8.
- 65.
See Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 49–74; Currie, Image and Mind, 79–90; Dominic Lopes, Understanding Pictures (Oxford University Press, 1996). Currie does mention that this idea can be applied to the case of sound in film, but he does not develop it further. Currie, Image and Mind, 88).
- 66.
For a more extensive application of this idea to the case of sound in film, see Birger Langkjær, “Making fictions sound real. On film sound, perceptual realism and genre”, MedieKultur 48, (2010): 5–17.
- 67.
Chion, Audio-Vision, 23.
- 68.
Ibid., 26.
- 69.
For an argument in the case of images, see Currie, Image and Mind, 86–87.
- 70.
Recanzone, “Interactions of Auditory and Visual Stimuli in Space and Time”.
- 71.
See Cohen, “Film Music. Perspectives from Cognitive Psychology”. The purpose of Cohen’s experiment with the bouncing ball is to show that sound—or music in her case—affect the (emotional) meaning or interpretation of images they accompany. However, the Congruence-Associationist model she provides as an explanation for this phenomenon, can arguably also be applied to the case of fidelity.
- 72.
Todd Berliner and Dale J. Cohen, “The Illusion of Continuity: Active Perception and the Classical Editing System”, “Journal of Film and Video 63, no. 1 (2011): 44–63. Berliner and Cohen take this approach to explain classic editing devices for continuity in film.
- 73.
These parallelisms—specifically regarding the claim of transparency—have indeed been explored to a certain extent in the literature. However, given that these discussions are scattered and not always in texts concerning film, it is worth compiling in this entry the arguments for transparency of sound recordings that can be applicable to film.
- 74.
Kendall Walton, “Transparent pictures: On the nature of photographic realism”, in Noûs 18, 1 (1984):67–72.
- 75.
Andrew Kania has developed this point with respect to musical recordings. See Andrew Kania, “Musical recordings” Philosophy Compass 4, 1 (2009b): 22–38. I base part of this discussion on his.
- 76.
Theorists cited pose these objections for the case of photographs. I “translate” them for the case of sound recordings, but, strictly speaking, the authors are only committed to these objections for the case of vision.
- 77.
Jonathan Cohen and Aaron Meskin, “On the epistemic value of photographs”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 62, 2 (2004):197–210 and Bence Nanay, “Transparency and sensorymotor contingencies”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 91, 4 (2010): 248–57. Nanay’s view is weaker than Cohen and Meskin but follow similar lines of argument. They pose the objection specifically to the case of images.
- 78.
Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image, 61–2; Currie, Image and Mind, 65–9.
- 79.
Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 89.
- 80.
Cf. Cohen and Meskin, “On the epistemic value of photographs”, 89.
- 81.
Kania, Musical Recordings, 10–11.
- 82.
Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 94.
- 83.
Ibid., 95.
- 84.
Michael G. F. Martin, “Sounds and Images,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 52, 4 (2012), 332.
- 85.
The relevant individual here is not the person who emitted the voice, but the sound of the voice itself.
- 86.
An objection to this view cannot be that the content of my perception in the case of the sound recording cannot be the same as the voice perceived directly because the sound recording, could, for example, be noisier (as an old recording). I can see my friend Pau sitting on the chair in front of me with and without glasses. In both experiences I would be seeing Pau—the same individual—even when in one case I see him blurrier.
- 87.
I am very grateful to David Teira, Miguel Ángel Sebastián and Shawn Loht for providing useful comments to improve this chapter.
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Atencia-Linares, P. (2019). Sound in Film. In: Carroll, N., Di Summa, L.T., Loht, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_9
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