Mak­ing Waves: The Art of Cin­e­mat­ic Sound

The talk­ing heads rolodex spins around hasti­ly in the ear­li­est pas­sages of sound edi­tor Midge Costin’s debut doc­u­men­tary Mak­ing Waves: The Art of Cin­e­mat­ic Sound: an archae­o­log­i­cal dig into the bumpy but ulti­mate­ly tri­umphant his­to­ry of sound in motion pic­tures, armed with a pletho­ra of famous film­mak­ers to add con­sen­sus to an obiter com­ment made by Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la pro­claim­ing sound as ​“50 per cent of the movie”.

With the likes of Steven Spiel­berg, David Lynch, Christo­pher Nolan and George Lucas offer­ing words of def­er­ent encomi­um on all things audio, Costin’s film slings its net into his­tor­i­cal back­wa­ters to drag up the key prog­en­i­tors, pio­neers and devel­op­ments that took us from Edison’s inven­tion of the phono­gram to Alfon­so Cuarón’s Dol­by Atmos mix for Roma. If that all sounds ter­ri­bly dry, fear not, it has its moments too.

Two sound design­ers offer par­tic­u­lar­ly illu­mi­nat­ing insight. Gary Ryd­strom in his dis­sec­tion of the bul­let-strewn beach land­ing in Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan with input from Spiel­berg him­self, and Wal­ter Murch into the flash­back-rid­den, trau­ma-laden open­ing to Apoc­a­lypse Now, which remains a tow­er­ing break­through in mix­ing and edit­ing to this day.

In fact, Murch opens the doc­u­men­tary with the asser­tion that sound is the first of our sens­es to be encroached start­ing from our time with­in the womb pick­ing up on sounds around our moth­er. It is a bold asser­tion, cer­tain­ly, and while it may be one that bucks the tab­u­la rasa as pro­posed by John Locke, there is no dis­put­ing that sound is cen­tral to how we per­ceive and process thought.

Costin uses con­trib­u­tors to explain that, in the con­text of a screen­ing the­atre, can­ny direc­tors and their spe­cial­ist col­lab­o­ra­tors have come to under­stand that emo­tions can be manip­u­lat­ed if sound is deployed judi­cious­ly. Alfred Hitch­cock grasped it ear­ly, show­cas­ing it best with his sparse, score­less The Birds. Robert Alt­man exper­i­ment­ed with it to explore scope and con­vey vérité with the help of Jim Webb’s ground­break­ing mul­ti­track work for Nashville.

Lucas emerges as some­thing of a cen­trifu­gal force in push­ing sound effects towards new fron­tiers in the sev­en­ties. For­ward-think­ing and ambi­tious, com­mis­sion­ing Ben Burtt for a year-long research project for Star Wars yield­ed results that would super­charge his film with a son­ic va-va-voom to match the jaw-drop­ping visu­al aes­thet­ic for the sprawl­ing space tale.

At times Mak­ing Waves plays like an earnest infomer­cial plug­ging the virtues of niche branch­es of the film indus­try. For some­thing as explo­sive as audio, this sto­ry may be edu­ca­tion­al, but it is also per­verse­ly mut­ed, aus­tere and one-note-seri­ous, whilst also fre­quent­ly impaired by the com­mon first-time film­mak­er pit­fall of struc­tur­al disjointedness.

At its heart, how­ev­er, is a well-intend­ed and often enlight­en­ing cel­e­bra­tion of those who have helped most in mak­ing our movie-going expe­ri­ence as ful­fill­ing as it can be. From Foley artists, to SFX folk, to dia­logue edi­tors and more. They have inched sound for­ward so that it would no longer in any way be mov­ing image’s one-foot­ed dance part­ner, but a mutu­al­ly enrich­ing, if not entire­ly co-depen­dent, partner-for-life.