Contemporary Hollywood Soundtrack

The Contemporary Hollywood Film Soundtrack: Professional Practices and Sonic Styles Since the 1970s

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2 Abstract Since the 1970s, the soundtrack in Hollywood has come of age as a complex and sophisticated site of cinematic art. Greater combinations of sounds expressing a wider spectrum of tones, textures and volumes can be heard at the movies more than ever before, while behind the scenes, the number of personnel producing them has grown considerably. Moreover, this era has witnessed a proliferation of different artistic and professional approaches to sound. This thesis provides a detailed and wide-ranging picture of these developments and how they were ultimately affected by changes within the American film industry. Drawing
Having sketched out the historical parameters of my research, it is now vital that I outline what I mean when I discuss the “soundtrack”. The soundtrack is conceptualised in terms of its three main components: dialogue, music and sound effects. No one component is assigned priority in my analysis; rather, I aim to examine the relationships that hold between them. Thus I analyse the soundtrack as a complex, multifaceted whole, and am thereby able to paint a picture of the soundtrack which not only captures more fully its character as a single artistic product but which allows for the capturing of the complex relationships between the various professional roles involved in the creation of that product. The multi-component/multi-craft analysis I employ has some overlap with Sergi, who argues that: By singling out particular elements of a soundtrack, critics have been able to praise individual achievers rather than focus on the much more complex issue of what actually becomes of these ‘individual’ achievements once they are recorded, mixed and
Drawing on the work of critics and a range of accounts from industry professionals, I chart a history of their creative and collaborative roles in light of Hollywood’s industrial and technological developments. I argue that contemporary sound practice is more diverse and fluid across productions due to decreasing standardisation across the industry following the end of Hollywood’s studio system. Chapters 6 and 7 illustrate these claims by focusing on the two “sound teams” of Lynch, Badalamenti and Splet, and Lucas, Williams and Ben Burtt. I discuss their careers in different areas of the film industry, which become backdrops against which I explore their differing group professional approaches and collaborative sound relations. In chapters 8-12 I offer a comprehensive study of sound’s function in contemporary cinematic narration. I begin by suggesting approaches to detailed sound analysis, from looking at its inter-component relations between dialogue, music and sound effects, to the specific qualities of individual sounds. I then explore David Bordwell’s theory of the narrational “modes” associated with “classical” Hollywood cinema and European “art” cinema (1985b, 2007), outlining a number of ways in which sounds function in the service of each mode. This leads the way to a proposed “contemporary” mode of narration, which incorporates norms from each of the others and thus enables the emergence of more