Cinematic Sound

Cinema employs sound as an equal, or arguably even more important, to the visuals. Diegetic and non-diegetic sound makes up the soundscape of a film. Non-diegetic sound, sounds that do not originate naturally from the actions in the frame, tends to come in the form of music. Music can establish time, place and tone, explore subjective psychological viewpoints, build up to impending drama, emphasize action and link scenes together (Rothbart, 2013, p.1213). The sense of scale and intensity that sound can create is not to be understated. A film without sound is still a film, but there is an immersion and an excitement that is lost without it. Imagine watching Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2012) without the now infamous BWAAA sounds.

Sound is the one tool that photography, on its own, has no way of replicating. The visual aesthetics of cinema are created photographically and are inherent in both mediums. Montage cannot be forced upon the viewer as frames per second, but it can be replicated as a series of photographic images viewed together, as is common in the world of photography, or as images composited together to form a photomontage as seen in Hannah Höch’s Cut with a Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany or David Hockney’s cubist portraits. Sound could be played in the same room as photography is being shown, it could be represented as visual sound waves, or the photographs could be shown in sequence alongside sound. Sound is unique among cinematic techniques in that it cannot be embedded directly in photography.

If sound can be cinematic can something wholly removed from the visual be cinematic, and what would this reveal about the term cinematic itself?

FOREST (For a Thousand Years) (2012) is an audio art installation by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. The audience is guided into a forest where speakers are placed in the trees and bushes in every direction. They are encouraged to sit down and to walk through the space as the twenty-minute piece is played. The works subjects are eclectic and disparate. A plane is heard overhead, gunfire in the distance, mumbled voices, choral and orchestral music is heard every so often. There is no direct narrative, but instead a raw emotional one. The piece is overwhelming at times, with an intensity and surround that aesthetically feels cinematic. The music builds tension and the gunfire sparks danger. At times it could be a Spielberg war film, and at others a Terrence Malick mood piece. The sheer scale and intensity of it begged for the label of cinematic. In an interview with ArtNet Janet Cardiff compared the making of FOREST to a film, with a large crew and a shooting script (Halperin, 2017). Cardiff also states that the inspiration came simply from their previous work The Murder of Crows (2009). This piece was much more direct in its narrative, with clear spoken words and a three-act structure. If, as stated before, cinematic is purely a descriptor of the nature of a works influence from cinema, then The Murder of Crows and FOREST (For a Thousand Years) suggest that cinematic can indeed be applied to non-visual artwork.