We tend to think of film as a visual art form, and it is! But the great thing about film is that it isn’t just one thing: it’s certainly visual like painting or photography; it's kinetic like dance; narratively structured like books and oral storytelling; and aural like music (and real life...). The sound for a film gives us things like the human voice, diegetic sound (sound within the context of the story), incidental sound (to suggest mood), the musical score. There has pretty much always been sound in films, as even during the age of silent films music would have been played nearby in the theater to accompany the projection of the moving image. But the synchronized sound that we are accustomed to today had a difficult and uphill journey, as it required fairly sophisticated technology to synchronize both a film cameras with audio recording devices and projectors with speakers.

The first commercial, feature-length film to feature sync sound was Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer (1927) starring Al Jolson, and back then it was pretty earth-shattering (not to mention totally racist). Though today we take sound for granted, we must recognize that it has had a complicated role in the history of film, and was largely bemoaned at first as a gimmick that cheapened the emerging artform that was film.

The Reading

Read Chapter 8 (pgs. 220 – 224) in The Art of Watching Films to learn about sound in film.

The Watching

Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound (2019) by Midge Costin

This module’s film takes a slightly different approach than a traditional narrative feature. Midge Costin’s Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound (2019) is a documentary that pulls back the curtain on one of the most overlooked — yet absolutely essential — aspects of filmmaking: sound design.

Through interviews with legendary sound designers, editors, and directors, the film explores how sound is constructed, manipulated, and layered to shape our emotional and psychological experience of a film. Think iconic sounds like the lightsaber in Star Wars, or the unsettling atmospheres of films like Apocalypse Now. This documentary reveals how sound is not only supportive of the image, but how fundamental it is to creating meaning.

What makes this film especially valuable for this module is that it gives you a vocabulary and framework for understanding what you’re hearing. It breaks down the relationship between dialogue, ambient sound, Foley (named after a real guy, btw!), sound effects, and score, and shows how these elements work together to guide attention, build tension, and create immersion.

As you watch, try to connect what you’re seeing and hearing in the documentary to the concepts from the reading. Think about how sound operates in films you’ve already seen in this course. Ask yourself:

• How does sound direct your attention or shape your interpretation of a scene?
• When does sound feel realistic, and when is it clearly constructed or exaggerated?
• How might removing or altering sound change the meaning of an image?

Having seen Sunrise (A Song of Two Humans) by F.W. Murnau in Module 01, consider how different the experience of film becomes once synchronized sound is introduced — and how much of what we “feel” in a scene is actually coming from what we hear.

Note: as always, the media for this can be found in the LEH 353 - Visual Storytelling library on Plex.

The Questions

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