Walter Murch on Sound

"Womb Tone"

How interesting it is that while sound is the first important sense we truly experience in life, we value it so much less than we do sight (something we do not even have for our first nine months of existence). I really enjoyed Murch's illustration of sound's importance through the eyes of an infant, specifically in regards to the discovery of synchronization and how it relates to the realization that the self and the world are separate entities.

It's also interesting how material from different classes inevitably all relates back to one another. I am in Intro to Editing at the moment and just today we were discussing the importance of L cuts and J cuts. It's important to have asynchronous sound so as to not, in Murch's words, "stifle the imagination" and instead to "loosen those chains and to re-associate the film's images with other, carefully-chosen sounds which at first hearing may 'wrong' in the literal sense."

"Dense Clarity - Clear Density"

Balaz spoke about sound and color as well, and it confused me just as much then as it does in Murch's essay. "Think of sound in terms of light," he says. Easier said than done! I understood his descriptions of encoded vs. embodied sound, but why on earth is one violet and one red? The description does call to mind the phenomenon of synesthesia, although I don't think this is what Murch intended. But perhaps voices really are purple and music really is red to him.