Phantom sound, or negative sound
Phantom sound, or negative sound (CHION 2009, 483) is a sound that is evoked by the image, yet remains unheard.
- A frequent feature of the phantom sound, and one that enhances its absence, is the insisting presence of other audible sounds. See auditory compartmentalization.
- Phantom sounds proliferate in silent cinema, due to the very nature of the medium. The musical accompaniment provided for silent films was most frequently improvised: only few silent films had a musical score that had been specially commissioned for them. In such cases (Friedrich Murnau, Sunrise, 1927; Carl Theodor Dreyer, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, 1928...) naturalistic effects were less present—although never totally absent. Imitative/descriptive effects in which the aural redundantly follows the visual were often criticized: see Th. W. Adorno and H. Eisler, Composing for the films).
This excerpt from Friedrich Murnau's Sunrise (USA, 1927) illustrates a typical case of phantom sound in silent cinema: the woman is seen whistling outside a house, to catch the attention of her lover who is inside. While the succession of camera shots make it obvious that he has heard the whistling, the nondiegetic music that accompanies this sequence (from the score originally written for this film by Hugo Riesenfeld) does not attempt at all to imitate musically the woman's whistling. The aural information of the whistling is sufficiently enhanced by the sole image. Here, Riesenfeld's musical scoring for this passage avoids any form of aural mimicking of the whistling that would have been: in so doing, he avoids those too frequent and banal redundancies between sound and image. Rather, the musical accompaniment (a slow, repeated motive on the lower register of the orchestra) remarkably helps in subjectivizing the whole sequence: from the man's point of view, instead of the woman's.
The paradoxical "presence" of phantom sounds can be reinforced by auditory compartmentalization: in a sequence from Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist (2011, France/USA), an audience is watching for the first time a talking picture: the phantom sounds are those emanating from the "talking" actress—we can see her talking—yet she remains silent to us (the nondiegetic audience), since we are watching a film that is shot in the style of a silent movie... But the suspension of disbelief helps us to assert that the diegetic audience watching that film does hear her voice—although we only hear the nondiegetic music.
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