Michel Chion developed the idea that there are two ways for music in film to create a specific emotion in relation to the situation depicted on the screen (Chion, 1985). On one hand, music can directly express its participation in the feeling of the scene, by taking on the scene’s rhythm, tone and phrasing; obviously such music participates in cultural codes for things like sadness, happiness and movement. In this case we can speak of empathetic music, from the word empathy, the ability to feel the feelings of others (Chion, 1994). On the other hand, music can also exhibit conspicuous in difference to the situation, by progressing in a steady, undaunted, and ineluctable manner: the scene takes place against this very backdrop of “indifference”. This juxtaposition of scene with indifferent music has the effect not of freezing emotion but rather intensifying it, by inscribing it on a cosmic background. Chion calls this second kind of music anempathetic. The anempathetic impulse in the cinema produces those countless musical bits from player pianos, celestas, music boxes, and dance bands, whose studied frivolity and naivete reinfonrce the individual emotion of the character and of the spectator, even as the music pretends not to notice them. There also exist cases of music that is neither empathetic of anempathetic, which has either an abstract meaning, or simple function of presence, a value as signpost: at any rate, no precise emotional resonance. The anempathetic effect can also occur with noise – when, for example, in a very violent scene after the death of a character some sonic process continues, like the noise of a machine, the hum of a fan, a shower running, as if nothing had happened. Examples of these can be found in Hitchcock’s Psycho and Antonioni’s The Passenger.
Sound can also influence the perception of movement and perception of speed, and perception of time in the image.
Audiovisual dissonance
Audiovisual dissonance is when image and sound follow two totally different tracks. It is not enough if the sound and image differ in nature (their respective content, spatial characteristics). Audiovisual counterpoint will be noticed only if it sets up an opposition between sound and image on a precise point of meaning. This kind of counterpoint influences our reading, in postulating a certain linear interpretation of the meaning of the sounds. Take for example, the moment in Godard’s First Name Carmen when we see the Paris metro and hear the cries of seagulls. Critics identified this as counterpoint, because the seagulls were considered as signifiers of “seashore setting” and the metro image as a signifier of “urban setting”. This reduces the audio and visual elements to abstractions at the expense of their multiple concrete particularities, which are much richer and full of ambiguity. Thus this counterpoint reduces our reading to a stereotyped meaning of the sounds, drawing on their codedness (seagulls = seashore) rather than their own sonic substance, their specific characteristics in the passage in question.
So the problem of counterpoint-as-contradiction, or rather of audiovisual dissonance, is that counterpoint or dissonance implies a prereading of the relation between sound of image. It forces us to attribute simple, one-way meanings, since it is based on an opposition of a rhetorical nature (“I should hear X, but I hear Y”).
There exists hundreds of possible ways to add sound to any given image. Of this vast array of choices, some are wholly conventional. Others, without formally contradiction or “negating” the image, carry the perception of the image to another level. And audiovisual dissonance is merely the inverse of convention, and thus pays homage to it, imprisoning us in a binary logic that has only remotely to do with how cinema works.
References:
Chion, M. (1985). Le son au cinéma. Vol. 5. Cahiers du cinéma.
Chion, M. (1994). Audio-vision: sound on screen. Columbia University Press.
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