Ambient Sound: How it is used in animation.

Introduction:

After exploring specific audio trends within the animated world, I decided to re-score three animations of varying styles.

The clips chosen were:

• Halo 4 - an in-game cutscene depicting the remains of the mothership, UNSC Forward Unto Dawn and the revival of Master Chief.

• Divisor - a sci-fi depiction of robots being harvested for parts.

• Ryze: Call of Power - a fantasy cinematic about a wizard’s journey to reclaim his power.

• The Albatross - a clip of a struggling writer at sea trying to overcome his alcohol addiction.

*finished projects available at the end of the article.

 

Current Context and Trends:

This project explores the trend of ‘Ambient Sound Design’, the creation of “background sounds which are present in a scene or location” (MediaCollege, n.d.) and using themes to accentuate moods specific to a scene. Mel Wesson, a British film composer, is a crucial example of this trend as he worked with Hans Zimmer as an Ambient Sound Designer on multiple film scores including The Dark Knight, Transformers and Inception (IMDb, n.d.).

 

Mel Wesson’s Drones 4 (2017) is an album that influenced me greatly, especially the track In for a Penny. The latter is a dystopian themed track featuring reversed chimes, high sustained drone sweeps and stuttered bell hits, inspiring my soundtracks for Divisor and Halo 4 as drones were fundamental in both. Divisor took a similar route with reversed metallic sweeps and low drones.  In an interview published in Mel Wesson’s biography, he explains how he is more interested in “making the sound do the work as opposed to the notes” (Wesson, n.d.).

 

To understand the artistic context of Mel Wesson’s work better, Michel Chion’s book Audio-vision (1994), talks about ‘Territory-Sound’ (more commonly referred to as Ambient Sound) as “a sound that envelops a scene and inhabits its space without raising the question of the identification or visual embodiment of its source”. By enhancing the environment, it can also help the viewer to become immersed within the clip.

 

In the realm of sound, Walter Murch is considered to be the “godfather of sound design and has redefined the way we listen and engage with movie sound” (Freer, 2017). Murch coined a sound design concept known as ‘worldizing’; editing and controlling a sound source until it “seemed to be something that existed in real space” (FilmSound, n.d.).  By recording a playback of the original in a different environment, the sound assumes the acoustic characteristics of where it was subsequently recorded. In the film THX 1138 (Lucas & Sturhan, 1971), specifically the scene White Void Torture (Movieclips, 2014), Murch uses sound design as a way to accentuate the environment instead of using ‘traditional’ music. The ‘literal’ image usually gets emphasised by sound or Foley but, in this particular case, Murch uses sound design to enhance background imagery, allowing for richness within the scene. Using sounds to enhance a specific environment is a process I explored with the radio sounds in The Albatross to add to the fishing hut and with ‘Number Stations’, a shortwave transmission from foreign intelligence agencies to spies in the field of foreign countries ("Number Stations”, n.d.), in Halo 4 to show residual activity in a recently destroyed ship. 

 

Even forty years since Murch started creating ambient sound design, sound designers are still using sound as a way to define a clip. Senjan Jansen and Bert Aerts, sound designers-mixers from the Netherlands, created the sound for Finity Calling (2018, an animated short by Jasper Kuipers) that won ‘Best Sound Design Award’ at the London International Animation Festival, being an exemplary example of how “Sound design, in its perfection, will sonically animate a universe” (LIAF Judges, 2018). The soundtrack of Finity Calling consists of no music, only sound design. The richness of each sound creates enough story while emphasising the emotion of the clip, as illustrated by the distorted screams and the ambient traffic noises. Further, the limited industrial soundscape from Archipel: Dialog of a City (Studio Naam, n.d.), another Kuipers animation in a similar style to Finity Calling, also contains no music. Due to the unique and immersive nature of sound design, both tracks use sound design rather than music as a way of “evoking a mood or an emotion from the listener” (Farley, 2013).

 

In terms of music for animation, a popular trend is that of ‘Mickey-Mousing’, “the matching of the musical soundtrack of a film to the details of the accompanying action” (Oxford Dictionary, n.d.). Disney popularised this process and film companies continue to favour its use within animations, an example of which is Disney’s animated short, ‘Runaway’, (Mickey Mouse, 2014). Live-action films have also been known to employ this technique, although less explicitly, as seen in Spider-Man (Raimi & Ziskin, 2002), when, after he gets bitten by a spider, Peter Parker starts to climb up the wall and each step forward is marked by staccato brass stabs.

 

Although the use of music is less explicit, animation studio, DreamWorks, follows a different approach when using music for the image as themes and small motifs are used to accentuate a certain feeling or mood, or even a specific character. The ‘friendship’ theme from How to Train Your Dragon (DeBlois & Arnold, 2010) is used to indicate the strong bond between dragon and rider (Soundtrackbeat, 2017). This technique for using music and sound to indicate and enhance emotion is one of the processes I explored and developed throughout my project.

​

*bibliography available on request