Task 1
Ultimately, sound is extremely important whether it’s in film, television and music. Sound can dictate how we see a scene, without sound a scene could look and feel bland with no meaning which effects how you perceive a piece of work, sound can make scenes memorable which in effect means you’ll be more likely to visit that piece of work in the future and recommend it to others, when sound is edited well it sets one piece of work above another. For example in Star Wars, they weren’t sure what ‘noises’ that R2D2 should be doing/how they weren’t sure how he should sound, so sound editor Ben Burtt‘ created’ his own voice for R2D2, giving the robot the iconic sounds that he’s known for. He remarked that getting the sounds for R2D2 was the toughest task. This was achieved by Burtt mimicking the sound a young child/baby who is attempting to talk which fits the character perfectly as R2 is a robot who can’t communicate. It makes sense that R2 was modelled on someone who would also be struggling/learning to talk, giving the character itself more realism. It uses foley to create a sound that conveys R2D2 perfectly as this character who is essential but doesn't have much to say (literally) and this is a great example of just how foley works, the result is one of the most iconic character sounds in cinema history, with Ewan McGregor saying 'there is something that makes you feel a great affection for him' showing just how influential well-crafted sound can be, sound doesn't have to be extremely complicated as Ben Burtt has shown, you can achieve high-quality sound with anything.
Furthermore, sound is edited to create a narrative, narrative means a story or to connect events. An example is of raw footage of an interview conducted with Thom Yorke, as you get further in the footage you realise that the raw footage is boring, when giving answers he stutters a little bit, which doesn't make for an interesting interview, an interview is meant for the audience to get to know the subject a little better. We want to know their thoughts on the same issues/subjects that we go through on a daily basis, as in this case the interview is about Neil Young, an artist who has had a big influence on culture, and who better to talk about an influential artist than a modern artist. And, a superstar like Yorke will bring in an audience to the interview itself, more people will tune into an interview with him rather than a normal every day person, he's a lot different to us as his life experiences differ to ours. We aren't lead singers of a band so to get into a glimpse of that life will be fascinating, and the interview won't want to waste the opportunity that is has to present a different world. Back to sound, earlier I referred to how Yorke often stuttered and slurred, which interrupted the flow of the interview thus making it seem uninteresting to the audience and if there's a lack of relevant information, then many audience members will click off, editing is required to be rid of the irrelevant details, an example of this is at 4:23 there's an example of the stuttering I was referring to, for around seven seconds the conversation remains stale and is an example of how the raw footage is a bore, it's completely unnecessary, trimming down the footage keeps the conversation fresh and keeps the audience hooked, we hang onto every word Yorke says because the interview doesn't stretch longer than it needs to, it keeps it fresh and non-repetitive keeping the attention of the audience throughout.
Editing fictional content is similar to factual, both need to fit a narrative but they still have different causes. Firstly, television stations trim down sound because they need to adhere to regulations, stations are allowed 7 minutes for advertising (which is what Ofcom allows) which is valuable to advertisers. With this, the television stations need to cut their content around this to be able to fit in with their schedule, therefore content has to be edited down to ultimately fit the regulations, but also the content still needs to make ‘sense’, there still needs to be a clear narrative because the programme still needs to make sense to the audience, the programmes are broken up into two slots of around 12/13 minutes each, meaning they need to skim through the footage and still be able to create a ‘watchable’ show which still adheres to the tight schedule they need to keep. An example of how sound is edited is in the show The Sopranos. For context: the daughter (Meadow) has been told by a therapist that she could go to Europe, and her parents (Tony and Carmela) won’t allow it. Around two minutes fifty-eight seconds in, Tony’s daughter remarks ‘Wow, listen to Mr Mob Boss’, then he stands up with a grim expression on his face, and the only sound is him getting up showing that this is the main focus of the scene, it builds tension for us the audience because we wonder what his reaction will be, the lack of non-diagetic sound only enforces this, there’s nothing else for us to focus on. This is ‘achieved’ by the diagetic sounds of Tony’s heavy breathing, it’s a way of showing the anger inside him without any physical action, then near the end of the scene once Tomy has stopped talking, there’s a few seconds of silence, again this reinforces the tension throughout the scene, everyone involved doesn’t know what to say and the lack of dialogue proves it, it also proves that their daughter doesn’t have any good points as to why she should move countries, despite being a show about violence they do portray normal mundane situations with precision. This scene is an example of how you create tension without saying much at all, everything that happened in the show at this point is brewing over and words fly out, it shows the importance of sound, you couldn’t achieve the tension achieved in this scene with anything else, but sound achieves it with purpose.
Task 2
There are many things required to actually edit sound, whether it’s a mixing console or editing software, audio engineers can mix either: television, film and music. To begin, software is incredibly important as that is what you use to finish your final product, one of the ‘better’/more known softwares is Audacity (which is what I’ve used personally), you can do a lot of things on it, firstly you can edit the tempo (speed) of the audio to potentially match with a video that you’re also editing, this is useful because some audio files may need to be sped up and the software prevents the need to rerecord audio, you can also ‘cut’ audio, you can cut audio that is irrelevant and not needed, like referenced earlier you will not want any audio that you don’t need. Regarding physical equipment, many audio engineers use the same equipment. These include:
Microphone – every engineer uses a microphone and the ones they use vary on what piece of media that they’re editing sound on. Microphones are used to pick up sound and the better the microphone then the better the audio will be, it’s best to use a high-quality microphone as it’ll require less editing in Audacity/Logic pro saving yourself some time and allowing you to focus on other projects/parts of the production.
Digital mixing console – this is an electronic device which is used for the audio engineer to combine many different audio ‘signals’, an advantage of this is that there are many ‘on-board’ effects which defeats the need for other pieces of software therefore saving you money because you already have the features that you need.
Editing technique
Volume riding – whilst editing sound, you need to pay attention to every snippet of audio to make sure there’s enough volume in each clip. An audio mixer would listen to a clip and then adjust the volume to the appropriate setting as no sound should be too loud or too quiet, you would use the volume fader to do this. A good edit can make a scene well known/iconic, an example of this is the scene in Jaws, where the audio’s volume and tempo have been edited to give the scene a tense feel, the tempo has increased so the audio is faster, giving the audience an anxious feel because as the speed of the clip gets faster, the more we as the audience expect something bad to happen. The sound of the scene creates the entire suspense, because we know that there’s a vicious shark on the loose but the audience don’t, so them being unaware of the danger plus the suspense of the scene creates dread and it makes us fear for the people in the water, with this scene it’s not a matter of if the shark gets them, it’s a matter of when.
