I.T on Film Music

The excellent Nina Power turns her attention to film soundtracks:

Increasingly film music seeks to lend humanity itself a veneer of the cinematic, an eco-friendly soundtrack to dampen the fears of the antagonisms and asymmetries of everyday existence. Coupled with the painful loudness of Dolby surround sound and the brutal atonality of sounds of cinematic violence - explosions, car crashes, gun shots - the modern cinematic ear is trained for nothing less than the sickening, yet omnipresent, combination of cruelty and fake humanism that characterises contemporary life.

Glad she mentioned Shutter Island as an exception to the general 'Revenge of the Visual'. At times while watching the film I felt that the sounds were more significant and divulging than the images. Generally the music choice displays similar paternalism and philanthropy to the Golden Age of British public broadcasting discussed in this essential Quietus review.

Sound Diary #1

The Canadian Rockies 23/03/10 – 26/03/10

We followed the Maligne Lake road up to Maligne lake – It’s between seasons now so no tourists are around. The lake is completely frozen. There is a profound stillness to the place. Those sounds that are audible – the ravens shouting at each other on the other side of the lake, the pine swaying and creaking behind me are amplified by the otherwise absolute silence. Coming from the city I’m unused to this degree of quiet. It’s unsettling and reminds me of those passages in Heidegger on anxiety where he talks about those revealing but unnerving moments where there is nothing to hold onto.

I never get used to this feeling -seeing so much and hearing so little. At Peyto Lake the silence is broken by a weird intrusion. There is a wind up audio guide to the glacial formation of the mountains and lake below. I gave it a go in English and then in Japanese, the Japanese version has a short piano piece playing in the background. When the pieces finish the immediate silence was even heavier.

The great sound of the Candian Rockies at this time of year is the Spring thaw. We visited a number of falls and rivers that were, depending on environmental factors, at various stages of deliquesence. The great roars of the Athabasca and Sunwapta falls are reduced to nothing in winter. Frozen, the falls make very little sound. In Spring the water begins to forge new channels beneath the ice surface and you can hear this filtered flow sound.

At Johnstone’s Canyon the river was largely frozen, a layor of ice covered a water flow of indeterminate size and strength. In places, where the surface ice has melted away, you can glimpse the clear waters flowing underneath. Wallace Stegner’s Mountain Water with its ‘ roar that shook both the earth and me’ is not there at this time of year. The river’s sound more like mountain streams when exposed. At one point the river’s water treated the ice’s underside like a drum, hitting it repeatedly, creating an arythmic bassy thud. As well as water flow you hear a lot of dripping. Not particularly interesting or pleasant for the most part unless the dripping was in a cavern when it took on wholly new reverberant qualities.

Summer must sound completely different, louder here.

We spent a lot of time on the road. We drove the 230km from Jasper along the Icefields Parkway to Banff. This must surely be one of the most scenic drives in the world. For the most part the radio was off. We had no cassettes so the only sound in the car was the sound of the car. For those drivers distracted by the scenery and veering over to the other side of the road there is an ingenious piece of sonic technology occasionally deployed called the rumble strip. The first and only time we strayed onto the rumble strip I was shocked. The whole car reverberates and the almost pleasant hypnotic whirr of the car changes suddenly to a much more vigorous shaking. The sound, which seems to occur after the initial shake and shock, is loud. The rumble strip works via what Steve Goodman terms sonic affect, it utilizes pre-perceptual vibrational force to bring about an immediate response – attention!

Before heading to Banff we spent two nights in Jasper. The dominant sound here is that of the Canadian national freight trains moving slowly through town. The trains are exceptionally long, some of the world’s longest I’m told. Carriages are as far as the eye can see in both directions and the chain takes over 20 minutes to pass by. The freight is mixed - there are single stacked inter-modal cars, what looks like oil tankers, and wooden wagons, each is rich in its own sonorous quality. One night I got to stand next to one as it moved by. The sounds emanate from the car’s wheels pressing down on the track, this resonates in the container’s materials and reverberates through its empty space. These creaking, groaning, screeching sounds are tempered by the pulse of the labouring locomotives.

On Wednesdays and Sundays the Whistle-stop pub hosts an open mic night. We had a seat in time to hear a guitarist tuning his four guitars; he’s an excellent slide guitarist. The agenda for the evening was simple: anyone could come along and perform, if they needed accompaniment there was a house band consisting of guitar, bass, drums and Moog organ on standby. It was the house band who started things off with a few rockabilly numbers. Other local artists performing on the night were diverse – there was Willie, a stalwart of the local folk and blues scene, who played harmonica and sung, two young rappers who sung about summers in the city, several anodyne acoustic guitarists, and a local country band with soft female vocals. An influx of migrant workers from the Philippines has meant that karaoke has become more prevalent in town. Here two Pilipino lads picked up bass and guitar to give us a rock cover.