“In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they’re not.”
—(attributed to) Yogi Berra
The social and industrial milieu for MSNL readers and contributors was effectively isolated from academics interested in film sound. Admittedly, none around the publication’s little group had encountered much theoretical scholarship about film sound. Beyond the arcane passions of MSNL’s auto-didactic sound historians Rick Mitchell and George Simpson, both of whom were excellent writers with professionally critical ears, there was not a formal presence of Theory itself.
The presumption was that the field in which we made a living was of no interest to serious scholars at all (a fair statement for 1989); it was especially evident that popular film critics rarely ever mentioned sound in their writing. Those few scraps of reviewers’ work that even acknowledged the human sense of hearing, to the boundless irritation of our community, might mention a musical score, referring to it as “sound.” 1 And sometimes reviewers made reference to sound effects as “special effects,” unforgivably conflating the creative arts of audio with those of the visual. No one would ever mention dialogue at all, except to complain when it was inaudible, but in Hollywood that is a rare failure.
Exemplifying the precision demanded by professional practice is the standard separation of soundtracks into three stems: Dialogue, FX, and Music. They are the Holy Trinity of post-production sound.
The unsung production mixers, dialogue editors, and re-recording mixers in our population are familiar with the lay audience’s apparent superstition that actors’ dialogue flows magically through the camera lens itself, and somehow comes perfectly out of a theater speaker to the human ear. Perhaps it was quixotic for MSNL contributors to take on that particular battle for understanding, but at least our readers already understood the value of a great theater sound system, an articulate and dramatic mix, and the intelligent and creative layering of FX, Foley, and BG’s.
There is among artisans a sharp awareness of many unspoken principals, while they are not particularly identified as theory. As a professor in Sound Design, the author reminds students that post-production craftspeople employ theories unconsciously in their praxis, but rarely if ever do they state them verbally. These include:
Gianluca Sergi’s The Dolby Era: Film Sound in Contemporary Hollywood (Manchester University Press, 2004) deals with roughly the same historical scope as these pages. Sergi has the right idea when he explains that the San Francisco Bay area was a power center for Big Sound in this period, and he smartly refines the definition of Hollywood to include New York City and San Francisco/Marin County/Berkeley area filmmaking. But The Dolby Era’s concentration on Northern California’s influential post-production sound community (with the exception of an interview with Los Angeles’ Bruce Stambler) risks the exclusion of Southern Californians’ contributions to the art of film post-production sound, as well as the evolving concerns of production sound experts.
Sergi writes an excellent technical history of the Dolby Stereo optical format and its place as a dominant force for film exhibition, including its wide appeal to Baby Boomer audiences in the late 70s. There is an excellent interview with Ray Dolby. The Dolby Era was published over ten years ago. Film sound educators should be grateful that we have that material now, especially considering Ray Dolby’s death in 2013.
The Dolby Era rightly “refuses the trap of the great man theory” and argues against students’ and scholars’ applying the worn-out auteur theory to well-known sound designers. Vincent LoBrutto also gets this right, in Sound-on-Film: Interviews with Creators of Film Sound. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers (1994).
LoBrutto and Hollywood Sound Design and Moviesound Newsletter equally show sound to be the result of collective authorship, both in the sense of contemporary workers’ collaborations in a time period and with awareness of their place in the context of the many crafts comprising film sound, and the alterations of crafts and workflows through history’s waves of change.
Sergi nimbly presents the antiquated critical arguments for and against consideration of sound as part of the now-traditional study of cinema and shows many examples in works of film study that lack serious understanding of sound. He cites one usually insightful scholar, for example, confusing photographic image with reality when compared to sound: missing the image’s artifice as created via cinematography, lighting, and production design, and somehow arguing that sound is artificial and image is representational. John Belton has contributed some excellent essays to our field, but for how long will his acceptance of 1930s French-style son direct be official scholarly doctrine? It is time to more fully understand the excellent construction of the omniscient ear of the Hollywood soundtrack. Finally, The Dolby Era offers commendatory reference to Rick Altman’s work (Sound Theory, Sound Practice. New York, NY: Routledge [1992] as well as many other titles) when Altman shows the “uneasy relationship that scholars have had with film sound” and to Elizabeth Weis (in Film Sound, Theory and Practice, with Belton, and in other essays) for showing how sound workers, dealing with what audiences perceive as mere technology, have elevated their work from artisanship to the higher tiers of art.
Some of Hollywood Sound Design and Moviesound Newsletter’s interviews from the Newsletter may be considered comparable to material in LoBrutto’s 1994 conversations, but engage with different people in an earlier context. Some of our articles, editorials, and essays may be comparable to material in the following books, but are different in nature, having been written by practitioners, not scholars:
Altman, R. ed. Sound Theory, Sound Practice. New York, NY: Routledge (1992).
Beck, J. Designing Sound: Audiovisual Aesthetics in 1970s American Cinema (Techniques of the Moving Image). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press (2016).
Beck, J. and Grajeda, T. ed. Lowering the Boom—Critical Studies in Film Sound. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press (2008).
Buhler, J., Neumeyer, D. and Deemer, R. Hearing The Movies, Music and Sound in Film History. New York, NY: Oxford University Press (2015).
Kalinak, K. ed. Sound: Dialogue, Music, and Effects. (1st ed.). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press (2015).
Sterne, J. ed. The Sound Studies Reader. New York, NY: Routledge (2012).
and
Weis, E. and Belton, J. Film Sound, Theory and Practice. New York, NY: Columbia University Press (1985).
Hollywood Sound Design and Moviesound Newsletter, like LoBrutto, informs readers from the wider perspective of the entire post sound, production sound, and exhibition perspectives. The following excellent books are critically important to the study of film sound, and each scrutinizes film with its particular focus:
Beauchamp, Robin. Designing Sound for Animation. (2nd ed.). Burlington, MA: Focal Press (2013).
Holman, Tomlinson. Sound for Film. (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Focal Press (2001).
Murch, Walter. In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing. (2nd ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Silman-James Press (2001).
Purcell, John. Dialogue Editing for Motion Pictures. (2nd ed.). Burlington, MA: Focal Press (2014).
Sonnenschein, David. Sound Design: The Expressive Power of Music, Voice and Sound Effects in Cinema. Studio City: Michael Wiese Productions (2001).
Viers, Ric. The Sound Effects Bible: How to Create and Record Hollywood Style Sound Effects. Studio City, CA: Michael Weise Productions (2010).
and
Yewdall, David. Practical Art of Motion Picture Sound. (4th ed.). Burlington, MA: Elsevier (2012).
Hollywood Sound Design and Moviesound Newsletter subsumes a rich variety of interview materials in its observation of the culture of movie sound work. Vanessa Ament in The Foley Grail: The Art of Performing Sound for Film, Games, and Animation, 2nd ed. (Focal Press, 2014), LoBrutto, and Yewdall both achieve this demonstrably well.