Birger Langkjær : Sound Realism – conceptualising cross-modal experience in the film
  

A fundamental thesis of this project is that sound and music play a vital role in the lifelike quality, or realism, traditionally attributed to the moving image. Sound can help persuade an audience that a documentary film is about reality or make fictional films more true to life. The film is a narrative medium, which could also be considered as a condensed form of audiovisual communication, in which the timing of aural and visual information is crucial, as they mutually reinforce each other's realism. The project builds on the assumption that sound in film and other media is something we talk about, but which is rarely analyzed. This may be partly due to the fact that sound and music are notoriously difficult to describe. Further, those disciplines occupied with hearing / listening (e.g. Musicology, Cultural Studies, perception psychology) describe sound differently. In accordance with Van Leeuwen (1999), this project will seek to gather up the descriptions that cut across modalities (e.g, 'distance', 'synchronicity', 'mode') and look at the common features of different aural forms in films such as speech, music and sound effects. The aims are 1) to develop ways to talk about and describe different types of sound that emphasize the similarities between speech, music and sound effects, see Cook 2001, and 2) to develop methods to analytically capture a level of significance that may be found in between the close technical descriptions found in music notation and the kind of anthropological / structural music analysis that tends towards abstract and generalized interpretation methods. Instead, sound and music are conceived as a specific form of communication within a popular cultural and aesthetic framework. This requires a form of middle level analysis that combines descriptive precision, relevance and importance. This is developed through careful analysis of the 3 movies that simultaneously are considered in relation to theories and concepts from different research fields, including film, music and perceptual psychology. The specifically aural is also considered within the context of audiovisual perception (perception as a synthesis between sensory modalities), and put into a generic context in which genre can be seen as the matrix that varies the basic functions of the sounds, such as their ability to control attention and/ or affect the emotional tone.

Birger Langkjær, Ph.D ., is associate professor in media studies in the Department of Scandinavian Studies and Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen. He is editor-in-chief for MedieKultur – journal of media and communication studies and is a member of a number of organizations including the Society of Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (SCSMI), the European Network of Cinema Studies (NECS), the Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) and Sammenslutningen af medieforskere i Danmark (SMID). He has published Filmlyd & filmmusik (Film Sound & Film Music, 1996) and Den lyttende tilskuer (The Listening Viewer, 2000) as well as numerous articles on film sound, realism and genres in Danish cinema in journals such as Convergence, Excavatio, p.o.v., Norsk medietidsskrift, Mediekultur, Film International and Montage av.