Crash, Boom, Bang! The Most Distinctive Sounds in Movie History
Almost everyone you meet around the world, whether they be intellectuals, couch potatoes, fashion models or family men, have a certain fascination for movies. We laugh and cry because of them, they inspire us to do great feats of our own, and they quite simply take us to other worlds, more intense and fascinating than our own realities may be. And a big part of that leap in movie quality is because of advances in audio technology. Even the most realistically plotted black and white films seemed removed from reality because of their initial lack of sound. But with the arrival of advanced audio techniques to the scene, movies would never be the same again.
And some of the sounds you hear in one movie may be unknown to you, replicated in other movies, especially of the same genre. Sound effects, as opposed to music, can be used again and again for shows of different purpose without the fact being noticed. Because of this, some sound effects have become so popular because of their applicability and distinctness. Some of these are the following.
- Animal noises: Most often in films that you see, the animals are never silent. Dogs always bark or pant, cats would do their distinctive meow and hiss, and snakes would always hiss or even rattle, in spite of a particular snake not being a rattler in the first place. It follows that animals usually reveal personality or add color to the films by using sound. Horror flicks use it perhaps most effectively, with wolf howls, owl hoots, and rodent squeaks being standards.
- The Martial Arts Swish: Do you remember all those fancy martial arts sequences and how they usually were accompanied by those swishing sounds that made even the slowest moves seem so much faster than they were actually executed? This is a sound effect used in virtually all of the older martial arts flicks. Notice that they all sound exactly the same.
- The Immortal Telephone Ring: This is one sound that has been reproduced to the point of it being cliché. Everything from Quincy to Magnum PI to Close Encounters With The Third Kind to Ghostbusters has featured this classic of the 70s and 80s. It's become so cliché that sound mixers and editors refuse to use it today, for fear that the effect may become artificial.
These are only a few of the many immortal sound effects that movies and television has shot to immortality. If you want more examples of these classic movie signatures,
Source: http://ezinearticles.com/
Added: September 30, 2008