The Emergent Focus on Film Sound, Music and Listening in Audiovisual Essays

 

 

Catherine Grant

 

“What do I see of what I hear? What do I hear of what I see?” (Michel Chion)[1]

Michel Chion’s key questions (set out in his groundbreaking study Audio-Vision) succinctly draw attention to the sensuous and semantic interactions of sound and image in audiovisual media. This compelling interrogative approach helps the French theorist to issue a clarion call for the combined study of these elements, which will also involve separating them out, in the research process, to better see, or hear, the effect of one on the other. Chion doesn’t especially advocate anything other than writing as the means of expression of scholarly insights thus derived. Yet what better medium in which to take up his call for much more rounded and complex approaches to film studies than the audiovisual essay form, currently flourishing as part of an emergent online videographic film and moving image studies culture? It may take a while for this call to be properly answered, however. While there appears to be no shortage of “image-centric” audiovisual essaying in this new field, studies that foreground—or listen more closely to—film, video and televisual sound are distinctly in the minority. This won’t surprise anyone working in “sound studies,” of course, since this unfortunate under-representation simply mirrors the long-standing ocular-centricity of existing, written film and moving image studies.

But truly interesting, and increasingly generative, audiovisual sonic explorations have been appearing online. As someone who has written quite often on film sound, especially on music, I have been on the lookout (and listen-out) for them, as well as experimenting with creating them myself in my own videographic practice. In the below curated collection of such works (and of excerpted reflections upon them by makers, publishers, and critics), my focus has primarily been on what the internet currently has to offer this area of scholarship and creative critical practice, that is to say, web-native videos and scholarly, audiovisual works drawing on, or inspired by, those vernacular digital forms, including mash-ups, super-cuts (concise and impactful video remixes and assemblages made with sharing—even virality—in mind), engaging synchronous multiple screen comparisons, striking comparative sequential montages, and even long-form, deconstructive approaches to “masked listening” (as Chion might understand them), ones inspired by and sometimes connected to contemporary digital art forms.

Table of contents

1. Sounding Out Film History

2. Sounds of Auteurs, Single Films/Television Series and Nostalgia

3. Vertigoed! “Forced Marriage”: Re-Scoring Mash-ups

4. What Does China’s Greatest Film Sound like?

5. Musical Déjà-Entendus

6. Love Sounds: Acousmatic Listening and the Masking Method

 

1.  Sounding Out Film History

a.  The History of Sound at the Movies (Filmmaker IQ, 2014)

“The inclusion of sound at the movies was one of the most dramatic changes in all of film history. Dive into the early experiments of Edison trying to incorporate sound from film’s inception, through the experiments in the early 1920s, The Jazz Singer and the industry sound overhaul, and finally the multi-channel surround and modern movie sound technologies.” (Filmmaker IQ)[2]

Filmmaker IQ specialises in short, pedagogical videos such as the above, 33 minute-long work which is both highly useful for teaching and also points to the potential of the online audiovisual overview. Some further, excellent, film-sound, pedagogical resources may be found at the FilmSound.org website. For another useful film sound history video, see A History of Sound Design in Film.[3]

b.  Garden of Forking Paths? Hitchcock’s BLACKMAILs (Catherine Grant, 2012)

“Although 1929 was rather late for a ‘first’ sound film, the delay enabled Hitchcock to produce [with Blackmail] an advanced meditation on the possible uses of sound. The text incorporates silent footage (lifted whole from the original silent version, made immediately prior to the sound version), which allows for a series of comparisons/contrasts between sound and silents/silence. The conceit of this early sound film is an attempt to keep a man silent (paying off a blackmailer). The heroine spends over a third of the film virtually speechless. When she finally speaks, her boyfriend urges her to keep quiet. The dialogue is laughably banal, yet the right word can cut like a knife. The opening scene, an exciting silent chase, is immediately contrasted with a poorly dubbed, confusingly cut dialogue scene that seems as if it will never end. But before we glibly assume silents were ‘better’ movies, sound becomes a moral force, while silence is linked with corruption and moral lassitude.

The text’s position on ‘sound plus image’ versus ‘image alone’ is carefully paralleled with the depiction of Alice. Thematically, she veers from one extreme to the other. She is introduced as a chatterbox. After a violent assault, she becomes almost catatonic. Finally, she accepts speech as a moral imperative, achieving maturity and the audience’s respect before slipping back under patriarchal control and enforced silence. Alice White becomes Hitchcock’s personification of the course the sound film must take.” (Amy Lawrence)[4]

Split screen comparisons abound online. In the form of audiovisual essays, or assemblages, these can enable viewers to experience for themselves linear or synchronous moving image and sound juxtapositions in a time-based framework, and thus offer up highly active viewing processes, ones of live “co-research,” or participant observation.

Garden of Forking Paths? uses this method for its synchronous study of an extant film scene from the silent and sound versions of Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail, which sets out to create a framework for the testing out of existing work by film scholars on Hitchcock’s mise en scène (like that of Amy Lawrence above), before and after the advent of cinematic sound.[5] In playing the two versions of the sequence together, the video affords its viewers an opportunity to scan—visually and auditorily—for all kinds of subtle and unsubtle correspondences as well as differences between the two films. Visually, the equal sized screens offer the potential for a comparative form of what Christian Keathley, following Wolfgang Schivelbusch (writing about the advent of train travel), refers to as “panoramic perception,” the capacity to “perceive the discrete, as it rolls past the window indiscriminately,” and “the synthetic philosophy of the glance.”[6] The video is much more of an assemblage than an expressive essay, but even in the obvious aesthetic choices it makes (using the audio track of the sound version, emphasizing the different lengths of the sequences by blacking out, in due course, the “unnecessary” screen), it seems to have provoked an uncanny effect in its audiences. One commenter described watching it as “spooky.”[7] The video certainly enacts and enables the experience of a creeping recognition of imperfect doubling, an uncanny disjuncture between its two screens. For another sound angle on Hitchcock’s sequence, see the video Film Tweets.[8]

 

2.  Sounds of Auteurs, Single Films/Television Series, and Nostalgia

a.  Sounds of Aronofsky (kogonada, 2012)

“In ‘Sounds Of Aronofsky,’ the adept editor cuts together some of the American director’s most striking auditory moments. The catch is that, in Aronofsky’s work, sound and sight generally [complement] each other.” (Andres Jauregui)[9]

“kogonada has turned his microscope on the sound effects of Darren Aronofsky, director of Black Swan, The Wrestler, Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, and Pi. As the video highlights, Aronofsky uses an unusually heightened style, examining many actions at only a nose’s length—and the sound effects, which sometimes make the tiniest noises sound almost thunderous, match that approach. In some particularly unusual and even cartoonish cases a single sound effect tells a whole action: A slurp (over a jump cut) represents eating, a ka-ching from an imaginary cash register represents a sale.” (Forrest Wickman)[10]

The undisputed master of the high-quality, film-analytical, viral video, kogonada here invents a brilliant new kind of super-cut to tell a hugely compelling auteurist story of film sound, and sound-image interaction, one which has certainly been highly influential, and very popular (with over 300,000 views to date).

For other, more recent, similar studies, see Hearing Tarantino (Jacob T Swinney), Hearing Paul Thomas Anderson (Jacob T Swinney), and Martin Scorsese – The Art of Silence (Tony Zhou).[11]

b.  Short-Circuit: A “Twin Peaks” System (Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, 2015)

“Mechanical or artificial communication tends to go berserk in Lynch, creating every kind of auditory displacement and excess: screaming, sobbing, feedback, echo, static, distortion – as well as music that stops and starts, speeds up and slows down. Telephony is even married to an uncanny, mental telepathy in the Twin Peaks pilot, when people know what is to be told them before it is said, and even without it being said.

Light and communication, image and sound: is it any wonder that Daney noticed in Twin Peaks that spark of cinema which ‘constantly articulates something?'”(Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin)[12]

For more in this emergent, critical genre of videos about sound-image relations across a single film or television series, see The Sounds of Star Wars (Rishi Kaneria) and Whiplash: Sounds and Close-Ups (Jorge Luengo Ruiz).[13] For a (still very interesting) film-promotional take on sound design in particular films, see the SoundWorks Collection videos.

c.  Hiss, Crackle, Hum (Ian Magor, 2015)

“I am very affected by any extraneous sounds when watching films. I invariably listen through headphones and if there is a regular click on the soundtrack, however slight, I will find it impossible to carry on watching. At the same time I love those films which contain a kind of surface excess that either makes me think about whether it is an intentional part of the film or just subtly alters what I am seeing. Or, in the case of early Edison recordings, [it] comes bound up with the whole feeling of nostalgia and loss.

When I watch scenes from Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, I hear both the crackle of a fire and the scratching of a loved, old record. When I listen to the ‘room tones’ created by David Lynch I might have no idea what it is in the environment that is making the sound but I know that it is as representative of how it feels to occupy that space as the most memorable, evocative image could ever hope to be.

With Stan Brakhage I don’t even know if the sound is only there because I have a poor copy of his films but, if that’s so, I would never swap for a clear [version]. Just as his images can open the eye to looking and seeing, so for me the sound is something like an aural kaleidoscope. It’s similar with Maya Deren [and Alexander Hamid]’s Meshes of the Afternoon. The film does have a record player as a central motif, but I’m not sure whether the scratching is connected to this or is a production ‘fault.’ Would an answer affect my viewing/listening? I don’t think it would. This experience of the film is my desired experience—hiss, crackles, hums and all.” (Ian Magor)[14]

For further reflective videos on film sound phenomena by researcher Ian Magor, see Hearing Things (on Possessed); A Facsimile of a CONVERSATION; Ipcress Sounds; Play it Sam (on Samuel Fuller’s films); War Cry; Hypno-sound (on Augustine by Alice Winocour; The Pirate by Vincente Minnelli, and Heart of Glass by Werner Herzog); An Exile in Five Movements (on exile composers.[15]

d.  The Sound of Middle Aged Nostalgia (Liz Greene, 2015)

“Restorative nostalgia stresses nostas and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives in algia, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming—wistfully, ironically, desperately. Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt.” (Boym)

“It is this tension between restorative and reflective nostalgia that I want to unpick within a listening practice, questioning why these pop songs are being listened to and in what ways they are being listened to by the characters within the films and television programmes, and what it says about post economic crisis film and television programming. I would like to argue that it is a reflective form of nostalgia, one that is ambiguous, unresolved and contradictory that is at play within these examples.” (Liz Greene)[16]

Liz Greene is one of the first, established “sound studies” scholar-practitioners to have begun to experiment with audiovisual montage and essay forms in her research and presentations. The focus of the above work—on listening—forges a connection with Ian Magor’s video Hiss, Crackle, Hum, embedded above. It also recalls the subject (and approach) of gallery artworks, such as Christian Maclay’s influential, digital-videographic “assemblage” on ‪listening and affect, Telephones (1995), which can now also be seen online.

 

3.  Vertigoed! “Forced Marriage”: Re-Scoring Mash-ups[17]

a.  Star Wars Vertigoed  (Kevin B. Lee, 2012)

“You may have heard that Kim Novak, costar of Vertigo, took out an ad in Variety protesting the use of Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo score in Michel Hazanavicius’s modern silent film The Artist [and decrying] the ‘USE AND ABUSE [OF] FAMOUS PIECES OF WORK TO GAIN ATTENTION AND APPLAUSE FOR OTHER THAN WHAT THEY WERE INTENDED’. […]

Press Play contributor and film editor Kevin Lee followed this Novak/Lucas line of thought to its logical — or illogical — end. Just for the hell of it, he matched the Vertigo cue used in The Artist with the last three minutes of the Death Star battle in Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope, uploaded it, and sent the link to several Press Play contributors to get their reactions.

And it’s here that things got interesting: rather than generate cheap laughs at the expense of Novak, Lucas, The Artist or Star Wars, the mash-up inspired delight. Simply put: Kevin’s experiment confirmed that Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo score is so passionate and powerful that it can elevate an already good scene — and a familiar one at that — to a higher plane of expression. Score one for the master of film scoring!” (Matt Zoller Seitz)[18]

And in this way a highly successful (and deeply intriguing) online video remix competition focused on film music was born, one which rediscovered, on its own terms, the benefits of Chionian “Forced Marriage” experiments with the dynamism of music-image relations. Another compelling example from the competition follows.

b.  Vertigoed! Martin Arnold’s ALONE. LIFE WASTES ANDY HARDY (Hoi Lun Law, 2012)

“This [Vertigoed!] entry by Hoi Lun Law borrows its unedited footage from Martin Arnold’s short film Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy — which itself borrows footage from MGM’s Andy Hardy films of the 1930s. For more information on the career of Martin Arnold, click here. If you would like to view the original short film, click here.” [Matt Zoller Seitz][19]

For further Vertigoed! entries of especial scholarly interest, see RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (Steven Boone); Mädchen in Uniform (Matthew Cheney); and Edward Dmytryk’s THE SNIPER (Catherine Grant). For another, fascinating, audiovisual experiment with re-scoring, see Pam Cook‘s work Mildred’s Kiss: A Maternal Melodrama (2014).

 

4.  What Does China’s Greatest Film Sound like? (Zhang Lin, 2013)

“In collaborating with [Chinese film blogger and researcher Zhang Lin] on a video essay, we decided to explore the unique properties of sound in what is commonly considered the greatest Chinese film ever made, Spring in a Small Town by Fei Mu. The 1948 classic was made at a critical moment in Chinese history, following its liberation from Japanese wartime occupation and in the midst of civil war between Communist and Nationalist forces. The nation’s shell-shocked state at that moment is conveyed lyrically through the film’s ravaged landscape, the delicate emotional states of its characters and the fragile relationships between them, depicted with immeasurable nuance. It’s a film that reveals a uniquely Chinese cinema in style and sensibility, one on the brink of exploding on the global stage just as Italian Neorealism had around the same time, only to be tragically thwarted by the same dissolute social forces that give the film its alchemic power. Nevertheless, it has prevailed as a film that both Mainland filmmakers like Jia Zhangke and Tian Zhuangzhuang (who remade it in 2002) and Taiwanese filmmakers like Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien swear by, not to mention Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-wai (In the Mood for Love would be unthinkable without it). Spring in a Small Town serves as perpetual model for filmmakers; it represents the best of Chinese cinema’s lost golden age.” [Kevin B. Lee][20]

 

5.  Musical Déjà-Entendus

a.  Where I Come From, Where I’m Going (Adrian Martin, 2014)

“In the case of my audiovisual essay, premiered here, on They Live By Night (1948) and I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), I began from a personal punctum — hearing, for the first time, the music of the latter all over the former — and then let myself research many things, in the new, intransitive spirit and with the new means that the Internet allows: the history of a folk song; the often overlooked and overlapping phases of Nicholas Ray’s pre-film career; the different ways and forms that They Live By Night has been quoted and evoked in its critical and filmic after-life. And so on.

[T]ext is always inside context, and vice versa; they should never be separated, even in the course of an abstract, categorical taxonomy. My own experience making Where I Come From, Where I’m Going bears this out: studying the form (in history) of a song led me to freshly attend to the music score and sound design — the auditory, filmic form — of Ray’s movie, literally (in my case) excavating what had merely streamed past my eyes and ears on several, previous viewings.” [Adrian Martin][21]

b.  Uncanny Fusion (Catherine Grant, 2014)

“In his fascinating chapter ‘The Galleries of the Gaze: The Museum in Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia and Hitchcock’s Vertigo’ (which I came across only after making the above video), Steven Jacobs notes Renzo Rossellini’s ‘eerie music’ (78), in passing, as he analyses Viaggio in Italia’s first museum sequence, the one I feature in my video. This music was my starting point. I initially wondered if its specific qualities or technique were what set off my curious psycho-somatic reaction to that scene when I first saw the film, and on repeated occasions afterwards, long before I remembered a possible connection to a seemingly similar cinephiliac experience upon first viewing The Hideaways as a young teenager. Even as I did remember this, I never suspected that there would be such a specific musical link between the two films, one that turned out to be extended by their similar use of traditional songs and folk music, which I also went on to feature in my video. All I knew at the outset of my exploration was that I had to take a look at this childhood film that I only vaguely remembered because I could recall having an equally striking mental-physical reaction to it. I discovered the musical (and all the other) connections solely by importing digitised footage from the two films into my video editing program and playing with it over and over again, moving it around, and endlessly experimenting with different montage combinations and timings. My videographic musical comparison did indeed reveal the uncannily similar use in both films of a particular musical technique: modal scales (in The Hideaways, pentatonic scales, as far as I can ascertain, and in Viaggio in Italia whole tone scales). These are scales that resist easy resolution, and, possibly as a consequence, are quite commonly used in films, I discovered afterwards, to figure uncertainty and uncanniness, as well as to signal flashbacks. How curious to find that my experience of watching a film from the 1970s helped me to flash back to a film from the 1950s that I wouldn’t even see for twenty years, and vice versa.” (Catherine Grant)[22]

 

6.  Love Sounds: Acousmatic Listening and the Masking Method

a.  Love Sounds (a Preview) (Masha Tupitsyn, 2015)

A preview for Masha Tupitsyn’s Love Sounds 24 hour-long video installation project, which you can read much more about here.

“Cinema remains the last medium for speaking and performing love culturally. While much emphasis has been placed on the visual iconography of love, with the exception of music very little attention has been given to love as an aural phenomenon since the tradition and practice of amour courtois. Partly inspired by Christian Marclay’s ontology of time in cinema, The Clock, and René Magritte’s word paintings, which textualized the visual tropes of painting with ‘written’ images, Love Sounds, a 24-hour sound poem and montage, dematerializes cinema’s visual legacy and reconstitutes it as an all-tonal history of critical listening.” [Masha Tupitsyn][23]

b.  Love Sounds (Sexual Politics, excerpt) (Masha Tupitsyn, 2014)

“Auditory landscapes can also be interpolations between space and time, space and reality, the psycho-social and the geographic, and temporality and memory. The act of listening involves a transitional state between attention and imagination, between sensual experience and understanding or seeking a possible meaning.” (Jean-Luc Nancy)[24]

“With Love Sounds, Masha Tupitsyn has gone the full otaku, building an enormous 24-hour database of audio clips covering the whole English-speaking history of the talkies, organizing it by relationship categories. Love Sounds is closer to what Hiroki Azuma would call a database than a narrative understanding of media. It’s a sort of epic forensic device for hearing what the whole mythic structure of the cinema era was, but breaking it down into its affective audible granules, and recomposing those granules by type rather than arranging them in narrative sequence. But it is not just a work about cinema. It also an instance of a post-cinematic form. Another media for another life. In the voice, one can hear at one and the same time the possibility of disarmament, of love; but also all the wars, over who owns who; of who is whose property. To listen, rather than look, at cinema, is to hear the struggle over the script itself, over which words are meant to matter, and which are mere convention. It’s a struggle over whether love is real. It’s one continuous dialogue on whether love, like God, is dead, and who killed it.” (McKenzie Wark)[25]

In ways perhaps not completely anticipated by Michel Chion in his advocacy of “masking methods” of research into film sound,[26] Masha Tupitsyn’s extreme and beautiful experiment with “acousmatic listening”[27] in her astonishing video-work Love Sounds sets out constitutively to break the synchrestic audiovisual contract of sound and image.[28] This monumental work, together with many of the other (much more concise) videos I have featured above, succeeds in pointing up not only the expressive worth of audiovisual essays for audio/visual studies, but also their performative and experiential potential. As I have written before of the “sensuous methodologies” and forms of videographic film and moving image studies, it is precisely because, audiovisual essays, unlike written texts, “don’t have to remove themselves from film-specific forms of meaning production to have their knowledge effects on us [that] we can feel, as well as know about, the comparisons these videos enact. […].”[29] It is their affective and phenomenological added value that convinces me not only that digital videographic studies of audio-vision are here to stay, but also that we can’t yet begin to guess at all of the very interesting places to which they might take our discipline. Turning up the volume of such studies, in coming years, sounds like a deeply audio-visionary prospect.

 

 

Catherine Grant is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sussex. Author and editor of numerous film studies videos, as well as of written studies of intertextuality, film authorship and adaptation theories, she runs the Film Studies For Free, Filmanalytical and (the curatorial) Audiovisualcy websites and, in 2012, guest edited the inaugural issue of online cinema journal Frames on digital forms of film studies. She is a founding co-editor of [in]TRANSITION, a new videographic film and moving image studies journal, which recently won an “Award of Distinction” for Innovative Scholarship, thanks to the 2015 Anne Friedberg Award Committee and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Board of Directors. Her article “The Remix That Knew Too Much? On Rebecca, Retrospectatorship and the Making of Rites Of Passage” appeared in the The Cine-Files, issue 7 (fall 2015).

 

[1] Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 192. Thanks to Ian Magor, Adrian Martin, Kevin B. Lee, Chiara Grizzaffi, Gordon Hon, Masha Tupitsyn, Liz Greene, Tracy Cox-Stanton, and others for their suggestions for (or other help with) assembling the collection of videos and texts presented in this article.

[2] Filmmaker IQ, “The History of Sound at the Movies – A Sneak Peak at our New Audio Course Series,” August 11, 2014. Online at: http://filmmakeriq.com/2014/08/the-history-of-sound-at-the-movies-a-sneak-peak-at-our-new-audio-course-series/.

[3] A History of Sound Design in Film (Noah Dankner, 2008). Online at: https://youtu.be/JgkAXcromkc.

[4] Amy Lawrence, Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Online at: http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft2x0nb1hx&brand=ucpress.

[5] “Having begun production as a silent film, the studio, British International Pictures, decided to convert [Blackmail (directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1929)] to sound during shooting. A silent version was released [probably only in Britain] for theaters not equipped for sound (at 6740 feet), with the sound version (7136 feet) released at the same time. The silent version still exists in the British Film Institute collection.” From Blackmail Wikipedia entry. Online at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackmail_%281929_film%29#cite_note-1. Accessed March 12, 2012. This video was first published in Catherine Grant, “Garden of forking paths? Hitchcock’s Blackmails — a real-time comparison,” Film Studies For Free, March 12, 2012. http://filmstudiesforfree.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/garden-of-forking-paths-hitchcocks.html. Also, see Catherine Grant, “Déjà-Viewing? Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies,” Mediascape: UCLA’s Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Winter 2013. Online at: http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Winter2013_DejaViewing.html. And Catherine Grant, “On Hitchcock’s Rope and Blackmail. Or, Technicist Dreams in Videographic Film Studies,” Filmanalytical, May 14, 2012. http://filmanalytical.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/on-hitchcocks-rope-and-blackmail-or.html.

[6] Christian Keathley, Cinephilia and History: Or, The Wind in the Trees (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 43; citing Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 57-8.

[7] See Justin Horton’s comment on “Garden of forking paths?” (see above, note 4). http://filmstudiesforfree.blogspot.com/2012/03/garden-of-forking-paths-hitchcocks.html?showComment=1331902437844 – c5504601629398401987. Last accessed May 28, 2012.

[8] Film Tweets (Catherine Grant, 2013). Online at: https://vimeo.com/71971893.

[9] Andres Jauregui, “‘The Sounds Of Aronofsky’ Is Brilliant And Disturbing (VIDEO),” Huffington Post, May 18, 2012. Online at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/18/the-sounds-of-aronofsky-video_n_1527651.html.

[10] Forrest Wickman, “Did You See This? ‘The Sounds of Aronofsky,'” Browbeat:  Slate’s Culture Blog, May 16, 2012. Online at: http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/05/16/_sounds_of_aronofsky_watch_the_short_video_essay_.html.

[11] Jacob T. Swinney, “Hearing Tarantino,” 2015. Online at: https://vimeo.com/118431867. Jacob T. Swinney, “Hearing Paul Thomas Anderson,” 2014. Online at: https://vimeo.com/128170021. And Tony Zhou, “Martin Scorsese – The Art of Silence,” 2014. Online at: https://vimeo.com/98240271.

[12] Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, “Short-Circuit: A ‘Twin Peaks’ System,” MUBI, May 21, 2015. Online at: https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/short-circuit-a-twin-peaks-system.

[13] Rishi Kaneria, “The Sounds of Star Wars,” 2015. Online at: https://vimeo.com/127445603; and Jorge Luengo Ruiz, “Whiplash: Sounds and Close-Ups,” 2015. Online at: https://vimeo.com/125387495.

[14] Text sent to the author by Ian Magor, May 2015.

[15] Ian Magor, Hearing Things [on POSSESSED], 2015. Online at: https://vimeo.com/126379788; A Facsimile of a CONVERSATION, 2015. Online at https://vimeo.com/124949360; Ipcress Sounds, 2015. Online at https://vimeo.com/117407216; Play it Sam [on Fuller], 2015. Online at: https://vimeo.com/123331094; War Cry, 2015. Online at: https://vimeo.com/122914230; Hypno-sound [on Augustine by Alice Winocour; The Pirate by Vincente Minnelli, and Heart of Glass by Werner Herzog], 2015. Online at: https://vimeo.com/119606085; An Exile in Five Movements (on exile composers), 2015. Online at: https://vimeo.com/125801119.[15].

[16] Liz Greene, “Listening, singing and dancing to pop songs in film: the sound of middle-aged nostalgia,” Presentation at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference, Montreal, March 2015. Citing Svetlana Boym, Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xviii. Greene’s video montage “The Sound of Middle Aged Nostalgia,” 2015, is online at: https://vimeo.com/123452796.

[17] “Forced Marriage” is one of Chion’s advocated research methods. It involves replaying the same film segment with different soundtracks in order to examine the relationships that are altered and created. Chion, Audio-Vision, 3.

[18] Matt Zoller Seitz, “VERTIGOED: A Press Play mash-up contest,” Press Play: indieWire, January 18, 2012. Online at: http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/the-vertigo-contest.

[19] Hoi Lun Law, “VERTIGOED: Martin Arnold’s ALONE. LIFE WASTES ANDY HARDY,” PressPlay: indieWire, January 21, 2012. Online at: http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/vertigoed-martin-arnolds-alone-life-wastes-andy-hardy

[20] Kevin B. Lee, “Video: What Does China’s Greatest Film Sound Like?” Fandor, March 7, 2013. Online at: https://www.fandor.com/blog/video-what-does-chinas-greatest-film-sound-like.

[21] Adrian Martin, “The Inward/Outward Turn,” [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Studies, 1.3, 2014. Online at: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/intransition/2014/09/14/inwardoutward-turn.

[22] Catherine Grant on “Uncanny Fusion” (video: https://vimeo.com/92596008) in Catherine Grant and Christian Keathley, “The Use of an Illusion: Childhood cinephilia, object relations, and videographic film studies,” Photogénie, 0, 2014. Online at: http://www.photogenie.be/photogenie_blog/article/use-illusion. Citing Steven Jacobs, Framing Pictures: Film and the Moving Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).

[23] Masha Tupitsyn, “Love Sounds,” 2015. Online at: http://penny-ante.net/title/love-sounds/.

[24] Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening.

[25] McKenzie Wark, Love Sounds Catalogue (New York: Penny-Ante, 2014). Work on the 24-hour version of Love Sounds is now complete and the installation has begin to tour internationally. The four and a half edit of Sexual Politics (excerpted here and on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/112231115) is currently being exhibited in a group sound show at the Kitchen in New York City: http://thekitchen.org/event/s-n.

[26] Chion explains that the intention of the masking method is to give the researcher “the opportunity to hear the sound as it is, and not as the image transforms it and disguises it; it also lets you see the image as it is and not as sound recreates it.”  Audio-Vision, 187.

[27] A method for the analysis of “the sound object without viewing the sound source from which it emanates”: Josep Torelló Oliver and Jaume Duran Castells, “Michel Chion in Audio-Vision and a practical approach to a scene from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia,” L’ ATALANTE, July-December 2014: 114.

[28] “Synchresis” is an acronym formed by Chion’s telescoping together of the two words “synchronism” and “synthesis.”

[29] Grant, “Déjà-Viewing,” Mediascape.