“You Have to Feel a Sound for It to Be Effective”

In an interview with Sound Designer Alan Splet, he foregrounds the production and experience of sound as material. Elaborating on the detailed process of manufacturing the noise of fantastical sandworms for Dune (dir. David Lynch, 1984), he remarks that what he and his assistant produced came out “like a mild earthquake traveling under the desert” (quoted in Gentry 1984: 68). When asked why he did not just use the sound of a real earthquake, Splet recounts the practicalities of recording and problems of inferior sound quality as reasons why using an ‘authentic’ noise would not work. Putting aside the issue of aural fidelity, he goes on to say:

Exactly how an earthquake sounds is kind of arbitrary. It’s really more of a feeling than a sound […]. It’s something you can hear, but also something you can feel. You have to feel a sound for it to be effective sometimes.

(68) For Splet, sound is to be experienced, appealing to the body as much as the ear. While the physicality of hearing has been noted by Rick Altman (1992), Sean Cubitt (1998), Vivian Sobchack (2005), and Edward Branigan (2010), among others, it is worth thinking further about how sound is used within film and television to expressively communicate and develop the density of the fictional world we experience and to which we respond. Such responsiveness to the affective potential of sound is informed by phenomenological approaches that seek to understand the perception of film as shaped by our lived experience and physical interactions with the world. While such approaches consider the ‘depths’ of the body, frequently blurring the boundaries between film body, bodies on-screen, and the watching body, this chapter seeks to explore the affective qualities of surface as expressively produced by these various components of soundtrack in order to highlight the important connection between sound and feeling that Splet notes. Attention to surface therefore enables consideration of the film world as designed and as affective. Sound effects can match surfaces seen on-screen, fill in textural details of what is unseen, or provide a material context for an environment, even if not matched directly. The progression of music, its contours and shape as modified through rhythm, harmony, and pitch, creates expressive sensations. The 86combination of the soundtrack elements in the mix can be registered as multiple surfaces forming an overall texture.