Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen

by Michel Chion, Claudia Gorbman (Translator)

Michel Chion’s landmark Audio-Vision has exerted significant influence on our understanding of sound-image relations since its original publication in 1994. Chion argues that sound film qualitatively produces a new form of perception. Sound in audiovisual media does not merely complement images. Instead, the two channels together engage audio-vision, a special mode of perception that transforms both seeing and hearing. We don’t see images and hear sounds separately―we audio-view a trans-sensory whole.

In this updated and expanded edition, Chion considers many additional examples from recent world cinema and formulates new questions for the contemporary media environment. He takes into account the evolving role of audio-vision in different theatrical environments, considering its significance for music videos, video art, commercial television, and the internet, as well as conventional cinema. Chion explores how multitrack digital sound enables astonishing detail, extending the space of the action and changing practices of scene construction. He demonstrates that speech is central to film and television and shows why “audio-logo-visual” is a more accurate term than “audiovisual.” Audio-Vision shows us that sound is driving the creation of a sensory cinema.

This edition includes a glossary of terms, a chronology of several hundred significant films, and the original foreword by sound designer, editor, and Oscar honoree Walter Murch.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction

296 pages, Paperback

Published April 2, 2019

Reviews

[S · Rating 2.5 out of 5]

Has that masturbatory quality so much academic writing has, in that it sounds smart but is practically useless. Chion spends all this time discussing definitions of sound, but almost no time discussing the narrative possibilities of these techniques. I actually have no idea what the purpose of the book is, to simply bring our attention to the different uses of sound? I think anyone picking up this book already has an idea. The real utility here would have been to show how sound can be employed to tell story in novel ways.

I was hoping for something that could improve my filmmaking, instead this book is a bunch of broadly general ideas of the toolkit, but not what the tools can be used for in real scenarios.

[Lance Dann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the most important book about film sound that has been written. It gives us the language we need to discuss and analyse sound.