The Voice of a Story
Listen to a movie. Even to its silence.
I moved to Hyderabad just two months ago. This Sunday morning, as I was finishing my breakfast at the dining table, with my back turned to the TV in my parents’ home, and thinking about what to write, I began to listen to the movie that was playing on TV — the Sam Mendes film, Revolutionary Road, starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio.
I wasn’t watching it. I was just listening. I listened to doors opening and slamming shut, the sound of traffic, a heated argument between the two protagonists in a car — I heard everything I could without once looking at the TV. As I got involved in the plot of the movie, I realised that I knew everything that was going on in the story without needing to watch the movie at all. Everything about the plot was crystal clear to me. I was simply amazed. How could this be? I understand that this is a romantic drama so dialogue drives the story forward in a big way, but what about all the things that didn’t involve dialogue and were still conveying meaning? How could I tell the location of scene? How could I tell the mood of a person simply by listening to the sound of his movements?
I don’t have a superlative sense of hearing or inference. So those are ruled out. It must be the film itself. The sound design was so impeccable, so well thought out. I marvelled at the genius of the sound production team of the film. Was this the case with every film? I went through a couple of best-rated scenes on YouTube including scenes from V for Vendetta, Lord Of the Rings and The Dark Knight (populist preferences) and even though a large part of the scenes involved action and violence, I could get the gist of what was happening. With action scenes, it felt like when you’re following the conversation in a different language you can’t speak very well but can understand in pieces. With conversational scenes or scenes with movement devoid of violence, I could understand everything from the sound of the scene alone.
What were the clues I was using to decipher the scene?
The first thing that occurred to me was the splendid voice acting of the characters. In Revolutionary Road, DiCaprio and Winslet speak with such clarity of emotion that you know what the character is feeling every second of the way. Each word is coloured the way it needs to be; every point of emphasis is clearly spelled out; the tone of voice flows like water, a river when there’s an incline and a pond when there’s a depression.
The voice can be used so many ways. Using it without motive would leave the listener unable to relate very well. When you listen to incredible voice acting that is always synchronous with an emotional goal, like in Revolutionary Road or The Dark Knight, you can understand the message as clearly as light on a sunny day.
Great actors speak with a unity of body language, expression and tone that all point towards a specific emotion they want to convey. The reason I feel they’re able to do this is that they use the core emotion as a granary to feed their outward actions. It’s not their voice that they control artificially but their emotional makeup that they manipulate to let the right acting come out as a result.
Even to convey a particular age group, sex or ethnicity, actors like Meryl Streep use their voice in ways you and I might think unimaginable. The way some actors imbibe accents and bring them out so naturally makes you really feel they’re someone else.
I’m not too well-versed with acting methods and would love to get your opinion on what you think acting really is. I know what I do as a musician when I’m expressing myself through music. The message I want to convey is already clear to me. I try to live with that message, that thought, that emotion — and the music flows by itself.
This brings me to the music in a film. Need I say anything about how the film score manipulates our emotions? I can take the well-known example of Hans Zimmer’s music in Interstellar. Listen to scenes and observe how and where the music kicks in to accentuate what’s happening in the scene. Perfection! My favourite examples of music that speak the scenes are by Ramin Djawadi. I’m a huge fan. Apart from his other great scores, he’s composed for two TV series that many people are intimately familiar with: Game of Thrones and Westworld. His work in Westworld is absolutely brilliant in my opinion. Watch the 10-part first season while paying attention to the music and you’ll most likely agree. Game Of Thrones…well, you can tell me in the comments.
Even in Revolutionary Road, the music director Thomas Newman has done a great job with intensifying the emotional colour of scenes. Particularly, there’s a scene in the middle of the movie, when Kate and Leonardo are having a conversation about moving and that slowly turns into a full-blown argument. The music starts early with a feeling of suspense, angst and dread, already signalling the direction the conversation is going to take. It anticipates and then follows the conversation so well, something Hans Zimmer is great at too, by the way. If I haven’t said it enough, I can say it again at the expense of being a nag: listen to the scene to really understand my description.
Another important but often overlooked element to the sound is, well, everything else — the sound of footsteps, trees rustling, chairs being moved, swings creaking in the wind — all of it. Each sound adds adds to the aural picture we have of the scene. Let’s look at it another way. Imagine you’re watching a scene where someone is walking towards the camera while talking. There’s no sound of footsteps. We automatically feel something is wrong. The voice is audible but not the footsteps. Maybe the floor is soft. Maybe the person is only wearing socks. Maybe she’s a ninja. These are all inferences that we make in the blink of an eyelid.
While listening to Revolutionary Road, I realised I was able to place the characters in an environment quite easily. Having tweaked reverb levels on so many recordings till date, I knew that this was because of the reverberation characteristics my brain was inferring from what I was hearing. All of us do this instinctively. It is a survival mechanism after all. If you were in a large, empty room with plain, hard walls and no furniture, it’s going to be quite easy for you to imagine how much your voice will echo. It’d be the stereotypical “dream-like voice” in a film, like the sound of your voice in a large cathedral. On the other hand, if you were in a smaller room filled with furniture, wooden flooring, heavy curtains and carpets, there’d be hardly any echo at all.
When you listen to the sound of characters speaking, objects moving or general background noise in a film, even in an animated film, there’s a very real sense of the surroundings of the scene because of the reverb qualities that you discern. All sounds in the same location have a similar reverb characteristic, which clues you in on the relative locations of all objects and the dimensions of the room. It becomes very easy then, to figure out where the actors are and what furniture surrounds them. You can tell if they are surrounded by walls, if the room has a ceiling or if they’re in the open. Of course, specific ambient noise like birds chirping or traffic can tell where the scene is taking place too.
The way actors move tell a story too. The way they pick up a cup, the way they walk, the way they groom themselves — you can hear all of it. You can tell where they are in the scene and of course, when they do it well, you can tell what they’re feeling too. It’s unlikely that a character in a dinner scene would lay the plates gently and calmly for guests at the dining table. There would mostly be a clattering and smashing as he went about the task. That’s all the difference it takes to convey the mood of a character. All we have to do is listen.
[An interesting fact I came across recently is that we can tell only by listening if water pouring into a container is hot or cold. I didn’t believe it at first. Then I tried it — it worked like magic! Look it up. Or better yet. Try it out for yourself. Listen carefully and in no time, you should be able to tell if it’s hot or cold water. You can do this because cold water is more viscous than hot water. This makes us perceive a relatively lower pitch when cold water splashes]
All this is theory. The practice is in creating a unified sound image that conveys the location, characteristics and emotion of a scene. As you can guess, this is a very complicated process and takes a lot of work to accomplish.
Stories delivered through the medium of audio, like radio, podcasts and audiobooks, convey emotion through sound too. It’s the only option they have so they use it to the fullest extent they can and pull it off really well. Only today did I feel the full force of sound in film too.
Watch an amateur film production and you’ll most likely be put off by the less-than-acceptable quality of sound production, even if the visuals are breathtaking. Poor microphone handling, incorrect balance in the mix and unwanted noise are problems that plague many of the beginner films I’ve watched. On the other hand, great audio and below par visuals are, arguably, not as big a problem. To me, it feels better to miss seeing a wrinkle developing on the forehead of an actor than strain to hear what the characters are saying. Of course, the best option is to not miss out on anything.
At other times, filmmakers get the audio technique right but it still feels disjoint from the emotion and subjective mood of the scene. The emotion nurtures the technique. Only once the story is clear will the means to achieve it bloom.
Concluding these unplanned reflections with another one — a few minutes of listening to a movie today made me understand better what so many filmmakers, sound designers and musicians have said time and again: take sound seriously!
