X-27 effect
X-27 effect (CHION 2009, 499-500) is a specific case of diegetic sound or music that can reinforce the geographical sense of space (sound mapping), through the variations of its volume: when the sound is close to the source that produces it, the volume is loud; when heard from a distance, the volume gets lower, and/or muffled.
- The earliest examples of diegetic music used to create X-27 effects are found in Josef von Sternberg's film, Dishonored (1931, USA; in France, the film is known as Agent X-27—hence the name "X-27" given by Chion).
A first example shows how the diegetic music (the woman plays at the piano), delineates the presence of two spaces: inside the apartment, where she's playing, and the street outside her window, as her playing is heard continuously but at a lower level: as well as there are two points of view (in the apartment/outside the apartment), the X-27 effect generates here different points of audition. At the end of this sequence, the complete fading of the music corresponds to a visual dissolve, leading us to another time (maybe a day later), and another place. The disappearance of the music creates temporal and geographical discontinuity.
A second example from the same film takes place in an apartment in Vienna. We hear first the muffled sounds of an unseen military band from the Austrian army starting to play somewhere in a nearby location. As the band approaches, the music gets louder, until the officer in the apartment opens the window, indicating the very close proximity of the band. As the band continues its march, its sounds get gradually lower and muffled after the officer has closed the window.
The use of diegetic music may seem here anecdotal, but it dramatizes the situation: in the apartment, the young woman, who hasn't too much to lose to get out of her miserable life as a prostitute, is asked to become a spy for the Austrian Secret Service. When the military band walks down the street and is at its loudest, the officer says: "Look at these men marching. Marching into the jaws of death!" Those words alert us that this is no perfunctory music that just happens to be "there": they put us in a similar situation to the young woman: like her, we listen to this music. The heroic echoes of the military music ironically resonate not only with the dramatic context of WWI, but also with the young woman's future tragic fate.
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