The art of foley sound, of creating sound effects to accompany pictures alongside dialogue and music, is a vast creative domain, not to mention, a critical tool for the sound designer. Having met numerous Hindi film sound designers and other professionals over the last several months for a soon to be published essay, it is safe to say that the world they reside in is a unique one. The constant engagement with the sounds of cities and wilderness, days and nights, bats and beasts, trees and trains; of the sounds that can be made from objects, fabrics, fluids and other materials; and the texture, tone and timbre of sounds, is a profoundly immersive world. If there is a world of sound out there, there is indeed, yet another one mirrored within the mind's eye of the designer. A ripe peach squished down on a hard surface is as enticing to the designer as the retort of an 18thcentury cannon. To the designer, the ecological value of sounds is of great significance, and the sonic space on the soundtrack is his playground (and battlefield on occasion).
Pellucid sounds are obscured in ‘lo-fi' environments, R Murray Schafer, the pioneering composer, music educator and acoustic ecology advocate writes in The Music of the Environment (1973). In modern cities, with all the sounds of industry, progress, transportation, migration, there is much lost to the ear, in particular, perspective: "There is cross-talk on all the channels…and it is no longer possible to know what, if anything is to be listened to". But in a ‘hi-fi' soundscape, Schafer argues, it is the slightest of perturbations that matter, and "the human ear is alert, like that of an animal". He fascinatingly reproduces a sentence from F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night here:
…footfalls followed a round drive in the rear of the hotel, taking their tone in turn, from the dust road, the crushed-stone walk, the cement steps and then reversing the process in going away.
From the helicopter sounds in Apocalypse Now (1979), the constant radio station texture in American Graffiti (1973), overhead trains of the Bronx in The Godfather (1972), to the ‘digital' surveillance sounds of The Conversation (1974), Walter Murch's work as a sound designer and re-recording mixer is iconic, to say the least. Very interestingly, he discusses the sound of the desert in The English Patient (1996) here. The desert was very quiet in actuality (which was great for production sound), he says, but that would not really work for the soundtrack. They had to devise ‘a signature' for the desert, ‘an active silence' that provided a sonic bed for the various other sounds – sandstorms, planes, jeeps, machine gun fire, campfires, etc. Pat Jackson, the sound supervisor on the film, Murch reveals, collated a wide "blend of complicated sounds that included a very, very dry insect sound and the sound of grains rolling down paper". In the opening sequence, Murch edited in a small montage of desert sounds including a percussion rattle associated with a vial of medicinal oils. This initial sonic montage served the purpose of locating in viewer in time and space of the moving image. (...)
Old comedies and variety shows caught his imagination, Brunelle writes on, pointing in particular to The Three Stooges, which had "more sound effects per square inch of film than anything except for cartoons" – the ‘fourth stooge' to his mind.
Some of the techniques and methods used for the Stooges' antics were: cracking walnuts for knuckle crunches, ukulele or violin plinks for eye pokes, a muffled kettle or bass drum hit for a bump in the stomach, hitting a rolled up carpet with a fist for body blows, various ratchets or twisting stalks of celery for when ears or limbs were twisted. The glugging/drinking effect was done by pouring water out of a one gallon glass bottle into cotton batting (which would muffle the splashing).
Photo: uncredited
