Cinema Quarterly (1934 - 1935)

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effects, must be brought in to organize the sounds into a score in which the effect of each one is calculated in relation to the picture and to the other sounds. He will do well to abandon many musical conventions on which he has been brought up, and attempt to approach this new problem of film-sound as a fresh art with many unexplored possibilities, which is only now starting to make its own conventions. He finds four kinds of sound at his disposal : — (i) Music. (2) Natural sound, synchronized (including speech). (3) Natural sound, used contrapuntally. (4) " Sound effects," for emotional or atmospheric purposes. (1) Music undoubtedly fulfils certain functions which nothing else does: it can excite the emotions more powerfully than either spoken word or natural sound. This is because its significance is conventional and imaginary. It is an artificial organization of sound for purely emotional purposes, a representation of physical movement in terms of sound and rhythm. In a film it may be either given its full weight, and perhaps, at emotional peaks, even be allowed to dominate the picture, or it may have only secondary importance as an atmospheric background, possibly with other more important sounds superimposed. The composer approaching the film problem for the first time will be struck by one especially important fact, namely, that in film-music more than in any other kind of music the greatest virtue is economy. A phrase of five bars lasting twenty seconds suitably fitted to thirty feet of picture may express as much as a whole slow movement of a symphony. One minute is quite a considerable length for a piece of music in a film. The academic principles of leisurely formal development are therefore of little use in the composition of film-music, though they may well be employed in the construction of the whole film and its sound-score. The same need for economy applies to the instrumentation; four instruments may well provide a better effect than forty, and a piece that would sound painfully thin and ridiculous in the concert-hall will be perfectly satisfactory over the microphone. It may be said without presumption that the peculiar powers of the microphone have, with the exception of one or two isolated experiments of which little notice has been taken, not been exploited to much advantage up to the present. The most obvious possibility is that of balancing, by placing at suitable distances from the microphone, those instruments whose normal volumes are entirely unequal. The film-composer has to recognize that the much-despised "canned" quality of film-music is actually its most important characteristic and greatest virtue. 72