Feeling Sound: Effects and Affects

Catalog description

Sound has immense importance in film language as a semantic, metaphoric, and affective device. It is in-frame, out-of-frame, in our memories, in the room, and elsewhere. Outside of film, our relationship to sound in our daily lives can be cultivated and honed to be more receptive to our own world—which, in turn, informs our experience of cinema. This course will cover a brief history of sound in film, from its early days to the advent of digital 69 Filmmaking and Moving Image Arts technology, while emphasizing its ever-continuing role in shaping narrative, emotional, and cognitive experience. Through a combination of lectures, readings, screenings, and hands-on group conferences, students will explore the mutable relationship of sound, film, and everyday life; the philosophy of sound; and the phenomenological aspects of auditory perception in both cinematic and everyday contexts. We will have short written assignments, critiquing the use of sound in film from in-class screenings, and a final, more substantial writing assignment that critiques one of those films through the lens of sound, using selected essays/texts from class readings. Hands-on group conferences will include making field recordings as a group that function as reflexive exercises or punctuations for our lectures about sound and image. Not for Children: Alternative Animation, 1960-Present