In the April 2005 issue of Film & Video Magazine, there's an interview with Sound Designer Randy Thom called "What Randy Thom Hears." Here are some quotables:
In an action sequence, the impression you want to give the audience, typically, is that they’re hearing 50 things at once — people screaming, gunshots, explosions, the score, etc. But if you actually play all of those sounds at an equal volume, it turns into incoherent noise. The trick is to decide what you want the audience to focus on and use various audio tricks to allow them to focus on those sounds to the exclusion of everything else. Sometimes it’s as simple as raising the volume on the thing you want them to focus on and lowering the volume of everything else. Sometimes you change the tonal character of the principal sound and what you want to be the background sounds. If you do it artfully enough, the audience gets the impression that it’s hearing everything all the time. But if you analyze it, what you’re hearing is a carefully orchestrated changing of focus from moment to moment, from this to that.
In reality, everything that we hear in our environments has an emotional effect on us.
...when you’re a filmmaker and a sound designer, you should be thinking about the story and about using sound in the smartest possible ways to help tell the story and not be obsessed with 5.1 and 7.1 and all that. Because I would, and most people with a brain would, rather watch and listen to a great movie in mono than a thoroughly mediocre movie in 20.1 if such a thing existed. All of that stuff, being able to pan sounds around the room and having lots of subwoofer, is the icing on the cake. And first you have to get the cake, and too many movies these days don’t start with a very good cake.
In an action sequence, the impression you want to give the audience, typically, is that they’re hearing 50 things at once — people screaming, gunshots, explosions, the score, etc. But if you actually play all of those sounds at an equal volume, it turns into incoherent noise. The trick is to decide what you want the audience to focus on and use various audio tricks to allow them to focus on those sounds to the exclusion of everything else. Sometimes it’s as simple as raising the volume on the thing you want them to focus on and lowering the volume of everything else. Sometimes you change the tonal character of the principal sound and what you want to be the background sounds. If you do it artfully enough, the audience gets the impression that it’s hearing everything all the time. But if you analyze it, what you’re hearing is a carefully orchestrated changing of focus from moment to moment, from this to that.
In reality, everything that we hear in our environments has an emotional effect on us.
...when you’re a filmmaker and a sound designer, you should be thinking about the story and about using sound in the smartest possible ways to help tell the story and not be obsessed with 5.1 and 7.1 and all that. Because I would, and most people with a brain would, rather watch and listen to a great movie in mono than a thoroughly mediocre movie in 20.1 if such a thing existed. All of that stuff, being able to pan sounds around the room and having lots of subwoofer, is the icing on the cake. And first you have to get the cake, and too many movies these days don’t start with a very good cake.
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