Theoretical and Practical Aspects of Building ‘Quiet Spots’ in a Film’s Soundtrack

Abstract

The article looks into the concept of silence in the context of modern sound design. The aesthetic aspect of film sound and cinematic space, including the notion of silence implies an insight into the historical phases of the phenomenon’s development, the artistic and technological contexts of the film’s production. As a research object, silence falls into a number of components (‘quiet spots’) – soundlessness, quietness, pause – which suggests different approaches to their comprehension, accordingly, to their practical implementation in the film’s sound track. ‘Silent spots’ entail essentially different phenomena sharing complete or almost complete – up to the point of indistinguishability by hearing – absence of sound (foleys, dialogue, or music). Absolute silence, a kind of ‘sound vacuum’, is quite a rare and powerful expressive means, motivated either by the dramatic structure and particularities of the intraframe locations, or by the filmmaker’s aesthetic principles. A ‘quiet spot’ in the film will be perceived as such relative to the previous and subsequent scenes, i.e. the formation of silence requires a certain degree of its dynamic difference from more sonically saturated or openly loud scenes. Silence does not only have acoustic, but also semantic and aesthetic parameters, in a certain temporal modality (from linearrealistic to vertical-existential time). The analysis of the artistic implementation of silence in auteur sound filmmaking shows that silence is not only an acoustic phenomenon, but also an existential one, associated with the specific power of the viewer’s aesthetic experience of a multi-level semantic space revealed to them via the specific aspects of the acoustic space. Therefore, by creating silence the sound designer must envision their actions from both the practical and aesthetic side, taking into account a variety of pragmatic and artistic issues. In this regard, sound design lies within the constantly evolving process of interaction between technical innovations, various artistic practices and academic art studies.