Concluding Thoughts

Chapter 6 offers concluding thoughts on various methods of blurring the line between score and sound design and their common themes such as integration, inclusion, the erasure of boundaries, and the toppling of hierarchies. The chapter notes the inner dialectics of this trend, epitomized in the forces of change understood as progression and those explained by the cyclical reappearance of certain tendencies. The former are manifested in the use of a contemporary musical language that draws on the whole world of sound and the use of digital technology; the latter include the musical approach to soundtrack, aesthetic trends such as the aesthetics of reticence, and a fascination with the materiality, texture, and hapticity of sound, which all have precedents of some kind in the past. This chapter asserts that the main methods of blurring the line between score and sound design are inspired by music or informed by musical logic.

Introduction

The introduction argues that blurring the line between score and sound design represents an important new trend in contemporary soundtrack practice. It contends that the one factor that connects all the different cultural, aesthetic, and technological influences, and all manifestations of the present shift in practice, is a musical approach to film soundtrack conceived as an integrated whole. The chapter explains how the notions of an integrated soundtrack and the musicality of the soundtrack relate to this trend and looks at how they have been addressed in the existing literature. This chapter also provides an outline of the content, arguing for an approach that addresses the interdependency of intellectual, affective, and sensory stimuli in the film experience.

Musicalized Sound Design and the Erotics of Cinema

Chapter 4 explores the sensuous dimension of contemporary soundtracks through examples of soundtrack musicality drawn from diegetic sounds such as physical activities, walking, or environmental sounds. The chapter argues that the overall musical effect produced by the interaction between repetitive sound and rhythmicized visual movement creates musicality of an inherently cinematic nature, a type of audiovisual musique concrète. This approach is theorized through the concept of the erotics of art, contending that the practice of blurring the boundaries between music and the soundtrack’s other elements is intimately connected to the emergence of a trend that emphasizes the sensuousness of film form—its sonic and visual textures, composition, rhythm, movement, and flow—without confusing it with sensory overload.

The Musicalization of Speech and the Breakdown of the Film Soundtrack Hierarchy

Chapter 5 explores how the musicalization of speech undermines the traditional classical soundtrack hierarchy based on the dominance of the spoken word. Using examples from Drake Doremus’s Breathe In, Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, and Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color, this chapter asserts that the musical approach to the soundtrack as a whole challenges unwritten laws regarding speech intelligibility and redundancy, replacing the familiar hierarchy with a more fluid relationship in which music and speech alternately come in and out of focus. The case studies demonstrate how narrative information can be conveyed through nonverbal means—mise-en-scène, editing, characters’ body language, expressive close-ups—emphasizing musicality as the primary guiding principle of this practice.

Scoring with Sound, the Aesthetics of Reticence, and Films of Peter Strickland

Chapter 3 focuses on methods of replacing diegetic sound with electroacoustic music and/or musique concrète, or their seamless merging, arguing that they represent a significant development in the practice of erasing the line between score and sound design. The main case studies—Katalin Varga and Berberian Sound Studio—come from the work of British director Peter Strickland, whose methods of “scoring with sound design” are informed by his interest in avant-garde and experimental music. Connecting Strickland’s methods with a growing tendency among some filmmakers to reject the conventions of traditional scoring and its values of passive spectatorship, this chapter introduces the aesthetics of reticence as a conceptual framework embraced by artists who encourage the audience’s active intellectual and emotional engagement with the text.

“The Most Beautiful Area”

Chapter 2 provides a historical context for exploring core questions about the production of soundtracks in the digital age, focusing on the relationship between score and sound design and the various ways in which their functions can overlap under the influences of technology and the musical approach to soundtrack. The blurring of the line between score and sound design is examined from two different angles: one looks at scoring techniques that move the score towards the realm that is usually covered by the sound department, including ambient sound and sound effects; the other involves the musicalization of sounds that are traditionally tasked with a purely mimetic role and the creation of a “realistic” sound environment.