Metz & Aural Objects

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Questions raised by Christian Metz

Here are some questions raised on Sound in Film.

"Sounds Have no Images" Bela Balazs





Is the recording and reproduction of sound simply an unproblematically reduplicated presentation or  . . .  a mediation which transforms and represents its object in altered form?


How do we perceive the aural world?
  • How is it possible that we are capable of recognizing and isolating the sound of “lapping” on the sound track of a travelogue or among the confused rustling sounds heard when walking in a forest? 
  • How is this possible even when we don’t know its source, even if we identify other quite different sounds as “lapping” at other times? 
How do we understand that there is rain or water when we do not see it? The scene below is from Antonioni's 'L'Avventura' 1960



“Lapping” exists as an autonomous aural object, the pertinent traits of its acoustic signifier corresponding to those of a linguistic signified, to the semes of the sememe “lapping”.

  1. This sound is relatively weak (as opposed to “uproar”, “yelling”, “ruckus”, etc.) 
  2. It is discontinuous, whereas a “clamour”, a “whistling”, a “background noise”, isn’t. 
  3. It is acoustically double, or at least not single, if by double one means that its occurrences break down into at least two successive sounds: /--/ .... /-/ .... /--/ .... (In this respect, the first three phonemes of the linguistic signifier, /-^-pping,^ can be considered onomatopoeic.) Commutation shows that other identifiable sounds don’t present this characteristic and that each of their occurrences is “single”; thus “detonation”, or “blow” or “crash” when referring to sounds. It’s the same opposition as between FLOP and CLACK. ^ 
  4. This sound is experienced as “liquid”, or as if caused by a liquid, whereas “rubbing” and “scraping” in their aural sememe present the trait “solid”, while “hissing” and “whistling” are “gaseous”. 

There is, nonetheless, a difference between the visual and the aural in their cultural definition. When I have recognized a “floor lamp” and can name it, the identification is completed and all that I could add would be adjectival in nature. But, on the contrary, if I have distinctly and consciously heard a “lapping” or a “whistling”, I only have the feeling of a first identification, of a still incomplete recognition. This impression disappears only when I recognize that it was the lapping of a river, or the whistling of the wind in the trees: in sort, the recognition of a sound leads directly to the question: “A sound of what?”

Antonioni's Question  I would like to be lucid and instead this . . . the sound

The difference between the arbitrariness of language and the onomatopoeia of sound.
Ideologically, the aural source is an object, the sound itself a “characteristic.” Like any characteristic, it is linked to the object, and that is why identification of the latter suffices to evoke the sound.

In fact, the only cinematographic aspects that interest everyone, and not just some specialists, are the image and speech.


[A]n “off-screen voice” is defined as one which belongs to a character who does not appear (visually) on the screen. We tend to forget that a sound in itself is never “off”: either it is audible or it doesn’t exist. When it exists, it could not possibly be situated within the interior of the rectangle or outside of it, since the nature of sounds is to diffuse themselves more or less into the entire surrounding space: sound is simultaneously “in” the screen, in front, behind, around, and throughout the entire movie theater.

Anna's Insomnia

Leah M. Chizek
  • [S]ound remains a “bad object” from the perspective of western cultural praxes, which continue to favor the visual and the linguistic as preferred objects of analysis. 
  • Visual (and tactile) qualities are these primary elements, and as such they assume a position of supposed superiority at the symbolic level of language, i.e. a subject-position, through which they experience their consistent reaffirmation. 
  • Demoted as (Sounds) are to this secondary status, our own experience of them is also delimited. . . . victim of . . . the structuralist distinction between predicates and subjects. 
  • [T]he dialectic between sound and image offers seductively easy examples to the contrary, which suggest that sound is not so easily subordinated as Metz himself wishes to imply. 
  • For example, one can speak with ease of “the same sound in two different films.” Who among the visually-fixated would think to speak of “two different films in the same sound?” 
The same song used twice in the same film: Fleetwood Mac’s song “The Chain” 



The same song used for different films. The Clash London Calling

  • 'The problem of “objectification,”' is that it 'often degrade[s] the object itself, overwhelming our confidence in its pristine superiority. 
  • [I]t isn’t the sound itself that is “off” but rather its sourceThe potential inventory of such sound-objects, their qualities as such and the cultural practices that produce them in the first place all deserve a detailed enumeration,
  • The rise of the soundtrack, no longer limited to mere songs. 
  • “Noise,” too, as opposed to organized sound . . . Noise has approached the limits, it seems, of its anarchical existence. 
  • [M]anipulation . . .  is intended with reference to other aural objects, creating new soundscapes that do not depend on a surreptitious trafficking in visual images.

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