Hope you guys are ready for a flood of posts over the next few hours. I don’t watch/listen to much horror-related stuff, so I won’t really be able to give my thoughts on that for this reflection. I can talk about some other cool stuff though. One of my favourite uses of sounds in storytelling is a deliberate lack of sounds. I’ll bring up a few such cases.

First things first, I’ll talk about Moon Graffiti. In the story, I loved the occasional bits in between Buzz and Neil speaking when you can just hear their breathing and a little bit of crackling from their radios. Just from the breathing and crackling, you can feel them resigning themselves to their fates. It’s neat how you can feel that from just the sound of breathing.

A similar use of sound in sci-fi is in this scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey:

All you hear is the sounds from inside Frank Poole’s helmet. The hissing of the oxygen and his rhythmic breathing. Together with the shots where he seems so small, you can feel the vast emptiness of space, and the thin layer protecting him from it. His death scene is entirely silent: no breathing, no music, just quiet and the blackness of space. By not using sound, they’re able to convey our insignificance when compared to the universe.

As a podcast, Limetown has to tell its story using only audio. Its use of sound was really immersive; you could almost see everything happening just from the sounds. Its use of music to convey emotion was also done well. For instance, there was very calm ambient music playing when the doctor (I forget his name now) was reminiscing about Napoleon, while when he was talking about Napoleon’s death, the music was much more fear-inducing.

Now here’s one of my favourite scenes from one of my favourite movies, Children of Men. If you haven’t seen the film, it’s set it in a world 18 years after women worldwide became infertile. The main character gets involved in some stuff and meets a pregnant women, who he tries to escort to a place where she can have the baby safely. In this scene, the military is fighting some refugees in a rundown refugee camp.

I really like how they’re able to use the sound of a baby crying, which is normally an irritating and frustrating noise, to convey hope and wonder. I especially like the shot around 2:35 in the video, where it’s entirely silent except for the sound of the baby crying. The use of the ambient music throughout the scene also fits really well and helps convey that sense of hope.

So yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about sounds this week! They do a ton in conveying emotion and tone that aren’t as easily conveyed solely with video.