This chapter asks you to consider the various techniques of sound including sound recording, mixing, and reproduction. Sound is powerful because it engages a distinct sense mode and can actively shape how we perceive and interpret the image on screen. Several aspects, such as loudness, pitch, and timbre are the fundamentals of film sound. Rhythm, fidelity, and spatial conditions give temporal dimension to sound and offer many creative possibilities to the filmmaker.

After reading this chapter, you should be able to understand:

1. Sound is as flexible and wide-ranging as other film techniques, but harder to study because audiences typically think of sound as simply an accompaniment to the "real" cinema: the moving images.
   
   
2. Sound in the cinema is of three types: speech, music, and noise (also called sound effects). The creation of sound resembles editing of the image track. Though the audience is not aware of sonic manipulations, the sound track demands as much choice and control as does the visual track. Much work goes into capturing specific sounds at specific qualities for a film. Speech, music, and noise are all used differently and the hierarchy of their importance depends on the purpose of a particular scene.
   
   
3. Sound mixing is the overlap of several tracks or layers to create a combined and ongoing stream of auditory information. Sound can be used either to coordinate with the images on screen or to contrast with them. A sound's fidelity (its realistic quality) can achieve different effects when accompanied by images.
   
   
4. Diegetic sound has a source in the story or film world. Nondiegetic sound comes from a source outside the story world and does not cross over into recognition by the actors or action. Diegetic sound can be external or internal. Sometimes the line between diegetic and nondiegetic sound is blurred.
   
   
5. Sound perspective is the sense of spatial distance and location analogous to the cues for visual perspective.
   
   
6. The filmmaker uses sound to represent time in various ways. Synchronous sound is heard at the same time as the appearance of the visual source of the sound. Simultaneous sound is found when, in terms of story events, the sound takes place at the same time as the image. Though it is most common for the sound and the image to be presented at a simultaneous moment in the narrative, sound can also precede or follow the action with which it is associated.
   
   
7. Robert Bresson's AManEscaped provides a good example of the multiple functions of sound technique.