Sound effects

Interesting piece here about sound effects. It reminded me of the Berberian Sound Studio, which I wrote about six months ago and has stayed with me for all that time.

scraping dry ice across a contact microphone and combining it with a woman's high scream recorded backwards... the sound of dog food being slowly sucked out of the can... a pistachio nut being destroyed by metal plating... the cries of the pigs, slowed down to sound unearthly

In a more cheerful/less traumatising way, it also put me in mind of this, which always makes me smile...

When Tom Waits released the album Blood Money in 2002, the pre-release notes mentioned a mouse tambourine and a journo asked about this in an interview:

"Instruments utilised include piano, cello, pump organ, hand bells, circular violin, spring drum, marimba, calliope, timpani and mouse tambourine. l ask about the mouse tambourine and he laughs. 'Oh, you know what,' he says, bending over and rolling up his right trouser leg 'See these boots here, they have this buckle,' He wiggles a small silver buckle at the top of his black motorcycle boot. 'Well, during most of the songs I was tapping my foot and there was a lot of room mics in the studio, and so when we listened back to all the songs my wife's going, "What the hell is that?! That *tsk tsk tsk...*"' We just couldn't figure it out. Finally, she said, "Dammit it's those boots. I told you not to wear those boots. It's on everything!" And she got so upset!' He laughs. 'We tried to get rid of it and couldn't, so finally we just had to call it the mouse tambourine." ("Conformity is a fool's paradise" Time Out London (UK) by Ross Fortune. February/ March. Published: April 24 (- May 12), 2002)

Sourced from the Tom Waits Library: http://www.tomwaitsfan.com/tom%20waits%20library/www.tomwaitslibrary.com/percussioninstruments.html

I also love this: "On 'In The Colosseum' we used the Conundrum. This was an instrument that was built for me by a neighbour of mine who's a sculptor and a welder. It's just an iron cross with a lot of metal hanging off of it. it sounds like a jail door closing behind you."

Matt said he has video of our friend Pascal, who is a wizard with stringed instruments, tuning our ukulele. Just down the street there were some construction workers smashing a lot of glass and it created a great effect. I would like to explore this idea but with more subtlety - and a point to it - so I will have to think about that more.

Exercise: Listening

This exercise suggests going to somewhere very quiet (always tricky in London) and thinking about what can still be heard. I spent some time thinking about the sounds to disassociate them from the object that made it.

I would recommend the movie Berberian Sound Studio (dir Peter Strickland, 2012) for anyone thinking about this - it is about an English sound engineer, Gilderoy, (played by Toby Jones) working in an Italian Giallo studio. He has to create sound effects to match the action on the screens in front of him (which fortunately we never see). We watch Gilderoy, pale with disgust, stabbing cabbages and ripping stalks from vegetables to create sounds of hair being ripped from a woman's scalp etc. 

Having recorded some of the ambient noises within earshot, I tried to use other sensations to describe the sounds:

• Flavour/smell (thinking like a wine taster)
• Colour
• Emotion
• Physical texture

Bird song
Sharp; pointy; happy
Jewelled; citrus; sweet; tangy
Undulating texture
Festooned; yellow-green; lime
Fresh

The fridge
Grey; octagon
Salty; ocean smell
Tense/boring
Rough

Car engine on nearby street
Linear shapes
Bland
Metal-smell
Industrial
Anticipation
White

Kitchen noises (someone unloading a dishwasher)
Fractal
Spicy; chilli peppers
Uncertainty
Firm; unyielding texture
Blue light
Petrol fumes

Angle grinder in workshop next door
Zig zag shape
Parmesan taste
Industry
Silver
Sawdust smell

Sounding of a power sander
Orange
Pointy mesh
Zest
Hot oil smell
Anxiety

It was interesting to see from other student comments that some similar themes come up (sound of a beach and the taste of parmesan!)

Berberian Sound Studio

We watched the Berberian Sound Studio (dir Peter Strickland, 2012) last night. The ending felt very flat, to the point of ruining the movie (did the project run out of money or ideas?) but on reflection today, it did have some excellent moments. Plus it provided a fascinating insight to sound effects and the intricacies of being in a sound studio, which is good as the next part of the DFP course is about sound… 

The protagonist is Gilderoy, played brilliantly by Toby Young, who is an exquisitely stiff-upper-lip-Englisher in the fetid, sleazy world of 1970s giallo films. He has been brought in to work on a movie called The Equestrian Vortex, which - we quickly discover - is a brutal, misogynistic horror film (by implication this is possibly Suspiria – dir Dario Argento, 1977 or something similar). Although the viewer never sees the film we are forced to imagine the scenes from the voiceovers and visceral sound effects. Gilderoy is totally unprepared for the appalling scenes he has to enhance through sound but he seems to stay on the job as a result of being broke and also feeling that it is the professional thing to do. He loves the studio (we hear that he only has a garden shed in England for his work) in a wonderfully nerdy way and is flattered to think that he is the best man for the job. Gilderoy – a perfectionist - is manipulated by the intensely vile Francesco (played by Cosimo Fusco) and the film’s charismatic creator Santini (Antonio Mancino), handsome and charming but ultimately lecherous and predatory with the female actors. 

It was not clear to me what was happening towards the end. I suspect that Gilderoy has a kind of breakdown as he feels that he has become part of the actual film by being complicit in making such a gruesome piece of cinema. He is suddenly able to speak Italian even in the flashback to when he first arrives. One of the actresses practices her lines by speaking words from a letter sent by Gilderoy’s mother, which she could not have seen. 

The mise en scene is excellent in creating a mood of menace and claustrophobia: lots of use of dark shadows; throbbing red lights; close-ups of rotting vegetables; women in the recording rooms screaming in apparent silence; power cuts; distortion of sounds – especially the human voice; a focus on the machinery – turning reels and projector lights to indicate the monotony of the work. We become hypersensitive to sound like our anti-hero, leaving our nerves on edge throughout the film. The whole movie is set underground - in the studio, Gilderoy’s room (next door?) and the corridor nearby – we get the sense that our man has been imprisoned. 

There were echoes of the mystery of Barton Fink and for much of the film we feel a great secret may be revealed that things are not as they seem. This is interspersed with lots of black humour and the hilariousness of an Englishman abroad (the scene where he gets angry to try to get his expenses paid is brilliant). 

 This is a disturbing and ambiguous movie with lots of surreal moments. It is slow, brooding and quite creepy – manipulating the minds of the viewers to create the horror reflected in our protagonist’s wide eyes. By the end, we have no idea what or who is real. I would have given this pretty high marks if it had not just fizzled out so disappointingly in the final moments but I would recommend it for anyone obsessed with films.