The use of sound in movies

? With regard to the comprehensive application of sound in movies, Comrade Chen Xihe's article "The Application of Sound in Grasping Movies" (published in the second and third issues of Film Art 1979) has made an extremely comprehensive and detailed discussion. This paper only prepares some problems that should be paid special attention to at present to elaborate.

sense of space

? The picture of a movie is a planar two-dimensional space. Visually, it depends on the composition of the picture and the size ratio between the subjects to create an illusion of a three-dimensional three-dimensional space. If we can make full use of the characteristics of various spatial relations in the fifth dimension of sound, such as the relationship between distance, the reverberation characteristics of indoor space and the characteristics of free space, it will help to strengthen the three-dimensional sense of the picture, and even use sound to express the spatial relations outside the picture.

In fact, the relationship between sound and distance has been paid attention to as early as ten years before the appearance of audio movies. 1928 Griffith's perspective shot in abraham lincoln shows "voices from afar". In the German film Der Blaue Engel 193 1, outdoor vocals changed with the opening and closing of windows. Of course, this is only a rough sign. With the progress of technology and the exploration of art, the application of sound spatial sense is more and more diverse and realistic. For example, in a British film "1 1 5th of the month" in the 1970s, the sheriff walked through three rooms while talking. In each room of different sizes, the reverberation characteristics of his voice were different, which made the audience feel the movement in the sound. Citizen Kane, an American film, uses the characteristics of reverberation to express the loneliness of the grateful king in that empty palace house in his later years. In a film about the French resistance movement, there is a scene in which the fighters of the resistance movement fight with fascist tanks. Soldiers and tanks never appear in the same picture, and there is no difference between scenes. The spatial system of the two is expressed by the sound of tank tracks. These techniques are very common in foreign films. In recent two years, due to the application of Dolby noise reduction system, the sense of space has become an indispensable demand. American director Altman used eight channels and a dozen wireless microphones for synchronous recording when shooting location in several films, and the effect can be imagined.

? As far as the conditions of recording equipment are concerned, we are not backward, just because we do not pay enough attention to this aspect and do not give full play to the advantages of the equipment. There is no requirement in art, of course, there is no exploration and experiment in technology, or there is a requirement and I don't know how to use it (as far as I know, some electroacoustic research institutions have research results in this field, but our films have not been used). For example, the three films "Cherry Blossom", "anxious to return" and "When the Mountain is Full of Red Leaves" released last year, although they noticed the echo of free space, the sounds on the bare mountain, the deep forest and the Three Gorges River all sounded the same, lacking delicate changes and losing their sense of reality. In a musician's biopic, the sound is handled in more detail, but no matter what the scene is, no matter how far apart the hero and heroine are, or the distance is changing, whether by the river or in the bamboo forest, the sound of the piano is always in the foreground and has not changed. In another film, two people are fighting between rocks on a foggy mountain, but their footsteps are not just the characteristics coming through the fog, but the sound of stepping on an empty floor. Another example is the scene where the crashed car was identified in the garage in the French movie Angry Man. All the tiny movements echoed in the empty garage, but the Chinese dialogue prepared for this scene was pure tone in the recording studio, which made the audience feel very uncomfortable.

Sound also has the function of extending the picture space. The space of the screen cannot exceed four frames of the screen. If you use a variety of off-screen sounds with different perspective relationships, it is like opening a picture frame on the screen. The sound of invisible sound sources can produce special effects. For example, the scene of Bai Liping's apartment on New Year's Eve in Song of Youth successfully used this effect. We first saw several friends of Bai gathered in the main hall, chatting and singing "exile songs". Cui Xiuyu couldn't restrain her feelings and ran into the wing. Then the picture shows Hak-Rim Paek and Lin walking into the wing to comfort them. At this time, the first "Song of Exile" sounded outside the painting, with shouts of grief and despair and the sound of breaking glass. This effect (including vocals, acoustics and songs) not only strengthens the emotional atmosphere of the wing scene, but also makes the audience subconsciously see the scene of the main room, thus expanding the space of the picture and strengthening the sense of depth. In Angry Man, the hero was walking in the foreground of the screen when he followed the nightclub owner. Suddenly there was hurried footsteps behind him, and two men rushed up from behind to catch him. Because of the strong sense of space in the footsteps, people feel as if those two jumped from the audience hall to the screen.

The scene of catching a thief behind the wall in the Indian film "Wanderer" adds comedy effect. I think, especially in today's increasingly diverse possibilities of voice expression, the composition of the picture should no longer be limited to the "closed" treatment of the traditional stage picture: it is a world of its own, isolated from the outside of the picture, and the attention center of the characters is always kept in the picture; We should use more "open" pictures to compose pictures, break the stage frame and make the space more open and free. And sound will greatly contribute to such performance, thus making the picture more realistic.

? convey a message

? When it comes to conveying information, it is generally considered as a line. Therefore, the ideological nature of this dialogue-a film carrying such a sacred function, dare not be easily used for other purposes, for fear that the audience will not understand and hear clearly. The positive and negative characters on the screen enunciate clearly, and few people connect with Ba. Isn't the ambiguous words deliberately said by the gangster in Waiting for Darkness another meaning-superior to the other party and a shoo-in? In fact, in all kinds of war movies, there is such a scene. The thin figure of the heroine stands in the middle of the street and falls into the Tanqueray passing by on both sides. Everything is drowned in the deafening sound of tanks. It clearly expresses the theme of the film.

Sound can also be used subjectively. In the film Silence by Swedish director Bergman, there is a scene in which two sisters and their son come to a foreign city on their journey. Tanks rumbled in the street, as if a coup was taking place. My son squatted under the window of the hotel and looked down. His mother didn't want to hear these noises, so she told him to close the window. But before the window closed, the noise suddenly disappeared. This is from the mother's point of view, subjectively turning off all sounds. Then the child's aunt was very unhappy with the music played on the radio in the room and went to close the window. At this time, the music disappeared and the sound of tanks came from the street. When she turned and walked towards the center of the room, the music started again. She went to the table and turned off the radio. The music stopped. Of course, this is a rare way to express subjective voice.

Dramatic function

? Since sound (not just dialogue) can express information, it can of course directly participate in the plot, so that it can promote the development of the plot, especially music, which can directly reveal the internal laws of external actions.

There is a scene in the American film Cui Di Xiao Chun: the composer Strauss sits at the piano and writes a love song "When We were Young" for the singer Clara, and his wife Polti comes into the room with tea. She took it for granted that this love song was written for her. This made Alice very angry and showed her indifference and disgust. Bo was confused by this sudden change. Later, when his music friend was playing this piece, Clara came. Bo, immersed in happiness, suddenly realized from Clara's expression that this song was originally written for that woman and her husband had a new love. We saw and heard the performance of this piece of music and the change of wave's facial expression from the screen. In this way, this song not only promotes the development of the plot, but also makes the conflict superficial, and the song itself is beautiful. If it is deleted, the play will have to be designed differently.

By the way, as I said before, the picture was forced to do a lot of illustrations for the episode, which was very clumsy. It seems that the problem is that the episode is out of the plot. It often appears after the high tide, just where it develops to the low tide. Therefore, instead of adding fuel to the fire, it becomes redundant. The legend of going up the mountain in heaven shows that when painting foreign songs, the picture is only a silent scene on the surface of the hero and heroine, so it is not redundant, but sets off the artistic conception.

? Periodic feeling

Pay attention to the sense of the times of sound, especially music. It is difficult to understand that accordionist played merry widow in the park during the Cultural Revolution. The "Rebellion Song" of that period appeared in Maple Leaf: "Take a pen as a sword, and Qi Xin will fight gangs together ...", which suddenly strengthened the flavor of the times. In the early spring of February, "Floating Clouds" sung by primary school students and "Down with Local tyrants" in "Sparkling Red Star" all added the flavor of the times. However, the piano music played by Xiao, no matter from the composition skills of the characters or amateur playing skills, does not conform to the actual situation of the times, which affects the realism of the play. The artistic pursuit beyond the times and objective reality can only give people a false feeling. Just as it is difficult for a sound engineer to get a sense of space in a spacious room of 30 square meters where an ordinary single cadre lives, it has become a fake. Here I want to mention the piano of Lan Tao's family. In a remote town in the south of the Yangtze River, the climate is humid. How can the piano be so well protected? There are no out-of-tune keys. Xiao Jian is new in autumn. He didn't try to play scales. There are many pianos out of tune in foreign movies: in my heart, the high note A of the piano is always out of tune; Several notes of the piano in a Soviet war movie are out of tune; In the American film "Mrs. Minerva", when my little sister played "Wedding March" to welcome her newly married brother and sister-in-law, none of the notes on the piano were accurate. In the American film Bullfighting, when a young composer played his new work on the piano in a suburban restaurant, it seemed that the creator couldn't bear to destroy the music with an out-of-tune piano, so he made a compromise: the white decorative piece of the old piano with seven keys had fallen off, revealing yellow wood. Foreign films pay attention to the authenticity of details everywhere, but we are too careless.

The musical instruments used to play music also have a certain relationship with the times (as well as ethnic groups and regions). Of course, melody plays a leading role. In any case, the use of electric guitars in ancient historical films may not be accepted by demanding audiences. However, it is another matter to create special sound effects with electronic sounders.

? Sense of time

The sounds of nature or timing tools are often used in movies to express the shift of time or the change of seasons. The problem is that some technologies are repeated over and over again, and they are already in a rut. Why can't we further develop our imagination and explore various sound features in the real environment to express time and season? For example, the characteristics of sound propagation under different climatic conditions, acoustics under different seasonal customs and habits, and so on. , can be used from the artistic expression. In early spring and February, the atmosphere of the twelfth lunar month in the south of the Yangtze River is created by the sizzling sound of hot pot, which is novel in concept and has ethnic customs. Isn't it annoying that the author intentionally uses cicada chirping to express midsummer?

The British film Meet Me Late played a well-known piano concerto on the radio throughout the film. The story uses flashbacks, and the actual time is lengthened in several flashbacks. When the picture returns to the background at the beginning, the music is nearing the end. Therefore, except as an emotional background, the audience is not given a concept of limited screen time-20 minutes is needed to play this paragraph.

? The clever use of sound can also constitute a flashback of sound. For example, in the American movie "Our Golden Age", the demobilized soldiers who lost their jobs after the war happened to come to the cemetery where the abandoned machine wreckage was parked. He boarded the wreckage of the same type of plane he had flown, sat in the seat of the bomber, immersed in memories. The film doesn't show the memory intuitively. The camera still captured the front of the bomber with the engine removed from the outside. Outside the screen, the resonance sound of the four engines of the heavy bomber sounded. This set of acoustics was gradually replaced by bass instruments, forming a tense piece of music, mixed with the shouting in the battle that year: "Found the target!" " ""The wing is on fire! "..... In this way, under the condition that the picture remains unchanged, the voice brings the audience back to the fighting past of the fighting hero, which forms a sharp social critical contrast with his plight of unemployment after demobilization. At the same time, in this well-thought-out, slow and internally tense short paragraph, a series of fast and short flashback shots are used to avoid destroying its rhythm.

Comprehensive application

There used to be a view that music and sound effects could not be used at the same time. This stereotype has long been broken by advanced technology and successful artistic practice. Voice, sound effects, music, and all the sounds needed for the artistic effect of movies can appear at the same time and can be required by different strengths. This is an artistic problem, just like orchestration in orchestral music. As long as the spectrum is properly processed, all "sounds" can still be clearly heard. For example, a western composer said that because an actor is a deep bass, he noticed that someone gave him a piece of music in another range. It is a simple technical problem to deal with different sounds in different spectral regions (this is the application of sound masking effect in actual recording), but it can give the creator full freedom of artistic expression. In the art of film as a technical product, it is extremely important for artists to master certain scientific and technological knowledge. Unfortunately, many of our artistic creators are ashamed to understand technology, so his means of expression are of course greatly limited.

In the opening caption background of the British film "Ka madame roland", there are a series of shots of carolan riding a horse. There are galloping hooves and ducks in the pond on the vocal cords, and at the same time, there is gradually beautiful lyric music depicting the heroine's fate. Although the two sounds are slow and urgent, the rhythm is different, but the effect is extremely unified, which forms a counterpoint to the two aspects of this character's personality. Another murder film, Black Christmas, uses the Christmas chorus of Silent Night, but with the picture, at the end of the song, there are several sad dogs barking in the distance, which immediately casts a shadow over the festive atmosphere of Christmas.

? The scene where mother and son meet in prison in China's new film The Tenth Bullet Hole is also played with music. Some interference with its effect, such as the cello's range is too close to the sound, is a technical problem.

Give two examples.

Taking the opening of a relatively general American film "The Police Sister" in the 1940s as an example, we try to explain how to use the sound, acoustics and music in the film in a balanced way.

The story of the film is one of the cliches in Hollywood: a girl from a poor family yearns for the music scene, and after many twists and turns, she finally gets the appreciation of the old man, meets a talented person and finally gets married. The film started on the train, and those singers who wanted to go on stage knew that a composer was also on the train, and they all wanted to break into his room and show their talents. The composer was so angry that the black flight attendant came up with an idea to draw these people away. As a result, the heroine Anna found the wrong room and sang a song for a salesman.

The theme music that unreasonably borrows the form of opera overture to praise Anna's love sounded on the opening subtitles. When the picture turns to the emotional shadow in the train carriage, the rising phrase of violin is transformed into music that mainly imitates the rhythm and whistle of the train, which slightly hints at the singing and dancing music nature of the upcoming Sun Twin Sisters. The music faded away, the train stereo appeared, and with the closing of the aisle and the sound of "thank you", twin sisters appeared. Their visual and auditory images reflect a vulgar word: wearing vulgar clothes, speaking with an indigenous accent in southern Texas, indecent language, high range, sharp timbre, heavy throat and fast pace. The black flight attendant pointed out the composer's door to them. The twin sisters rang the doorbell and the composer opened the door. They immediately sang and danced in the aisle. The program was vulgar concert hall singing and dancing, and the last sentence was a little out of tune (accompanied by imaginary music, and the train had a strong rhythm). The two men were panting after the dance. The composer politely refused and closed the door. His voice is a high-pitched voice among boys, with a gentle tone and impatience. The train rumbled as soon as the music stopped. After the twin sisters left, the composer opened the door and shouted "waiter!" When he spoke to the black flight attendant, there were several long whistles besides the rumble of the car, which set off the hoarse voice of the black. His pronunciation is vague, tenor and slow. Anna walked down the aisle with her back to the camera in another first-class carriage. After passing the junction of two cars, the car made a loud noise. After entering the next carriage and closing the door, the sound of the carriage became dull again. Anna walked into the second-class hard-seat carriage with a noisy voice on her face. Anna sat silently next to her twin sister with her back to the camera. Those two people are still chattering about the composer. The train stereo continues. A dining car attendant knocked on the xylophone (135 1) to announce lunch, and the twin sisters left their seats to eat in the dining car. When Anna turned her head to reveal her beautiful silhouette face in close range, she whispered, "waiter!" " "Pure northern accent, lower range than twin sister, soft and pleasant tone, calm tone (this is a visual and auditory appearance carefully designed for a singer). The train stereo is always on. The waiter told her a wrong room number. Anna knocked at the door (sound) When he walked in, there was a thump of passengers covering the glass cover in the room. Anna seized the opportunity and sang an elegant lyric song after two sentences. His singing meets Bella Canto's requirements in all aspects. Immediately after the introduction of this song, the rhythm of the train was added, and the rhythm changes of the train entering and leaving the station were also hinted at halfway. When the composer got off at the station and stopped at the platform to buy a newspaper, Anna's slight singing came from the distant carriage, which caught the composer's attention through all kinds of noises on the platform and the deflation of the front of the car. The composer talked to the newspaper seller while listening. Their voices are consistent with the picture-in the foreground (! )。 After Anna finished singing in the carriage, the sound of the train appeared immediately and continued until the scene ended with the door closing.

13 minute opening scene, how detailed the sound design is. First of all, there are differences in pitch, timbre, accent and rhythm among the five people who appear, and a contrast between vulgarity and elegance is specially arranged between the voices of twin sisters and Anna, thus highlighting Anna. Two songs took three and a half minutes. The first is to set off the second. What keeps the audience interested is its "inferiority". The second song is not only "beautiful", but also has dramatic suspense. This is the first time that the composer missed Anna's singing four times in the story. In addition, although the signature of this film is the singing of Diana Durbin, a new female singer at that time, the creator pushed the beautiful singing into the background according to the requirements of the plot (not the concert) and put the composer's voice in the foreground reasonably, and mixed all kinds of noises on the platform between the foreground and the background, thus giving people a sense of artistic reality. As for the relationship between dialogue, sound and music, the design is also very detailed. When there is no music, the sound is always continuous, showing the acoustic characteristics of spatial environment change. Opening the door, closing the door, breaking the glass, panting and so on are all displayed one by one. In the scene of the dialogue, the sound is constant. When music appears, although the sound is interrupted, the music still maintains its sound characteristics in rhythm. However, this is an old film 35 years ago, with outdated technology and art, thin voice and too much imaginary music.

Here is an example of using human voice, natural sound and music at the same time to cause emotional atmosphere transformation.

There is a scene in the American film Cui Di Chun Xiao (1939): When the singer Clara finally lets his beloved Strauss stay in Vienna and board the boat alone, Strauss stands on the dock with mixed feelings. When the ship set sail, the band on board played When We Were Young (a love song written by Svec), which was very popular in Vienna at that time. Clara sang this song to the music and expressed her attachment and farewell to Sven for the last time. The song is melodious. As the ship sails into the night fog of the Danube, the song gets farther and farther. Finally, as the ship's shadow disappears into the fog, the sound is lingering. It is conceivable that if you can't bear to damage the singing skills of opera stars here and always put the voice in the foreground, how can you show the sense of farewell required by the movie plot? This is the artistic level 4 1 years ago. ) Through the night fog, the low whistle of the ship came in the distance ... another ... another, farther and farther away. Strauss wandered on the dock. Occasionally, the carriage came back late, and the hooves and wheels rattled on the stone road. Strauss stayed for a long time until dawn. The sun is exposed to the horizon. Outside the screen, there are several notes suggesting the motivation of the Blue Danube. Strauss strolled to the water's edge and sat on the stone steps, lost in thought. A group of laughing laundry girls came running backstage, and the laughter of youth slightly attracted Strauss's attention. A shopkeeper came out of the shop with a wooden basin and crashed a basin of dirty water on the water near Strauss. Strauss was surprised. The melody of "Blue Danube" brewed in Strauss's mind sounded on the water in the sun. When this piece of music was finished, the bright sunshine along the Danube appeared on the screen. A small steamboat passed by, making a clear and sharp whistle (in emotional contrast to the low whistle at night ahead). Then a series of illustrated pictures appeared, showing how this waltz was popular all over the world, and young men and women of all ethnic groups danced to the music. When the music played to that brisk jumping paragraph, a funny scene appeared. The printer shook his head and printed the score of Blue Danube with the rhythm of waltz. In particular, the image of a chubby young worker bulging his cheeks and blowing out a staccato music with his mouth is even more funny. In this short time, the director skillfully combined various sounds and pictures to capture the emotional changes of the audience. What an excellent treatment!

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