The sounds of silence... and other stuff.

Sound in cinema has always been an important factor in films since the advent of synchronous sound and other sound technology. The dialogue between characters adds information that the audience may not have been able to get just by looking at the screen. The added music can create different moods depending on how it's used. It can make an otherwise serious scene seem comical. Emotions are brought into play when the music seems to foreshadow upcoming events, something that could never happen if there were no sounds. Sound adds an extra dimension that makes watching film a more immersive experience. as an audience, we listen for auditory cues that would indicate what is happening, and film composers often create their soundtracks to match with the action on screen. Some characters are given their own musical themes, and every time they appear on the screen, their theme may begin to play in some form. The reading also mentions anempathetic music, in which the music sees to be detached from the emotions conveyed in a scene. While they are not connected directly to the emotions in said scene they create the sense of normalcy in a scene much in the same way ambient sound would. Even emphasizing these types of sounds may suggest o the audience that there is more to the world in which the characters live, and as in real life, no matter what occurs in from of the camera, time will continue to pass regardless. The reading also points out how the ear analyzes, processes and synthesizes faster than the eye. One could use that to move the audience's attention to auditory information and have them process more of that rather than give more visual information. This becomes important in a scene with much detail visually, but the focus is centered on whatever is making sound. One must also think about the ways that sound is presented, so as to temporalize images. A sound that is uneven will make it seem as if the action is more tense and more attention is focused on the image. Sound with unpredictable tempos will seem to motivate the action forward. The tempo of sound is also important because temporalization will be more dependent on the irregularity of the sound rather than on the quickness of the tempo. Hans Zimmer's soundtracks often come to mind with their droning, repeated melodic phrases played against slower actions.