Week 1 – 06.10.2025 – A theory of listening (to film)

• • • • • Introduction to the course’s structure and objectives
          • Learning to listen
            • acousmatic and concrete music
          • What’s theory for
            • ontology, phenomenology and the psychoanalytic obsession vs. reception theory
              • “The problem here is that an apparently ontological claim about the role of sound has been allowed to take precedence over actual analysis of sound’s functioning.” Altman, 1992: 39.
        • READING: “four and a half fallacies of film sound”, in Sound Theory/Sound Practice by Rick Altman and Enthusiasm by Lucy Fischer in Film Sound;
        • WATCHING-LISTENING: Tuvalu by Veit Helmer

                                   – Foundations of the Audiovisual Contract 

• • • • • Introduction to the „Audiovisual Contract“
          • Icons, index, symbols and leitmotifs  
          • Main terminology:
            • The audiovisual contract
            • Vococentrism

 

Week 2 – 13.10.2025 – Aesthetics of Conventional Sound Design

• • • • • The audiovisual contract:  “the audiovisual relationship is not natural but rather a sort of symbolic pact to which the audio-spectator agrees when she or he considers the elements of sound and image to be participating in one and the same entity or world” (p. 222)
          • Vococentrism
          • Added Value: “expressive and informative value with which a sound enriches a given image so as to create the definite impression, in the immediate or remembered experience one has of it, that this information or expression ‘naturally’ comes from what is seen, and is already contained in the image itself” (p. 5).
          • Empathetic sound (and others)
            • Counterpoint, consonance, dissonance, and syncopation
          • Synchresis: “Synchresis is the forging between something one sees and something one hears – it is the mental fusion between a sound and a visual when these occur at exactly the same time. Synchresis is an acronym formed by telescoping together the two words synchronism and synthesis”

• • • • • Narrative functions of voice: narration, dialogue, monologue
          • Modes of speech
        • Icons (thunder), index (siren), symbols (church bells) and leitmotifs (harmonica) 

 

Week 3 – 20.10.2025 – Aesthetics of Contemporary Sound Design

• • • • • listening modes vs. soundscape features
          • causal, semantic and reduced listening
          • keynote, sound-signal and sound-mark
            • Stoker
        • integrated soundtrack & aesthetics of reticence
          • Hildegard Westerkamp – Beneath the Forest Floor (Elephant Soundtrack)
          • You Were Never Really Here
          • https://www.alphavillejournal.com/Issue27/HTML/ArticleWierzbicki.html

 

Week 4 – 27.10.2025 – Rektor’s volno – Home assignment: analysis of a soundtrack (send by 30.10.2025)

• • • • • Megalopolis Integrated Soundtrack Analysis

 

Week 5 – 03.11.2025 – Sound in Video Art

• • • • • Introduction to video art as an audiovisual form
        • The use of sound in non-narrative and experimental video works
          • unlike film, video always contained sound
          • sound as a material, not as a medium
          • Sound as sculpture: malleable
        • Contemporary aesthetic strategies: deconstruction, domestication, electronics, noise, glitch, silence
          • The Fluxus movement
        • Procedural art: Steina Vasulka, Violin Power
        • https://francisalys.com/
        • https://felixblume.com/
        • Readings: Background Noise, by Brandon LaBelle; Rumour and Radiation, by Paul Hegarty; Inner Sound, by Jonathan Weinel

 

Week 6 – 10.11.2025 – Other Sounds

• • • • • Radio and Podcast Theory
        • Installation sound, spatial audio, and gallery context
        • Challenges of non-cinematic playback
        • Streaming platform effects on listening (Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, etc.)
        • Acoustic Ecology and Soundscape Studies
        • Electroacoustic music projections
        • Queer and Feminist Sound Studies

 

Week 7 – 17.11.2025 – Public Holiday  – prepare presentation for final week

 

Week 8 – Student’s presentations (10/15 min of analysis of a scene of their choice)