What we hear affects what we think we see…I never really considered this until I heard this being said in this video. It’s completely true. I mean if we hear something drop and it sounds light and doesn’t echo we don’t really think too much about it and see it as something minor but if we hear something drop that sounds hard and makes a thudding sound all of a sudden we freak out and feel as though we dropped something valuable and something that is going to leave a huge mess. This video showed guys smashing things and going through a whole load of trouble just so that they get the right sound effect for their movie. If the sounds weren’t loud enough, or if they didn’t sound forceful enough, people wouldn’t understand the extent of damage that was done. I found this really interesting as I never really thought about how much work it takes in order for directors to get just the right sound effect for a scene. The example that they showed in this video was a car crash and what they did was continuously smash a car in order to find just the right sound that would leave the desired effect on the viewers. They use a special device that they call Harry and it is actually shaped like a human head. It has microphones in the same places where a human being would have their ears and so it records sounds the same way that one would be able to hear them. The director in this video went through extreme lengths to record sounds like dropping logs using a crane on cars in order to get sounds that would sound realistic and severe enough for the particular scene that he was working on. The video also mentioned how one simple sound can be used to create many different effects. I found this to be particularly useful because I never thought about how just one sound can be used over and over again in a way that it sounds like something else every time. I think that this is something that I definitely want to incorporate into my sound composition because I want to see the different effects one sound can leave. Like a penny dropping on the floor. I wonder how many different things people will think of it to be. The director also mentioned that apart from just hearing sounds you have to be able to FEEL them. In order for this to happen he preferred using a lot of bass. I found this really interesting because I never realized how true this fact was. When you hear something and the bass isn’t particularly evident you don’t get as much out of it as you would if the bass was more evident because then you would be able to feel it. The effect is longer lasting and much stronger. This is also something that I really hope to test out in my sound composition. I want to see how changes in the strength of the bass can affect the same sound. This video brought to my attention the fact that one sound can appear to be so many different things. It also made me realize that sounds are not only heard, but felt. A truly stimulating sound is one that you feel.
What we hear affects what we think we see
7 03 2010
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