Notes for an Aesthetic of Cinema Sound Kumar Shahani As life slowly climbed the ladder of evolution, one sense after another arrived and developed. + Hearing was the last to arrive, and the last to attain a state bordering on perfection, We have acquired the habit of giving the greater part of our attention to what we sec, leaving a mere fraction to what we hear —James Jeans (1937) ‘oth the senses of sight and sound, it may be noted, arose out of BM the need to perceive movement; to locate an object, and one’s PB own relationship to it; to gauge the pressures at work; to achieve points of "equilibrium and to move in a controlled int to static point, as we seemed to agine in our classical civilisations, but to find in these different vibrations, and differences of pressure, the vitality of being itself. “When does one say that a piece of material lives. When it continuously does something, moves . The atomic physicist, Erwin Schrodinger, quoted by Fritz Winckel. Winckel goes on to add that “<. .impulses to movement are, for example, electrical or chemical potential differences. When they arc equalised, the tendency to form a chemical bond ceases: temperatures become equalised through heat transfer. Thermodynamic equilibrium results in a condition of constant rest (of maximum entropy), a condition which is precisely: death. From the physical standpoint, disorder is continuously created out of a condition. of order. Nature strived for a condition of ideal disorder . ..” “The trick by which an organisation can keep its place on a rather high level of order consists in reality of a continuous absorption of order out of the surrounding world.” Thus Music; Jornal of Arts and Ideas : »CINEMA SOUND Music is perhaps the most highly developed. sensate function of human understanding. One can begin to speak of the aesthetics of sound only in relation to music, because it is this that provides the most fundamental expression of the states of being and of acting in a continuously impinging disorder. It is possible to read speech, to make sense of words onc has never heard, as signs that refer to a content for a state of being or of action. As for incidental and atmospheric sounds in the cinema, they lie between The organised sounds (music) drifting into entropy and Contextual Sounds (speech) The rest is silence. Yet silence, from which everything was originally supposed to begin, does not exist in an absolute sense. ‘The soundtrack invented silence’ says Robert Bresson, and this is perhaps true in a far deeper sense than even he meant it, On the most obvious level, silence in music relates to space indirectly. In the cinema, on the other hand, it relates to space in movement. In music, it relates to the sustaining of a note, to reverberation, to absorption by the spatial enclosures, producing, transmitting, reflecting, and receiving the sound. In the cinema all this and more. In fact, cinema may or may not relate to the spaces which produce and receive sound. It is the arbitrariness of silence, created both by the sounds, the music, the speech and its juxtaposition with the visual imagery, changing in tone, line and colour that articulates silence farther. For this perhaps a reference-point could be the discontinuites of sound in the scene where the heroine of Subararekha kills herself off-screen. Neither the spoken word nor music can work in such discontinuity. The smallest unit of the spoken word in any language is the allophone. In specific languages, it is the specific manner of continuously linking of allophones that constitutes a word or even a nonsense syllable. An isolated note cannot be perceived as music, If it is held for very Jong it may not be perceived at all. An isolated note is no different in meaning and perception than what we have just cited as an example of discrete sounds im silence. 40 Octaber-December 1985The silence of John Cage, or the pure frequency of the computer, if it is music, is so in'a special sense which corresponds more closely with the function of speech, of context. Yet I am sure that it does seem to you, as it seems to me or to anyone who has worked in the cinema—I include those who actively see the cinema—that there is a great deal of overlap between all our categeries. . In the development of almost all traditions of music, at any rate, the speech and the recitative has always been closely related to changes of frequency, if not the motive force, Many of the classical languages—and perhaps some modern languages—had developed meters from. pitch and frequency variations rather than stress, In fact the Khayal gayaki, a system of music we are all familiar with, may be recognised as the highest form of the speech-music continuum. The absence of rigid notations, experienced by us today as a near impossibility, along with the apparent semantic poverty of its words, has perhaps made it possible for us to come nearer to what James Jeans conjectures to be the music of the future: ‘... a continuous scale in which every interval can be made perfect’. The simplest example can come from the infinite variations upon the Bhairavi. But closer examination may reveal that we approach it even in pentatonic ragas like the Bhoop. For Helmholtz (1877) from whom all modern studies of the sensation of the tone, and the theory of music, begin, a continuous scale was unimaginable—at least its understanding was impossible. For ‘Winckel (1939), it is only in the context of disorderly sound movement that order arises. And music already begins for him to link itself with indeterminacy. It seems clearer than ever before that notations are a mere approximation. Since shrutis have to be heard, we should only strive to name approximations, not absolutes. Yet it is heartening to find that it is the search for precision that yields to flexibility. And vice versa, that it is the flexible language structure which is meaningful. Heartening for every artist who wishes to place himself in a tradition and yet to innovate, to individuate. Journal of Arts and Ideas 4 CINEMA. SOUND