Welcome friends,
It’s been an somewhat frustrating uneven week of film watching and writing. London’s recent heatwaves have nudged my daily routine into what has become a typical summer cadence - work kicking off around 6am and tapering off by early afternoon. It’s a strategy to placate my internal productivity tyrant: my focus is aided by the cooler mornings by 2pm I’ve kinda reached the limit of writing energy.
This week though, the humdrum churn of life-admin has thrown a wrench into that flow. Those invisible hours spent on forms, emails, meetings, and the nebulous category of “developmental labour.”; the kind of tasks that don’t feed the present but one has to treat as investments in a deferred future.
To be honest, Wimbledon hasn’t helped either. I’ve been watching - and playing - a lot of tennis (not at Wimbledon I hasten to add). If I think back, July always ends up as the month with the lightest film consumption for me. But that’s fine. Taking a break from a specific aspect of one cultural life can be holistically rejuvenating.
What I have been watching, however, is a significant amount of student work. I'm currently supervising sixteen MA students on the Editing and Post-Production pathway, all working towards their final films. We had a full slate of tutorials on Monday, and - as always - there was a spectrum: some students presenting lucid, well-developed concepts with evidence of meaningful theoretical engagement, while others are still lost in the fog of first-draft thinking. Procrastination? Paralysis? Or just the slow gestation that creative work often demands? Or just outright laziness? As a teacher, one has to find a balance between gentle positive encouragement and lighting a fire under them.
What struck me mid-way through that day, however, was the number of students were gravitating toward sound. Not just as a technical component, but as a thematic and/or conceptual focus.
From experiments with film scores versus pop music in horror; to explorations of silence and non-silence in vertical editing structures; to reflexive work interrogating the female documentary voice, these students are wrestling with sonic textures as expressive tools. And that, in turn, got me thinking more acutely about my own long-standing interest in film sound. It’s an interest that's been shaped, deepened, and in some ways redefined by over a decade of podcasting and audio editing.
Once again, it’s been spooky how the cinematic gods of serendipity work. It’s been fascinating to read through responses to the latest Filmstack Challenge #4, hosted by the brilliant
. If you're not already following her Substack Anti-Brain Rot, do yourself a favour and subscribe immediately. Her ability to interweave personal narrative with cultural critique, supported by sharp resource curation, offers some of the most vital film writing out this platform.Swabreen’s prompt for the FilmStack #4 challenge was:
“For this challenge, you can choose to share either your favorite needle drops, composers, themes, monologues, usage of voice-over narration, or directors who use soundtracks to further their storytelling. Expand upon how these key moments of sound usage helped to shape a scene or contributed to the emotions you had while watching it.”
It’s a elegant a timely provocation. But one that, as usual, had the potention to take me in various directions with the high chance of overthinking. But I also want to adopt the challenge in my own way. Primarily it offered me a chance to gather together strands of thinking not just about specific moments of sonic brilliance in cinema, but about how centrally I think about sound when considering cinematic form and experience.
As I’ve argued in articles, interviews, and countless podcast episodes, my sensitivity to the sonic dimensions of film - the textures, rhythms, ruptures, and flows - didn’t originate from traditional film theory. It emerged from practice. From the labour of editing audio. From sculpting a vocal performance out of raw speech. From the meditative, occasionally maddening process of syncing tone, pace, silence, and breath. From constructing what I’ve called elsewhere a cinema for the ears.
And in that labour, I came to understand sound not as accompaniment to the image, but as a constitutive force in cinematic experience - one that shapes mood, narrative logic, emotional resonance, and ultimately, meaning.
Interview with Michel Chion.
In 2022, I had the privilege of speaking with Michel Chion - arguably the most influential figure in the study of film sound since the 1970s. Few scholars have shaped a subfield so decisively. From his early collaborations with Pierre Schaeffer in the musique concrète tradition to his theoretical breakthroughs in books like Audio-Vision (1993), The Voice in Cinema (1982), and Film, A Sound Art (2003), Chion has tirelessly advocated for sound not as an adjunct to image, but as an autonomous, irreducible mode of cinematic experience.
Chion’s intellectual reach is vast. His writings span Tarkovsky and Tati, Lynch and Kubrick, all while balancing the rigour of film theory with his own film work. His background in experimental sound practice continues to inform his work: his writing is steeped in a sensory materialism, attentive to the textures, rhythms, and ruptures that occur when sound meets image in time.
Two of his concepts, in particular, have become touchstones for anyone thinking seriously about film sound.
Audio-vision refers to the audiovisual contract - the idea that when sound and image are experienced together, they don’t merely combine but mutually transform one another. We don’t just hear and see; we audio-view. Image affects how we hear, and sound affects how we interpret the image. This interplay is not additive, but alchemical. Sound can make a static shot dynamic, imbue silence with dread, or shift emotional valence without any visual cue. Audio-vision, in Chion’s terms, is not just perception - it is meaning-making.
The second concept is that of the acousmêtre - a portmanteau of "acousmatic" (a sound we hear without seeing its source) and "être" (to be). An acousmêtre is a voice that is heard but not seen - disembodied, hovering in narrative space, often invested with mysterious or even godlike power. Classic examples include the Wizard of Oz before he’s revealed, or the unseen narrator in Sunset Boulevard. The acousmêtre can manipulate perception, disrupt narrative hierarchies, and unsettle the viewer’s sense of control. When the source of the voice is finally revealed- what Chion calls de-acousmatization-that power often collapses. The unseen has become seen, and with it, the aura dissolves.
In our conversation—facilitated beautifully through live translation by Johanna Bramli, sound artist and colleague at the University of Brighton—Chion expanded on these ideas with both clarity and philosophical depth. What struck me most was his insistence that sound in cinema isn’t simply something to analyse after the image. It’s something that shapes perception at the very threshold of experience. Listening, for Chion, is a form of interpretation, but also a form of ethics: of attention, of attunement, of acknowledging that what is cinematic often extends through sound beyond the visual frame.
There are show notes and links for the episode that are available for paying subscribers below.
The Cinematic Voice - Audio Essay
In March 2020, I edited an episode of The Cinematologists Podcast entitled The Cinematic Voice. The voice in cinema is, in many ways, a phenomenon we take for granted. Since the advent of the talkies, the synchronised speaking voice - tethered to the moving mouth and body on screen - has become the default mechanism for narrative exposition and character psychology. Yet, as Chion has long argued, this seamless synchronisation is one of sound cinema’s most persistent illusions, a sleight of hand that masks the artifice of audio-visual construction.
This episode, one of our most ambitious productions, brings together leading film scholars and critics to explore the cinematic voice in all its textured complexity. Each contributor examines different dimensions: the star voice and its industrial aura, the interplay between script and performance, the sonic aesthetics of vocal timbre, the affective and narrative power of voice-over, the distinct dynamics of the animated voice, and the haunting disembodiment of acousmatic presences. We also interrogate the politics of the voice - who gets to speak, who is silenced, and how listening itself can be an ideological act.
The is a complex and expansive edit that draws upon many films, but each contributor selected a key film for analysis. There are: In the Heat of the Night (1967, Norman Jewison), Inherent Vice (2014 Norman Jewison), Only Lovers Left Alive (2013, Jim Jarmusch), Félicité (2017, Alain Gomis), Magnolia (1999, Paul Thomas Anderson), The Wind Will Carry Us (1999, Abbas Kiarostami), Annomalisa (2015, Charlie Kaufman), The Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin), The Great Dictator (1940, Charlie Chaplin).
Formally, the episode is conceived as an audio essay: a sonic collage that cuts together interview segments with illustrative film clips and sound design. My intention was to create not just a piece of criticism, but an immersive experience - one that blurs the line between analytical discourse and artistic practice. I highly recommend listening with headphones to appreciate the full spatial depth of the mix.
As always, Neil and I offer contextual reflections on the themes raised, but we also take a meta-critical approach, discussing how our production choices situate the episode within the broader ecology of film podcasting. In particular, we consider how formal experimentation in the audio realm can open up new ways of thinking about cinema; ways that aren’t tethered to the visual but that instead centre sound, rhythm, and vocal texture as primary modes of meaning-making.
The Lobster with Live Score from The Solemn Quartet
Back in 2019, in another first for the Cinematologists, we are hugely excited to present The Lobster with a live score from the classical group the Solem Quartet and in association with Picturehouses cinemas. Live cinema events featuring musical accompaniments are becoming more prevalent as part of the auditorium experience; they echo cinema's past but also a look to the future as audiences seek out material experiences that go beyond or add onto traditional screenings, and perhaps look for a break from the digital. This event took place at the beautiful Gate Cinema in Notting Hill, to a packed house, I introduced the event and discussed the production with the musicians in a post-screening Q&A.
Devised, arranged and performed by The Solem Quartet the screening included classic pieces including Beethoven op. 18/1, Shostakovich Quartet no. 8, Schnittke Quartet no. 2, Schnittke Quintet for Piano and Strings, Stravinsky 3 Pieces for String Quartet, Britten Quartet no. 1, Strauss Don Quixote. The music underscores beautifully the dark humour and surrealist milieu of Lanthimos' social satire.
Winner of the 2014 Royal Over-Seas League Ensemble Competition, the Solem Quartet was formed in 2011 at the University of Manchester. The Quartet takes its name from the university's motto "arduus ad solem", meaning "striving towards the sun". In keeping with its name, the Solem Quartet’s first project was to play the Haydn Op. 20 “Sun” Quartets. Their repertoire is extensive, spanning the period from early Haydn to a broad spectrum of living composers including Larry Goves, Anna Meredith, John Luther Adams and Emily Howard, whose quartet ‘Afference’ they performed in a BBC Proms Extra broadcast, live on BBC Radio 3.
Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound - with director Midge Costin
In 2019, I had the pleasure of interviewing Midge Costin, a key figure in the world of Hollywood sound editing, about her documentary Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound. The film is a dynamic, accessible, and richly detailed account of how sound design has shaped - and been shaped by - the evolution of American cinema. What makes this work so compelling is not just its archival reach or behind-the-scenes insight, but the way it reframes sound not as an adjunct to image but as part of the very DNA of the cinematic experience.
Costin herself brings extraordinary authority to the subject. Her C.V. reads like a highlight reel of 1980s and 90s action cinema: The Rock, Armageddon, Days of Thunder, Crimson Tide - all films where the visceral, bombastic soundscapes weren’t just background effects but narrative and emotional drivers. As a graduate of USC, she emerged from the same ecosystem that produced the likes of Walter Murch, Ben Burtt, and Gary Rydstrom - names that are now synonymous with modern sound design innovation. Her film pays homage to these figures but also positions them within a larger lineage of experimental, technical, and creative development.
In our conversation, Costin spoke with great generosity and clarity about the often invisible labour of sound professionals - the way they work rhythmically, sculpturally, almost musically, to layer space, emotion, and movement into a film. Making Waves charts this work from the early studio era through the auteur-driven New Hollywood, right up to the digital present. What resonated most for me was how Making Waves links technical craft with aesthetic and emotional impact. This is not sound as ornament. It also demonstrates how experimental and intuitive sound practices have often led the way in film language, prefiguring visual innovation rather than merely following it. In this way, Costin’s documentary becomes an act of critical rebalancing-centering sound where it has too often been marginalised in the popular imagination of cinema history.
As always, thanks for reading, watching, or listening.
If you enjoyed this post and think to yourself yeah, I’d by this guy a coffee if he was in my local café please consider doing that virtually. It really does help sustain my work:
I realise I’ve been meandering rather indulgently without actually addressing the core of Swabreen’s provocation.
Here, then, are five films that I’ve selected in response to the challenge. Each offers a compelling instance where sound design is not simply functional or ornamental, but constitutive: woven into the narrative architecture, intimately bound to character psychology, and fundamental to the sensory-cognitive experience of the viewer - or rather, the audio-viewer. These are works where sound does more than support the image; it reshapes how we feel, interpret, and inhabit cinematic space.
They’re all relatively recent films too. Not because I’m eschewing the canonical but because I wanted to highlight contemporary filmmakers who are experimenting with sonic form in ways that feel urgent, evocative, and formally compelling.
Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021)
It’s hard to know where to begin with Memoria - a film that didn’t I simply watch but kind of inhabited. From the moment the first sound lands as guteral audio bomb - a low resonant thud, somewhere between an internal rupture and an external signal - we’re placed into a sensory riddle that is at once cosmic and deeply intimate. What challenged me most, and continues to haunt me, is the way Weerasethakul deploys sound not as atmospheric enhancement or narrative device, but as the film’s very ontology. The protagonist, played with ghostly precision by Tilda Swinton, becomes the conduit for a sound only she can hear. The sonic anomaly leads her, and us, on a journey that is less about resolution than attunement with the cosmos, no less.
It’s also fascinated, in a satisfyingly technical way, with the practice of audio design. In the scene I’ve embedded below, a technician attempts to recreate the noise, becomes a metatextual reflection on cinematic sound itself: the labor of shaping waveforms into meaning, of aligning tone and affect in search of an elusive emotional truth. Throughout, the film’s quietude is not silence but attention. Every breath, every echo, every bird call seems choreographed to the rhythm of a consciousness slowly unfolding.
The final act veers into the transcendent - part Kubrick, part Close Encounters, part psychedelic interior sci-fi - and while some may find that departure disorienting, for me it was the logical and lyrical destination of a film that dares to imagine sound as a portal, a memory, a time-machine. If you allow it Memoria vibrates within you, speaking directly to the body, to memory, to the uncanny pulses of lived experience.
The Vast of Night (Andrew Patterson, 2019)
The Vast of Night is an underseen indie sci-fi, a nostalgic 1950s throwback that leverages sound not merely as ambiance, but as narrative architecture. What initially appears to be Cold War–era pastiche (radio crackle, switchboard plugs, magnetic tape hiss) becomes, through Patterson’s exacting design, the very substance of the story.
From the opening scene, sound draws you in: cricket hums, distant train whistles, muffled cheers - all layered to situate us firmly in the sonic textual of small town nocturnal life. Yet it’s the “strange frequency” - interference on a switchboard line and then on radio - that catalyzes the plot. This unrecognisable sound, alternately eerie and compelling, slices through the calm, beckoning the characters - and the audience - into active listening and the feeling of dread.
Moments of visual blackness punctuate the film, forcing a shift from the ocular to the auditory. In one standout sequence, we linger in total darkness or minimal framing as a military informant delivers a monologue. With nothing but voice, we are given a powerful reminder: that sound can conjure images more vividly than any frame can show.
Working with a micro-budget (around $700K), Patterson embraces sonic minimalism as aesthetic strength. Every mechanical click, switchboard plugs, tape reels, radio dials, become a tactile beat in a larger rhythm, grounding the uncanny in the materiality of mid‑century tech. When the film suggests a climactic visual encounter, sound remains the true locus of mystery. In this way, The Vast of Night sidesteps genre spectacle and instead communes with the imagination via reverberation and resonance.
Sound of Metal (Darius Marder, 2019)
In Sound of Metal, sound becomes intrinsic to the auditory point of view of the protagonist, Ruben, as he undergoes a traumatic and abrupt loss of hearing. From the opening drumming scene, the film situates us directly within the intense, visceral world of a punk-metal drummer, with mixed live sound that conveys energy without tipping into overwhelming realism. That initial auditory immersion sets the stage for everything that follows. We don’t just see his loss - we feel it. The subtle shifts in auditory perspective are calibrated to unsettle us both physically and psychologically, aligning us intimately with Ruben's disorientation and anxiety.
The film also innovates by withholding subtitles for sign-language scenes, forcing hearing audiences to share in Ruben’s isolation. This absence of translation mirrors the soundscape’s own absences and ruptures. When Ruben receives cochlear implants, the “return” of sound is far from a restoration. It’s distorted, echo-laden, and painfully synthetic, a metallic approximation of what he once knew. Sound designer Nicolas Becker employed IRCAM filters and real-time earpieces to simulate Ruben’s auditory hallucinations, while editor Mikkel E.G. Nielsen shaped the film’s rhythm so that both sound and silence become structural tools. The result is an immersive, embodied cinema in which sound design doesn’t just accompany the narrative, it’s a sculpting of Ruben’s evolving consciousness. Viewers aren’t simply observers; they inhabit his sensory world.
For me, the film exemplifies sound as cinematic empathy; probing what it means to lose a sense we take for granted, and how its absence, distortion, and partial return become the emotional textures of a deeply human narrative.
Sleep Has Her House (Scott Barley, 2017)
Scott Barley’s Sleep Has Her House is an elemental work - one that refuses conventional narrative and instead immerses the viewer in a liminal, quasi-apocalyptic world of forests, clouds, darkness, and decay. The film’s visual textures, often described as painterly or expressionistic, are matched, if not surpassed, by its monumental use of sound. Barley constructs a sonic environment that resists being merely “naturalistic.” Instead, what we hear is hyper-natural - rain not as weather but as a metaphysical cascade, wind as ancestral whisper, thunder as tectonic force.
In the podcast conversation I had with Scott, he speaks of sound as the “breath” of the film, something that not only supports the images but also conjures presences and absences. Many of the sounds in the film are heavily manipulated field recordings, stretched or layered to the point where they become uncanny - recognisable yet alien. This is particularly effective in conjuring a temporal dissonance: we are suspended in time, and the sound is what holds us there. It builds without crescendo, it drones without monotony. The forest in Sleep Has Her House doesn’t speak in language, but it does hum, roar, and exhale in ways that suggest both the sublime and the sentient.
Barley also describes working with sound spatially - designing the mix so that the sound doesn’t just surround the viewer but seems to move through them. In that sense, the film’s sound design becomes a kind of immersive sculpture. Silence is just as crucial: long stretches of near-inaudibility heighten our awareness, demanding deep listening. These voids are not empty, but dense with potential, pulling the viewer into a contemplative state that is bodily as much as intellectual.
Barley draws on the affective potential of what he calls “tonal atmospheres,” creating a resonant field in which emotions are not imposed but emerge slowly, almost geologically. The result is not sound as accompaniment, but sound as ontology - Sleep Has Her House breathes, murmurs, rages, and finally retreats, leaving you with the sense that you’ve experienced not a story, but an event, or even a visitation.
The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023)
The Zone of Interest is a film defined by what it refuses to show. Set just beyond the walls of Auschwitz, Jonathan Glazer constructs an aesthetic of horror through omission; eschewing the visual spectacle of suffering for something more insidious and, in many ways, more ethically confronting. Johnny Burn’s sound design envelops the viewer in a ceaseless, inescapable sonic architecture: dogs barking, trucks idling, furnaces groaning, constant screams incessant pain. These aren’t occasional background textures, they are the relentless, ambient condition of the nightmare reality.
And yet the characters, specific the Höss family who head Rudolf is commander of auschwitz, are able, somehow, to seemingly tune it out. They tend their garden, host tea on the lawn, and dote on their children - all while genocide unfolds away from their, and our eyes. The horror is acousmatic: we hear it, we feel it, but we do not see it. And that’s precisely Glazer’s intent. The moral violence here lies not in the act itself, but in the ability to normalise its sound. The runtime is modest, but the experience feels punishing, because it tasks the audience not with watching atrocity, but with listening through the veil of everyday life that allows it to persist. It produces a physiological sensation of dread, a kind of sonic abjection, that for me built into almost a physical sickness. This is sound design not as expression, but as sustained exposure.
The Zone of Interest doesn’t dramatise the Holocaust; it constructs an immersive spatialisation of complicity. What the characters witness, choose to ignore, or directly perpetrate is not the central concern in the way it is in most Holocaust films. Instead, the film explores the terrifying depth of psychological compartmentalisation: how atrocity can be absorbed into the background of daily life, even in the face of a relentless aural experience that should penetrate every fibre of one’s moral being. For the audience, it becomes not just a question of endurance: over the course of the film, the cumulative weight of this inescapable off-screen nightmare implicates us in its presence. It is a study in complicity, where the sound design lives in the liminal space between knowing and imagining.
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For Paid Subscribers below is a extensive reference list of books and articles that helped shape the content above. Also there is list of links to many of the film clips that were used to create the podcast, examples of the use of cinematic sound some very well know others more obscure. For anyone who wants to go into a deep dive.
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