New Wine in New Skins - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 393

suffocated a lot of creativity, including sonic cre-
ativity. Studio-specific sound libraries were used
over and over again, which was due partially to
convenience, and partially to assist larger studios
to create their signature sounds (Flückiger, 2001,
Whittington, 2007). In some ways, the situation
of “classic” Hollywood is comparable with the
mainstream game industry today.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s the tide
began to turn. Directors such as George Lucas,
Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola began
to treat sound in an entirely different way. The
inspiration for these non-conformist “movie
brats” came from avant-garde movements, such
as the French Nouvelle Vague: In the late fifties
and early sixties, significant changes within the
French movie industry provided the creative
minds of François Truffaut, Alain Renais, Chris
Marker, and Jean-Luc Godard, amongst others,
with the freedom to break from convention and
to explore new directions. The Nouvelle Vague
was characterized by a critical approach to society
but also to cinema itself, emphasizing the role of
the author. This was an important inspiration for
a new generation of Hollywood film makers, the
New Hollywood . I will come back to this later.
Firstly, let us consider the factors that contributed
to the liberation of the soundtrack.

strategies, and musicality emerged as a principle
to create and arrange every noise in a sound track
(Flückiger, 2001). Commenting on his sound work
for THX 1138 (Lucas, 1971) Murch states that: “It
is possible to just listen to the sound track of THX
exclusive of the dialogue. The sound effects in the
background have their own musical organization”
(cited in Whittington, 2007, p. 57).
A further consequence of this movement
was the combination of synthesized sound with
recorded sound that opened up new narrative
and aesthetic spaces. For example, the screams
of the birds in Hitchcock's eponymous movie
(1963) and created by Bernard Herrmann, Remi
Gassman, and Oskar Sala on an early electronic
instrument called the Trautonium. 16 Another strik-
ing and highly evolved example can be found
in Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979) where the
naturalistic recording of helicopter sounds are
combined, juxtaposed, and fused with wobbling
sounds from a synthesizer.

sonic Gene technology

As can be seen from these examples, technology
often played an important role in the develop-
ment of aesthetic innovations, even though it was
sometimes used in an unorthodox way. A further
example relates to the impact of multichannel
sound in driving aesthetic innovation: Reporting
about the technological and aesthetic challenges
posed by the quadraphonic system, Murch states
that: “Parenthetically, that's actually where the
concept of sound design came from. I felt that
since nobody had ever done this before, I had to
design it and figure out how to use this new tool
that we'd come up with.” (LoBrutto, 1994, p. 91).
Added to this was an unprecedented increase in
flexibility of the recording process due to portable
technology, in particular the Nagra, invented
in 1959 by Stefan Kudelski. This high-fidelity
portable recording technology made it possible
to work in the field more frequently, and also to
record sounds that previously were hard to record,

the sound of Music

Sonically, avant-garde movements had an impor-
tant impact, in particular Futurism and Musique
Concrète (see, for example, Walter Murch in
LoBrutto, 1994, p. 84). This led to highly in-
novative sound design practices. Sound design-
ers approached sound “in itself”, interweaving
the dominant causalistic and naturalistic sound
ideology with the “objet sonore”, which is only
attainable through “reduced listening”, where
the real or supposed source of a sound and the
meaning it may convey is ignored. The aesthetic
achievements of Musique Concrète inspired the
use of what could be termed “musical” design