#4

How do we discover and learn?

Because we now live in a “streaming-on-demand” media culture, people have little enough opportunity for accidental discovery. But most Film educators raised in the middle Twentieth Century (we hope we’re not a disappearing breed) have the largely shared experience of stumbling awkwardly into old films that were new to them, which had been running in shabby 16mm. prints on the local television station.

For us, there was no videotape available, but for a lucky few there may have been consumer-level audio recorders in the home. (I include myself here with Ben Burtt, Randy Thom, Walter Murch, Michel Chion, and other lucky media nerds.) We were sometimes able to record the audio of films on television, and thus get a chance to listen extra-critically to Dialogue, Music, and Sound Effects in mainstream Hollywood films. In Burtt’s case, it is significant that he learned to recognize the distinct sonic flavor of elements from each of the big studios’ sound effects libraries. Thus, Burtt grew up to be not only an exemplary Sound Designer of modern movies, but someone recognized (within the industry) to be an Expert-Mainstream-Hollywood-Studio-Sound-Department-Sound-Effects-Library-Historian. And how many of those do we have?

How did later autodidacts learn about movie sound? The next generation would be able to study film soundtracks on home video tape cassettes. They were likely to wear out the family VCR’s delicate mechanisms by joyfully running scenes over and over in their learning process. Following them, the DVD generation of sound in media nerds could repeat and replay their movies ad infinitum, as well as to study the exemplary supplements and process documentaries that came with some popular films. (“Film School in a Box”, I used to call it.) The Sound Design majors we taught at Savannah College of Art and Design could do the same kind of self-study with their films incarnated as computer files.

The accidental discovery of an old movie on television late at night was a joy in its day, especially if that film stayed with us through a lifetime, as an old friend. On broadcast television, we would wait months until the next time a favorite title was exhibited, and that’s no way to study the details. Now we have these tools, and it is a pleasure to scrub through every frame and every scene, trying to better understand its construction.