Magical History Tour: Music, Sounds & Noises – Sound in Cinema

Supplementing the Magical History Tour in March of this year, dedicated to "Voice, Language and Speaking in Cinema", we will this month again examine the often little regarded audio track and its suggestive power. Whether on-screen or off-screen sounds, diegetic or not, whether complex audio arrangements, an overwhelming sound or breathless silence: The audio track—consisting of language, music and sounds—is an integral component of cinematic experience. It generates an atmosphere or irritates, anticipates images or contradicts them, intensifies or smothers. It creates a world, a sonic space into which the spectator, depending on the sound system or audio equip-ment of the movie theater, can immerse. Since the mid-1970s, numerous audio-engineering innovations have facilitated the shaping of highly complex sound architectures, on which sound designers, sound editors, Foley artists, and sound mixing technicians work for months. But also beyond sound effects, multi-channel sound, surround sound, and Dolby stereo, multilayered, commanding audio tracks have been and are being created that deserve our attention and raise important question pertaining to the relation of image and sound.