The Power of Sound

Do you believe what you hear or what you see?

I hope you had an excellent holiday break! Here’s to a 2024 that results in good health, peace, and hope.

---

I recently watched a dramatic scene where an imminent planetary collision was threatening to destroy a whole civilization. The sound track was filled with shouts, crowd noise and crying children. Stern voices on loudspeakers warned everyone to stay back and keep order. I can’t recall if there was any music supporting this chaotic situation; either there was none, or it blended in perfectly.

When I saw that scene again, showing it to someone else, I noticed something curious. Despite the sound track I described, and even with a subtitle saying “[clamoring crowd]”, I noticed this time that although people were in line for the last train during what we knew to be a cataclysmic disaster, and one character complained loudly to a guard about having waited for hours, there was, in fact, no particularly unruly crowd, no visible clamoring. That effect was managed almost entirely by the soundtrack.

The power of sound is amazing. One of the things I always do when ads come on the screen is to hit mute, because I know that the most effective and insidious part of media advertising is the sound. It’s often louder than the show, overpowers with frantic or persuasive voices, often builds to an audio climax, and sometimes attempts an ear-worm of a jingle.

Ads have a limited time to impress us. Movies can afford to use much more subtle audio effects. Their soundtracks are very supportive of the action. Some of the composed music is excellent in its own right, though it always takes a back seat to dialog or is trimmed to fit the precise timing of a scene.

Sometimes, though, movie music is just wrong, and we usually blame the movie for it, not the soundtrack. There was one scene in a Star Wars movie where I found myself getting bored, even though a lot of urgent plans and relationships were in play between Luke and Leah. My first presumption was that there was something mediocre about the writing or acting. Then it struck me why I was getting bored. John Williams had chosen to write music for that scene that reminded me of the early afternoon classical music radio stations, with the feel of an endless Bruckner symphony. I began to wonder how that moment would have felt if the movie had used an entirely different kind of music there, such as punk rock or metal. The sci-fi setting and action would have lent themselves to those types of music pretty well, and I’m sure I would not have started nodding off. It wasn’t the acting or the script that were causing the problem; it was the sound track.

I had the opportunity once to play music for an interesting musical called A Man of No Importance, based on Oscar Wilde’s play, A Woman of No Importance. Three of us played the instrumental music, and there were songs from the stage, but I remember it more as a play with music than as a musical.

The music was not difficult to play, so it was okay that we had minimal rehearsal before the run began. But I was very glad that we got to do 16 shows because I learned a lot as we got warmed up (moral of the story: opening night might not be the best night to see a show!).

One critical moment of the show became far more poignant when I figured out how to play a single note the right way. In the score, there was a crescendo marking under a quarter note, followed by a rest. After several shows, I realized that the rest coincided with a dramatic reckoning by one of the characters. By exaggerating that quarter note crescendo, growing through the note and stopping suddenly, my violin set up the audience for the character’s line.

Some of the bowing exercises/games that I give students are made to experiment with changing bow speed as I did in that moment of the play — growing or releasing a sound, or choking it entirely. These are the tools of emotional expression.

One exercise, which I call “breathing bows,” gives a player a chance to physically practice speeding up the bow and bouncing it back the other way at high speed. Or slowing it down until reaching the end of the bow, and then rebounding in the opposite direction at the same slow speed, producing a very smooth change of bow. I’ll describe “breathing bows” more carefully next time for the fiddlers/violinists out there, but in a nutshell, the name comes from its similarity to the way we breathe — we start a breath by taking in air very slowly at first, then accelerate to take in a lot of air until we reach our limit. We immediately exhale very quickly at first before slowing down for a very long time, continuing a slow exhale until it’s time to start over and breathe in again. One breath is the in-and-out combined. We don’t think of taking one breath in and a different breath out. When violin players learn to bow from one bow to another as one breath, rather than as two separate bows, they gain the basics of expression.

We never stop breathing, however fast or slow, until the end of life, with a few exceptions — physical or emotional interruptions. Any time we stop breathing, such as when we hold our breath, or gasp, or make a sharp intake, or choke on food, it’s due to an emergency, whether physical or emotional. The feeling of urgency, emotion, the call for attention that we get from an interruption of breathing is the same feeling as we get with sudden shifts of breathing into a wind instrument or bowing a stringed instrument. The air and the bow move continuously until something happens to stop them, whether it’s a biting staccato, or a crescendo leading to sudden silence just as an actor makes a dramatic pronouncement.

Expression in music speaks much louder to us than technicalities such as note mistakes. Sound trumps eyes and logic. When music lulls us into a quiet mood, it can overcome the jagged action of the movie it’s meant to accompany. On the other hand, if the sound conveys chaos, we accept it as the mood of the scene even if our eyes contradict our ears.

Such is the power of sound, and music.