The terms I'm here to talk about are anempathetic and empathetic sound and music and film. Chion introduced these terms not simply about music and the relationship that music has in film with the image, but sound in general, and as the terms suggest, empathetic sound. It's an emotional term, so that the sounds that we hear are emotionally resonant to the images that we see. Anempathetic I find a lot more interesting because there's-the examples that you find of it are a little rarer and tend to have a lot of punch.
One of the reasons I think that anempathetic sound has so much force is because it creates a tension that's almost imperceptible between what you're taking in visually or in other aspects of the soundtrack. And this sound is just there to almost diminish what's happening. The classic example that Chion uses and other people have used is at the end of the shower scene in "Psycho" after Marion Crane's body has fallen lifeless to the ground. Then there's a shot of the round shower head, and what you hear is the sound of the water going on. The water going on is like unaware, disinterested and yeah, kind of apathetic, not taking in the fact that a woman's just been murdered.
Another more recent example of anempathetic sound comes from "Moonlight." In the second chapter when Chiron has just been pummeled by the bully at school and he is putting his face in a sink of ice water to try to make him feel better because he's just been beat up and he's going through a lot of reflection. One of the loudest sounds we hear in that very small room where he's doing this is a sound of a neon overhead light that is just sort of buzzing. And it's completely anempathetic, completely disinterested in what the lead character is going through, and it just continues to make this sound while he's going through a great deal of emotional turmoil. And the immediate environment around him offers him no sanctuary. Even at the level of the soundtrack, he is on his own.
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