THE FOLLOWING ARE ONLY ABSTRACTS FROM LARGER ESSAY. PLEASE DOWNLOAD THE FILE FOR A COMPLETE COPY.

Walter Murch, won an Oscar for sound for ``Apocalypse Now'' (1979) and was
awarded Oscars for editing and sound for ``The English Patient'' (1996)

- -

" So we all begin as hearing beings — our four and a half month baptism in a sea of
sound must have a profound and everlasting effect on us — but from the moment of
birth onward, hearing seems to recede into the background of our consciousness and
function more as an accompaniment to what we see. Why this should be, rather than
the reverse, is a mystery: why does not the first of our senses to be activated retain a
lifelong dominance of all the others?

Something of this same situation marks the relationship between what we see and
hear in the cinema. Film sound is rarely appreciated for itself alone but functions
largely as an enhancement of the visuals: by means of some mysterious perceptual
alchemy, whatever virtues sound brings to film are largely perceived and appreciated
by the audience in visual terms. The better the sound, the better the image.

What in fact had given film sound its brief reign over the film image was a temporary
and uncharacteristic inflexibility. In those first few years after the commercialization
of film sound, in 1926, everything had to be recorded simultaneously — music,
dialogue, sound effects — and once recorded, nothing could be changed. The old Mel
Brooks joke about panning the camera to the left and revealing the orchestra in the
middle of the desert was not far from the truth.

Clem Portman (Richard's father), Gordon Sawyer, Murray Spivack and the other
founding fathers of film sound had the responsibility for recording Eddie Cantor's
voice, and the orchestra accompanying him, and his tap dancing all at the same time,
in as good a balance as they could manage. There was no possibility of fixing it later
in the mix, because this was the mix. And there was no possibility of cutting out the
bad bits, because there was no way to cut what was being chiseled into the whirling
acetate of the Vitaphone discs. It had to be right the first time, or you called "Cut!"
and began again. "

type: pdf | size: 172.92 Kb