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Pumping up the Volume:
Cinesonic —
3rd International
Conference on

Film scores and Sound design
Reviewed

by Fiona A. Villella



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Fiona A. Villella is co-editor of Senses of Cinema.
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How many times have you experienced that moment when you're engrossed
in the drama of a movie and then, suddenly, music or sound rises from
the soundtrack and, as a result, the moment is intensified as the
image takes on another dimension of feeling and depth and as the
music's lyricism moves through you? It is precisely this moment —
where `sound' meets `image' — that founding director Philip Brophy
describes as the fundamental concern and interest of Cinesonic, an
International Conference on Film Scores and Sound Design.

With great irony, Philip welcomed the opening night audience to the
3rd Cinesonic amidst the jarring, high-pitched feedback of his
microphone. It was the only moment when the materiality of sound as
an object of discussion entered the proceedings of Cinesonic
uninvited! Nine presentations by local and international theorists
and practitioners, film screenings (films selected primarily for
their achievements in sound) and a forum devoted to the discussion of
the making of the sound for a recent Australian film Mallboy filled
the following three days. Not to mention the Opening Night, which
featured special guest Jack Nitzsche whose achievements in music
supervision, composing and producing for film over the last three
decades are unprecedented.

Cinesonic is a totally unique event primarily because it is the only
conference in the world exclusively devoted to exploring sound
(soundtracks, composition, dialogue, sound effects) in film. At
Cinesonic, such exploration takes place from a range of perspectives
and emphases: technological, industrial, historical, aesthetic,
cultural, or any combination of these. This is one of the unique
features of Cinesonic — the eclectic nature of the topics of its
papers, which this year ranged from a ground-breaking discussion of
the often ignored or overlooked work of the music supervisor
to "hearing" sound in silent film to the technology of Dolby Digital
to the music in Stanley Kubrick's films to "perverse" manifestations
of the musical in contemporary film, and more. Overall the conference
both legitimises sound as an object of study in film criticism and
also raises the awareness of the significance of sound design and
film scores in our viewing pleasure or displeasure. The conference
opened with special guest Jack Nitzsche, in a
program slot titled Revolutionizing Cinema: Or, how I put
Rock `n' Roll in movies. The real beauty of Cinesonic is its
"pioneering" quality: the way it uncovers and brings to the
spotlight real achievements and innovation in sound design
and film score that would otherwise remain obscured.

Jack Nitzsche and Philip Brophy on stage



Nitzsche's career began in the rock/pop recording industry as a
producer, musician, arranger and engineer. His career path was
entwined with the rise of rock'n'roll (having even backed Elvis
Presley in one of his films Girls! Girls! Girls! [Norman Taurog,
1962]). He arranged for Phil Spector and produced for the Rolling
Stones, Neil Young, The Monkees and The Cramps. Once he began score
composing and music producing for film, Nitzsche relied heavily on
his many contacts in the rock world, which included legends such as
Miles Davis, Taj Mahal, Captain Beefheart and so on. His ability to
work with musicians combined with his particularly innovative
approach to producing sound and detailed knowledge of the sounds and
musical instruments from other cultures and, of course, his genuine
and innate love of music and connection to the sonic, meant that
Nitzsche achieved something radical in his work for the cinema.

Throughout the "conversation" with Nitzsche, clips from various films
he worked on were screened and then discussed, including Performance
(1970), Cruising (1980), Blue Collar (1978), One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Starman (1984), The Hot Spot (1990/1), The
Indian Runner (1991), Cutter's Way (1981). It was quite a treat to be
in the presence of such a prolific and accomplished music producer,
composer, arranger and so on (who had worked with some of rock's
greats). Although his very laconic, laid-back, soulful kind-a-style
precluded rigorous analysis or discussion of his working methods,
there were occasional moments when Nitzsche shared a revealing
anecdote or two. For instance, after a clip from One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest, he recounted how one of the sounds for that section of
the film was produced: one morning, very early, sitting at a bar,
aimless and empty time, circling the brim of empty glasses with one's
finger, and, suddenly, a sonic effect.

As the program notes declare, Nitzsche's contribution
to "strategically working the soundtrack as a site for truly modern
manifestations of rock's infection of the cinema" is impossible to
ignore. In a further anecdote, Nitzsche revealed that it's likely
he'll be working again in Hollywood soon — I look forward to hearing
the results.

A new addition to this year's Cinesonic program was the inclusion of
film screenings, in particular, those films notable for their
contribution to the history of film soundtracks. The first double
bill, introduced by Adrian Martin, included William Friedkin's The
Exorcist (1971), with music supervision by Nitzsche, and Jean-Luc
Godard's Sympathy for the Devil (1970). While the former features a
very sparse yet powerful and profoundly haunting sound design, the
latter is a fascinating example of the sensibilities and aspirations
of the era and the filmmaker. Scenes of The Rolling Stones recording
their song "Sympathy for the Devil" are inter-cut with extended
sequences of political-revolutionary readings by Black Panthers and
Maoists. Defiantly political on the level of form and content, the
film is equally lyrical in those scenes where Godard's camera fluidly
scans the studio-space in which the Stones record their music. The
second double bill, introduced by Philip Brophy, included Martin
Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) and Jacques Tati's Playtime (1967), two
films which are fascinating case-studies for their contribution to
the soundtrack. Overall, the inclusion of film screenings into the
Cinesonic program was an auspicious move, not only for the benefits
it provided in enabling conference attendees to watch films with a
heightened awareness of the role of music and sound design in film,
but also for its gesture in presenting these films to the public
under the rubric of "sound in film".

The first conference paper presented was Bill Routt's Hearing Silent
Films. Like Ian Penman's Klang! Garvey's Ghost meets Heidegger's
Geist: Or, how DUB became everyone's soundtrack already, always &
forever more, Routt's paper was very reliant on pre-existing
theoretical ideas and concepts to establish its argument. The
apparent topic of Routt's paper suggests an immediate and inherent
contradiction: how can you hear silent films? However, through his
already fine and insightful thinking on silent cinema, Routt quickly
set any such preconceptions or assumptions aside. In my own very
crude interpretation of Routt's very subtle, eloquently expressed
argument: silent cinema often presents images that are the "visual
equivalents" of sound or music (for example, a dog barking) that,
therefore, imply a shift in the senses from seeing to hearing. Around
this point, Routt raises some fascinating questions to do
with "synesthesia" as a foundation for understanding "aesthetic
experience" and the interrelation of the arts. Routt touched on
various powerful and fascinating theoretical concepts throughout the
course of his paper: Alain Masson's claim that silent cinema images
work according to Symbolist theory and practice and early psychology
(where they signify something other and greater then their referent);
synesthesia; inner speech (hearing without sound, for example, in
dreams); and the work of Russian formalist Shklovsky (his metaphor
of "speech" for the cinematic image) and Boris Eikhenbaum. These
concepts and theories enabled Routt to consider silent film as
structured according to a "speech act", which is "heard" — a complex
sensory experience that one presumes refers back to the process of
synesthesia.

The presentation concluded with the screening of a wonderful short
silent film A House Divided (Alice Guy, 1913, 13 mins), which I for
one viewed from a new perspective. Routt's paper was a dense and very
thoughtful meditation on hearing silent film, which contained many
fascinating ideas and which one hopes to hear and read again.

Philip Brophy's paper Funny Accents: The Sound of Racism was an
intriguing reflection on the process of exporting, importing and
appropriating film and television from other countries. His argument
highlighted how it is particularly through the mechanisms of post-
dubbing that a culture appropriates a "foreign" product and distorts
its original meaning. He showed a range of clips from an episode of
the American kid's television series, Power Rangers, which
appropriates Japanese pop cultural icons, to a French porn film
imported and reworked by American producers as a sci-fi.

Third in the line-up of conference papers was Adrian Martin's Musical
Mutations. Martin's vast knowledge of and passion for the cinema
combined with his brilliant astuteness and sharpness in perceiving
the way a film works provided an entertaining presentation and a
genuinely insightful reflection on the cinema. In Musical Mutations,
Martin is essentially interested in tracing the ways in which
contemporary filmmakers reference the musical, in particular, its
classical Hollywood form. He theorises the classical musical as an
ideal of cinema itself, especially with regard to the idea of
the "reciprocal enchantment", "lyrical, synchronous fusion" of
camera, performance, objects and space, where mise en scène expands
and contracts according to this transferral and play of energy. As a
result, one of the defining features of the classical musical is what
Martin calls "the sympathetic camera", that is, the camera totally
tuned into the ever-expanding utopian energy of the mise en scène. He
illustrated this idea with clips from Jerry Lewis' The Ladies Man
(1961) and Howard Hawks' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953).

The musical genre has been theorised by Richard Dyer, Jane Feuer and
Rick Altman among others, as a genre that expresses a `utopian
sensibility' or that reinforces the `mythology' of entertainment.
Martin's contribution to this history of analysis is in identifying
the moment of (the smooth and unhindered) transition between the
world of the characters and the world of song and dance as a defining
feature of the classical musical. Furthermore, he argues that an
analysis of the way contemporary filmmakers negotiate and figure this
moment opens up new doors for theorising the musical in contemporary
cinema. Martin identifies two strains in post-`60s cinema
of "perverse, experimental and wishful" musicals: the tradition of
Dennis Potter, in which the banality and emptiness of the everyday
world of the characters contrasts ironically with the fantastic
fullness of the musical world; and the tradition of Jacques Demy, in
which there is no separation from the world of story and that of
song, where the latter has subsumed the former. Both of these
traditions originated in the musicals of Jean-Luc Godard. Martin's
paper was a rich and fascinating investigation of musical mutations
and the contemporary sensibilities they evince.

In The Greatest Music the World Has Known: Kubrick
Markets High Culture, Krin Gabbard, Professor in the
Department of Comparative Literature at the State University
of New York, presented an intriguing discussion on the
particular use of traditional "high culture" music in the films of
Kubrick, in particular, A Clockwork Orange (1971). He
argued that Kubrick often deployed not only classical music
but also pop music in very specific and ironic ways. In
relation to Kubrick's use of pop music, Gabbard showed
clips from films like Full Metal Jacket (1987), The Shining
(1980) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999) where the soundtrack is
juxtaposed in interesting and illuminating ways with the image.
Krin Gabbard


Another international guest of the conference was Anahid Kassabian
who has written at length on the significance of music in
contemporary film in influencing and shaping the viewer's
identification processes in her book Hearing Film: Tracking
Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music. Her paper for
Cinesonic, Listening for Identifications: Compiled vs. Composed
Scores in Contemporary Hollywood Films, focused on two different
kinds of contemporary scores and the way they influence
identification: the composed score and the compiled score.

One of the highlights of the conference was Jeff's Smith's paper
Taking Music Supervisors Seriously, which sought to uncover a serious
blind spot in contemporary film theory and analyses of music in film —
that of the music supervisor and their role in the production
process. This was a comprehensive, accessible and intelligent paper
that raised many important questions and issues. His paper revealed
the music supervisor to be one that occupies a very unique position
in relation to both the film and music industries and that often
performs a very key role in the creative process of filmmaking.

Smith began his presentation by illustrating the great disdain held
toward music supervisors by others in the industry, particularly,
music composers and directors. This is a result, he argued, both of
the music supervisor's strange position in the overall scheme of
production (as interface between the music and film industries) and a
general lack of understanding of what exactly they do. Working with a
variety of people with markedly different agendas, music supervisors
are vulnerable to many forms of criticism and attack (directors can
see them as commercially-driven agents of the music industry;
composers, as hoarders of their territory and the notion of quality
music for film).

Smith provided an invaluable overview of the changing face of
the "music supervisor" since the studio era. It is really over the
last decade that the significance and importance of the music
supervisor has been cemented. This can be primarily attributed to the
enormous rise in popularity and sales of the CD soundtrack, a
contemporary cultural phenomenon. However, the exact responsibilities
of a music supervisor are often very dependent on the project itself.
As Smith pointed out, a supervisor working on a Scorsese or Tarantino
film may only be required to perform administrative functions. On the
other extreme of the spectrum, their freedom to select and compile
the soundtrack for a film means that they exercise a significant
degree of creative control. Smith argued that the music supervisor
often adds an expressive layer to the narrative and even determines
its intended meaning through the careful selection of music.

Smith emphasised not only the different and contingent
responsibilities of the music supervisor but also the variety of
people who perform the role: from professional musicians and top
recording artists to businessmen and film producers. In this multi-
faceted role of the music supervisor, each has the potential to apply
their specialist knowledge. One of the more fascinating sub-
definitions of the music supervisor is the "musical archivist",
literally a music-buff with a detailed and encyclopaedic knowledge of
a certain period of pop music that they apply in their role (Smith
illustrated this definition in relation to the Coen Brothers' The Big
Lebowski [1998]).

It is not difficult to conceptualise the importance of the music
supervisor in contemporary film where a great deal of money
and emphasis is placed on marketing a film. In this context,
the CD soundtrack becomes a powerful marketing tool.
Yet Smith revealed that in many ways the CD soundtrack
serves the purposes of both the music and film industries.

Jeff Smith



Smith concluded his paper with suggested contexts in which to further
theorise the role of the music supervisor: political-economy studies
(multi-national conglomerates and the music supervisor in this
environment); postmodernism in the cinema; and gender-labour issues.
The richness of this area, hitherto insufficiently acknowledged or
theorised, and Smith's excellent presentation guaranteed that this
was a rewarding and very insightful paper.

UK writer, cultural critic and music reviewer Ian Penman presented a
witty, dense and philosophical paper on the history and current
manifestations of dub, titled KLANG! Garvey's Ghost meets Heidegger's
Geist: Or, how DUB became everyone's soundtrack already, always &
forever more. Penman explored the history of dub in 1970s Jamaica,
its particular mode of production and unique form. He examined
current practices of dub, in particular, what he refers to as "the
German modem/electronica cut'n'click `dubmusik'", and argued that
these current practices rarely achieve the true "Spirit" of dub. This
was a very sharp and interesting paper that would have suited those
with a pre-existing knowledge and familiarity with the culture and
history of dub both in the past and today.

The final day of the conference began with Australian academic
Rebecca Coyle's paper Speaking `Strine': Locating `Australia' in Film
Voice & Speech. Drawing on the work of Michel Chion, this paper
focused on the "materiality" of the voice, dialogue and accent in
Australian mainstream films, in particular, the way
this "materiality" can be culturally prescribed and coded in ways
that locate a character or place as Australian. Before launching into
her discussion Coyle stated that this kind of analysis could be
applied to a study of any country's popular, mainstream films. In
this paper, however, her primary concern was with mainstream
Australian films. Coyle showed clips from Crocodile Dundee (1986),
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), Muriel's Wedding (1994), and The
Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994). Throughout these
films and Coyle's intelligent and well-presented argument,
the "materiality" of voice became violently apparent.

Coyle argued that the accent and the voice can not only locate a
character as Australian but can also indicate their personality,
class, social position, education, place of residence (rural or city)
and so on. This was a fascinating and invaluable paper that
acknowledged the voice as a powerful cultural index and raised some
long overdue ideas about the important role of dialogue and voice in
film. Coyle's argument opened doors for other further analysis and
study, for example, the subtle though complex interrelation between
voice and body in performance, different "genres" of voice (across
television, film, advertising), current trends in more contemporary
Australian cinema and the difference between voice and accent in
mainstream and independent cinema. This paper was definitely another
conference highlight.

In its final phase, the conference introduced a paper primarily
concerned with the technology of sound in film. Bruce Emery's
Beyond the Matrix — Dolby Digital Multichannel Sound
NOW was a very well presented paper that examined the
history of Dolby sound and the intricacies of Dolby Digital 5.1
soundtrack. This was a very specialised presentation aimed
primarily at those either professionally or more casually
interested in the technology of Dolby Digital. It is to the credit
of Cinesonic that it is open to such an eclectic collection of
appreciations of sound and music in film, which cater to a
wide and broad audience.

Bruce Emery



Yet, Cinesonic, in placing side-by-side practitioner experience and
knowledge of sound in film with critical reflection and discussion,
is both radical and unique. Highlights of the conference included
those papers that combined this twin perspective of practice and
critical analysis into their presentation: for example, Jeff Smith's
paper, which utilised knowledge of the film and music industry (from
primary and secondary sources) with critical analysis of popular
music in film. Other highlights included those papers which
considered closely the sound aspects of various films, such as Adrian
Martin's paper, which closely considered contemporary filmmakers'
attraction to and refiguring of the musical genre and Rebecca Coyle's
study of the materiality of voice in film.

Perhaps the most obvious example where critical reflection and the
practice of sound design and film score were entwined was at the
forum in which the sound designer/music supervisor Philip Brophy,
producer Fiona Eagger and director Vince Giarrusso of recent
Australian film Mallboy openly and casually discussed the decision-
making process and overall experience in the area of sound throughout
the making of the film. The forum screened various scenes from the
film, which the panel then discussed from the perspective of sound.
Issues like when and where to insert a music cue, the difficulty in
gaining licenses and clearance, the challenges in using music to
indicate narrative duration, the relationship between the music
supervisor and the director, the importance of the director as a
musician (as is the case for this film), and so on were raised. This
was a fascinating and exciting forum and a perfect close to yet
another year's Cinesonic.

And of course the various rich contributions made to further
appreciating and understanding the role of sound in film at this
conference will be made available in a book, to be launched at next
year's Cinesonic.