Storytelling and Sound Illusions
We humans are easily fooled by sound. It sneaks into the side door to the brain, and in almost all cases, outside of music theory classes, we tend to resist analyzing it. We just feel it, and this is the case with sound effects too, not just “music.”
This fact makes sound for film/video/games storytelling very powerful. Sad to say that power doesn’t translate into big budgets, partly because movie and game producers are no more analytical about the creative power of sound than they are about the sounds themselves. They feel it, but they can’t rationalize funding it, because they don’t understand it.
One story involving a sound illusion that I like to tell happened during the mix of the second Star Wars film “The Empire Strikes Back.” The Director was sitting in the back of the mix room and noticed a moment where he thought there should be a change in the mix. He mentioned it to the mixers, who added it to their list of changes to be done. The Director got distracted by a phone call for maybe thirty minutes and wasn’t paying attention to what was going on at the mixing console. When he returned, the mixers happened to be playing through the area where he had asked for the change. He complimented them on having addressed his concern, and said that it sounded much better now. One problem … they had not gotten to that item on the list yet. We are highly suggestible when it comes to sound. If we have some reason to think a sound has changed, then it will sound to us like it has changed.