Sound design. Ambiguity and historical necessity of a fashionable label

Maurizio Corbella

Università degli Studi di Milano

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The web site filmsound.org, an international benchmark carrying the latest technical and practical data on the ‘art of film sound’, features the topic of sound design in hundreds of bibliographic references listed in alphabetical order by film title. Proof enough of the fortune of this formula that has come into everyday use among specialists and ordinary cinema-goers alike. In the structure of cinema production, sound designer is surely the most ambiguous specialisation, with a field of action ranging from so-called “special” sound effects to authorial responsibility for a film’s entire audio component. Like the term “director”, sound designer does not denote specific, well defined competences but rather an extensive and articulated semantic area.

The true sound designer must be immersed in the story, characters, emotions, environments, and genre of the film. With their contribution the audience will be led down the path in an integrated, yet most often unconscious manner toward an experience that is authentic and human, a metaphor for the life experience itself. Using all the tools of music, psychology, acoustics, and drama, the art of orchestration comes into play, selecting the right sound for the right moment (Sonnenschein 2001: xix).

Yet, unlike the director, the sound designer has not always existed, at least not in terms of such a definition. The emergence of this label went hand in hand with the New Hollywood phenomenon and the debate on art cinema in the American society, in the wake of independent filmmaking in Europe during the 1960s and its adaptation to Californian production practices. Following a further paradigm shift in which the problem of authorship seems slightly less poignant than before, there is nowadays a tendency to call into question a label which has exerted considerable fascination without becoming fully integrated into mainstream production models, at least not in its most ambitious guise (Jullier [2006] 2007: 21). Hence the need to clarify the semantic boundaries of a term which has been rapidly historicised, acquiring its aesthetic models and canons, while all too little attention has been paid to the reasons for its historical appearance and its conceptual paradigms.