I want to be inside the picture, not just distanced from the picture. And I think again and again and again and again every day, each time I write a piece, to make sure that it is really getting into the frame. Into the picture itself, as if it was an actor. Like another actor that comes in and plays with the other ones. You're in the same landscape (emphasis mine).25
Theoretical Frame II: Timbral Analysis
Film composers and filmmakers devote considerable effort to developing their soundworlds. As I hope to show in my upcoming analyses, much insight can be gained by shifting focus to the “stuff” of sounds and developing ways of taking about the sounds themselves. My questions when focusing on timbre will include: how does a sound affect the immediate onscreen moment, and how does it work with the soundworld of the score or film? How does a particular timbre interact with other sounds in the soundtrack? How does it interact with characters on-screen? How was it mixed in the recording? Are there macro, large-scale formal structures that can be found in film scores, but created not with line and structure, but with tone color? Writing about timbre is tricky. Like Wittgenstein’s seemingly impossible-to-answer question (can you say how a clarinet sounds?) it is difficult to describe timbre without using synesthetic terms like bright, dark, cold, or hot. In an interview with timbre researcher Stephen McAdams, Tim Falconer likens these descriptors to the metalanguage wine drinkers use at tastings: [McAdams] didn’t call it a completely stupid notion. In fact, he pointed out that there were a lot of similarities between the way we describe the taste and smell of wine and the way we describe the timbre of an instrument. Without a clear lexicon, we have to borrow vocabulary from elsewhere when we talk about these things. BMI, Multi Award-Winning Composer Alexandre Desplat Speaks Candidly With Jon Burlingame – Part 1, accessed July 6, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT30CByZP8w&t=297s, 4:57. 25
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