While
the term 'sound design' is still struggling for acceptance in a global
film industry that is attuned to the sonic as much as a slug is attuned
to contemporary art, there is a growing rationalization of sound design
that is not helping its more creative aspects to flourish. 'Sound design'
is struggling for respect as a craft - as a begging discourse which
seeks compensation for being belittled by the deaf brethren engaged
in everything but sound post-production. While sound designers are rarely
if at all acknowledged for their contribution to the cinematic event
of audiovision we call 'movies', the recourse - particularly voiced
by American/English-speaking film culture - is to make heroes out of
sound designers while conservatively affirming that they are under contract
to greater forces to service the industry dilligently and intelligently.
But this modern consicousness of sound design has done little to change
the deafness in cinema. Nor has it forced American/English-speaking
film practitioners out of their narrow frame of reference. Worse, most
sound designers voice altruisms about narrative, drama and myth which
speciously sound like the retarded rhetoric employed by script doctors
worldwide.
Sound design need not be hemmed in by these conservative channels of
expression. Sound design can actively contribute to the creative shaping
of a film as both a modernist and post-modernist amalgam of mediarized
voices and effects. It can foreground psychological, psycho-acoustic,
phonological, acousmatic and sono-iconic aspects of the cinematic experience.
And it can do so in subtle 'naturalist' ways as effectively as it can
unleash wild and bombastic cacophonies of sono-musical collapse.
These ideas - similar to what Philip Brophy has voiced in numerous published
articles - form the crux of the various experimental applications he
has been fortunate enough to develop with willing directors on the range
of projects for which he has been engaged. The De-sign
presentations show how these seemingly 'radical' or 'problematic' notions
can very easily and positively be incorporated into industrial practice
without destroying the original integrity of a film and the director's
sensibility.
