Sound Effects

Helena absolutely loves playgrounds, but she has never been a great fan of teeter-totters.  She prefers swings and slides and anything she can climb... and I have to admit that I empathize with her on her choices.  Even so, when we went to the playground on the shores of the Lagoa de Peri a couple of days ago, Helena wanted to get on the "up-up!" (as she calls the teeter-totter), and I decided to add a little to the game.  As she went up and down, I made strange noises: hardly the sound effects of a sci-fi movie, but something that tried to imitate airplanes and spaceships and who knows what else.  And for the first time, Helena's laughs on the teeter-totter were something similar to her expressions on joy on swings and slides.  She didn't want to get off, even after hundreds of ups and downs.

 This week, I have also been working on the title sequence for the new internet-based news channel that Rita and I are developing with teenagers from the favelas of Recife.  Though I had figured out some interesting images and visual effects, I simply was not convinced by the way the titles were coming out: they seemed to lack emotion and gusto.  Thinking of Helena and her teeter-totter, I began to work on the sound: not just the music, but the sounds that go on in the background that often pass straight to our subconsciousness.  And suddenly, the images began to make sense -- it's not that they were cooler or more interesting, but they became comprehensible in a new way.  With sound, the viewer sees new things.

Now, I think it's a bit of an exaggeration to say, along with the French cinema theorist Michel Chion, that film truly functions as a new space teaching us how to hear.  None the less, sound does teach us to see: imagine the explosions of a blockbuster movie without the booming sound effects of a theater, or a person walking though a deserted building without the echoing of footsteps.  I have made enough films to know that when you record sound as you film, you don't get it right.  The steps are too loud or too soft, the wind distracting...  In the end, the sound that we record in reality just doesn't sound right on film, so we have to re-create it.  It's not a deception, but a way of learning to see in a new place (in front of a movie screen, a TV, the computer...).

Immanuel Kant based his epistemology, the basic rules for how we know the world, on two premises: first, that we somehow understand space and time before we ever experience it, that it is a part of our mental make up.  And second, he insisted on the "systematic coherence of apperception", a really confusing way of saying that all of our senses have to agree on something for us to feel that it's part of the world.  If we hear a coffee grinder but don't catch the smell of beans and don't see the whirl of the machine, we know that something is wrong.  When the whole shebang of lots of different sensations comes together, we feel more confident about reality.

Film -- or any kind of play, like a teeter-totter -- is often lacking a couple of senses.  It isn't quite real: that's what gives art and play the chance for creativity, humor, and critical distance.  At the same time, it can make everything feel kind of empty.  So boys invent the sounds of laser guns and sword clatter as they play their war games.  We fake the sounds of falling as we climb in a tree or drop rocks off a bridge into a stream.  And we create sound effects on the computer for the movies we invent.