The term "sound" refers to everything we hear in a movie- words, sound effects and music. Sound is used in a film to heighten a mood, provide us with information about the location of a scene, advance the plot, and tell us about the characters in the story.
In media there are 2 types of audio present: Digetic and Non-Digetic:
- Digetic sound : refers to all those audio elements that come from sources inside the world we see on the screen, including dialogue, door slamming, footsteps, etc.
The example shown is a pure digetic sound example. The scraping noise and the wind blowing are exactly what is happening at that exact moment.
Movie example of a digetic sound would be:
- Non- Digetic sound: refers to all those audio elements that come from outside of the fictional world we see on screen, including the musical score and sound effects like screeches
This is an example of how extremely believable non-digetic sounds are created for movies.
More example of digetic and non-digetic are:
In this scene. The digetic sound would be the news reporter in the news and the non-digetic sound would be the music which starts as soon as Peter puts in his headphones and later on is loud enough for everyone in the audience to hear.
But the most interesting use of sound in a movie is the very absence of it: silence.
At key points in a film, directors may use silence in much the same way that they would use a freeze frame. Both tend to arrest the audience's attention to highlight some action or change in story direction. Silence can be used to build up a scene's intensity or to foreshadow impending doom.
But that was about sound.
How does music help in shaping a film?
When we think about it carefully, music is one of the most peculiar conventions in movies. No one questions that music should be a part of movies because we've all grown used to the idea that, in a movie, when a person is attracted to another person, we should hear music at the background, example, guitars. Of course, no one has a soundtrack accompanying their real lives. But in movies we not only accept this convention, we demand it.
The most obvious way music scores are used is to guide the emotional response of the audience. They provide clues, or, in most cases, huge signposts, that tell audience how the filmmaker wants them to react to a given scene.
In some voice-overs can be unobtrusive. Used poorly, voice-overs can often seem like "the voice of God", bringing forth wisdom audiences are supposed to accept unquestioningly. For this reason, some filmmakers refuse to use voice-overs in their films to let audiences have more freedom in determining what the meaning of the film is.
Linking sounds to my genre:
Thinking about the sounds used in the drama genre. I came to realise that many of them have a mixture of both the sound (well most movies do).
Lets take Titanic for an example, Titanic was one of the first movies in drama that broke the "typical" stereotypes of the drama genre. Because first of all, Titanic, the element on which the movie was based upon was true but the characters were not (and even if they were, nobody knows). So pretty much everything in that movie was imaginative.
Yet we will see an example about how its score, till today famous song, "Heart will go on", had come to the making.
Sound, like every other technique, offers a plenitude of possibilities, but the film maker judges which ones to pursue, based on how they suit the film's overall form and how they shape the viewer's experience.
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