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/
        • Cao Fei, Whose Utopia (2006)
        • Readings: Background Noise, by Brandon LaBelle; Rumour and Radiation, by Paul Hegarty; Inner Sound, by Jonathan Weinel

Week 6 – 10.11.2025 – Other Sounds

• • • • • Situated listening
          • Brandon LaBelle “Acoustic Justice“
        • Radio Art
        • Acoustic Ecology and Soundscape Studies
          • more than human
        • Sound Art
          • Optical Sound: Daphne Oram, Sound in Z
          • Bill Fontana work with bridges
          • the loudspeaker as an instrument: Cathy Van Eck
          • Christine Sun Kim

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)

• Sound Design
  • Making Waves (Midge Costin, 2019)
    • Music: Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
    • Boom position: Charade (Stanley Donen, 1963)
    • ADR: Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
    • Ambience: That Uncertain Feeling (Ernst Lubitsch, 1941)
    • Sound Effect: Outrage (Ida Lupino, 1950)
    • Foley: Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1952)
    • Marie Jeanne Wickmans

• Foley and Montage
  • ‘montage of attractions’; that is, keeping the interest throughout the scene through ‘a sensual or psychological impact, experimentally regulated (…) to produce (…) certain emotional shocks (…) [and] ideological conclusion[s]. (Eisenstein and Gerould, 1974: 78). •
    • Dziga Vertov:
      • From the Rumor of a Cascade and From the Rumor of a Sawmill (1916).
        • “I had the original idea (…) to enlarge our ability to organise sound; to listen not only to singing or violins – the usual repertoire of gramophone disks – but also to transcend the limits of ordinary music” (in Kahn 1999: 140).
        • “it will not be through opera or theatre representations that we will prepare. We will be intensely ready to offer proletarians from all countries the possibility of seeing and hearing the whole of the world in an organised manner. Of being mutually seen, heard and understood” (Vertov 1925: 5).
      • The Man With The Movie Camera (1929).
      • Enthusiasm, The Symphony of the Donbass (1931).
  • “every sound initiates an event” – Rick Altman, Sound Theory Sound Practice (1992)
    • Rouben Mamoulian
      • Applause (1929)
      • Love Me Tonight (1931)

• Soundscape Features according to Murray Schaffer vs. Listening Modes according to Michel Chion:
  • Keynote <—-> Causal
  • Sound-Signal <—-> Semantic
  • Sound-Mark <—-> Reduced Listening
    • Tourneur, Yalda Afsah 

• Not shown:
  • Hukkle
  • Bad Boy Bubby
  • Whose Utopia
  • Ten Minutes Older: the trumpet