Article: To hear your voice in the mirror — Cartoon sound in our collective memory
Music creates shared experiences, probably more so than any other medium. The same songs would be played on the radio or on TV all over the world and unlike movies or theater productions for example, they wouldn’t be dubbed or adapted and less likely to suffer censorship. Franz Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody №2” sounds the same played on French radio as it does on its American or Egyptian counterparts. Chances are, however, that the shared experiences created around Hungarian Rhapsody are more entwined with Bugs Bunny or Tom & Jerry than with Liszt.
More so than music heard on the radio or on TV, music in the context of cartoons is probably where most children who had access to a TV were first introduced to genres like classical music, ragtime and jazz and in terms of creating shared experiences, I have found very few topics that have cartoons’ ability to create and evoke them.
Like all motion pictures, musical accompaniment to cartoons was initially performed live at film screenings with a pianist or less often a small ensemble playing in the background while the movie played. The score varied between different cinemas and most of the time was dependent on the performer rather than the actual film. That all changed when the ability of adding the soundtrack, literally a track on the actual on film, became a reality.
Cartoons embraced music as the main narrator from that moment. My Old Kentucky Home (1926), the first ever cartoon with synchronised sound, almost instantly understood the potential of combining both mediums and using sound and music as the main accompaniment to the, previously silent, moving drawings. The point at around the 1:45 mark, with the dog hammering a tooth back into a set of dentures which results in melody on a xylophone foresees and practically invents a trope that remains in cartoons until this day, where a rather normal motion plays a melody.
However, the medium’s big bang moment arrived a couple of years later with 1928’s Steamboat Willie. Here Walt Disney pushed the technology to its limits and created the world’s first cartoon superstar in Mickey Mouse which led to coining the term Mickey Mousing to refer to music perfectly matching the actions on screen.
Orchestras and the Golden Age of Cartoons (1928 — Late 60’s)
Like most things that aren’t classical music, the term Mickey Mousing often carried less than positive connotations as writing music for cartoons was seen too immature or juvenile for adult audiences. That did not stop or slow down the process and the marriage of the mediums heralded what is now referred to as the Golden Age of Cartoons, and Carl Stalling would feature heavily in shaping the music of that era.
Stalling initially worked with Disney and is the man behind their Silly Symphonies which were made by composing the music first and then scripting the cartoons around the music. He helped pioneer the use of bar sheets in cartoons which plotted out the main musical cues alongside the main actions on the storyboard. Everything was done with music in mind and he carried this philosophy to Warner Bros., where he made his name, and where he gave the Looney Tunes their signature sound.
To follow the likes of Bugs Bunny and Road Runner in their high speed slapstick, Stalling utilised everything from short, rapidly changing musical cues to tempo shifts and mixed genres which reflected the on screen chaos perfectly. He combined orchestral hits with popular music, used instruments to mimic motions and then layered those with abrupt recalls to well known pieces like Ride of the Valkyries or The Barber of Seville.
Walt Disney, however, decided to take cartoons to a more serious direction, to showcase that cartoons and the music used within can be serious business. The result was Fantasia, a collection of eight short animated movies made to eight classical pieces, with The Sorcerer’s Apprentice probably being the most famous of the bunch. Like when Steamboat Willie was released 12 years earlier, Fantasia embraced the latest technologies and was the first film to be screened in stereo.
As important as music is, it is all but one aspect of cartoon sound of course, and audiences expect certain sounds to punctuate on-screen actions, a hammer falling on Tom’s head or Elmer Fudd tripping should have a sound. Which is where effects and foley come in.
Cartoon Sound FX: Creating Cartoons’ Sonic Vocabulary
Initially, most cartoon sound effects were produced by musical instruments and existed as an extension to the score itself. However, with recording and mixing equipment becoming more capable, more layered soundtracks could be made to accompany the cartoons. Sound effects could also help infer certain actions without having to animate them in detail, which meant less drawings, and in times of tighter budgets that meant less expenses. An early pioneer of creating these sound effects was MGM’s and Hanna-Barbera’s Greg Watson, who gave life to the largely speechless Tom and Jerry and classics like the Flintstones, Yogi Bear and The Jetsons. He would use tape processing techniques and cutting techniques much akin to those used in musique concrete to create his sounds and his sound effects library is still used to this day.
Over at Disney and in addition to voicing Mickey Mouse, Jimmy Macdonald would build and use all sorts of sound effect contraptions, pieces of glass and leather wallets to emulate everything from environmental sounds to trains, crashes and footsteps. He even used a primitive version of the vocoder to process human voices in Dumbo.
But if there is one person whose approach to cartoon sound exemplified all that is wonderfully wacky and exaggerated about cartoons, it had to be Warner Bros’ Treg Brown. Working with Carl Stalling, Brown’s imaginative approach to sound created the vocabulary of over the top effects that characterised the Looney Tunes and which has since been adopted to a lot of comedy. Working as a sound editor, he would take sounds recorded for feature films and cut them at unexpected places to the cartoon and the end result was things like bullet sounds being the sound of the Wile E. Coyote’s running, cars braking to Porky Pig screeching to a halt and he would do so in perfect harmony with the music.
It’s Not All Tweety Birds and Dancing Carpets: David Firth’s Salad Fingers & Horror in Cartoons
But what happens when the subject of the cartoon is not tweeting birds or cowardly chickens? What if it is a child-eating, rust-fetishizing mutant in an uninhabited hellscape? According to David Firth, it sounds like Boards of Canada and hyper-realistic foley.
Weird or unsettling cartoons were far from unknown when Salad Finger’s first episode came out on Youtube in 2004. As far back as 1930, the Fleischer Brothers realised that the medium could be as creepy as it is whimsical with their highly unsettling short Swing You Sinners. Cartoon Network’s The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy had the Grim Reaper as a main character and Courage the Cowardly Dog has some of the most terrifying and unnerving characters ever shown on any show meant for kids.
Given that it originally aired in 1996, Courage the Cowardly Dog could probably be seen as the clearest precursor to Salad Fingers. The series also featured a family living in the middle of nowhere with no recurring characters and a colourful cast of villains appearing every episode. The music borrowed a lot from classic horror movies and the sound design was still based in classical cartoon territory. The show was mainly intended for children, so visually it never really pushed things too far or got too gory, but it was still unlike anything else on TV. It might have paved the way for a show like Salad Fingers to become a cult classic, but nothing could have prepared those who watched its first episode for what was about to hit them. In short, when Salad Fingers was released, it made almost everything that came before it look tame and innocent in comparison.
The visuals are disturbing and the world the character resides in is utterly unappealing, but the sound is what draws and keeps the viewer in. The soundtrack which features ambient masterpieces such as Aphex Twin’s “Rhubarb” and Brian Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent)” in addition to Firth’s own beautiful drones create the backdrop to the title character’s weird, high pitched voice and the unexpected waves of bass and distortion that come in at certain points.
On later episodes of the series, Firth collaborated with two of the most prominent experimental musicians around who stand a sharp contrast from the early days of classically trained composers scoring cartoons. Episode 9: Letter was soundtracked by the late modern classical and dark ambient composer Marcus Fjellstrom, whose music fit the mood perfectly. While Episode 11: Glass Brother, the last episode in the series so far, featured an even more high profile collaboration with Flying Lotus. The two had previously worked together on the short movie Cream and it yielded equally great results on this episode. His track, “i’ll never let you leave”, is definitely an homage to the work of the aforementioned Aphex Twin, but it’s more lofi, more haunting and more tailored to the visuals.
The sound design varies from hyperrealistic over the top foley when he touches the spoons and countless recordings of flesh whenever Salad Fingers decides it’s time to play with disembowelled carcasses. They are mixed so loud that they add expertly to the mood and make sure that whoever is watching is sure to watch in complete discomfort. When children speak, the sounds they make aren’t musical melodies played on xylophones but waves of white noise and screams. It is a complete subversion of everything that came beforehand but it works brilliantly and is a huge part of why Salad Fingers was the cultural phenomenon it was. It also created shared experiences like its predecessors for a generation of youths growing up in the YouTube age.
It’s as different as it gets from a whistling mouse on a boat, but Salad Fingers wouldn’t have existed without the work of the pioneers like Stalling, Brown and Disney. They created the formula Firth subverted. Their work still lives on and adds colour to cartoons to this day. One doesn’t need to look any further than Adventure Time’s synthy auto-tuned pop tunes to see that whimsy is still a huge part of cartoons and their music. Wall-E, an incredible achievement of sound design, carries on the legacy of Tom and Jerry and the Silly Symphonies in using sound to give voice to speechless characters. These cartoons are the younger generations’ sources of new shared experiences.
The tools might have changed and more genres have appeared and will continue to appear and diversify as more time passes, but shared experiences around music and cartoons are still and will hopefully continue to be created around the wonderful world of cartoon music.
(This article was originally published in ma3azef on June 3, 2021 — Link)
