Ideology and the Practice of Sound Editing and Mixing

Abstract

The practices of sound editing and mixing to be considered here are those developed within the Hollywood studio system. ‘System’, should be understood in a rigorous sense as necessitating a certain amount of standardisation (with respect to techniques and machinery) and a relatively strict division of labour. Nevertheless, these practices have become ‘normalised’ to a large extent outside of that system — they have had enormous impact on the film-making industries of other countries, for instance, and on independent filmmaking activities as well. My assumption is that not only techniques of sound-track construction but the language of technicians and the discourses on technique are symptomatic of particular ideological aims.