sound and television

Television Sound: Why the Silence?

Michele Hilmes

Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, Volume 2, Issue 2, Autumn 2008, pp. 153-161 (Article)

Published by Liverpool University Press

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The field of sound studies has shown enormous growth over the past fifteen years. Excellent work has recently appeared on many aspects of sound in media, with particularly rapid development in the fields of radio, film, popular music, and the historical development of sound recording and listening cultures. Film sound, in particular, enjoys a depth of analysis that has been building up since the 1980s. Video game sound is beginning to receive the attention it deserves. Yet the one area still strangely silent comprises the dominant medium of our times since the 1940s: broadcast television. Why does television sound remain neglected in academic study, despite a long history of professional and industrial development? I will argue here that this omission is due to two primary aspects of television: its roots in radio and subsequent basis in an aesthetic of what I will call streaming seriality, and its fundamental differ- ences from film as a subject of scholarship.

Television’s radio roots mandate an emphasis on sound over the visual, as many have noted (see Ellis 1982, and Altman 1986); create an historical legacy of enormous textual variation derived from a domi- nantly aural originating context (as opposed to film’s dominantly visual context);1 and engender a ‘live’ streaming transmission aesthetic, funda- mentally imbricated in television’s characteristic seriality. Broadcast tele- vision can be, at times, streamed completely live (viewed in the moment an event is transmitted), recorded and transmitted (shot on film or video but then subjected to ‘live’ streaming), or (most often) a mixture of both, and of course all forms can now be recorded post-stream on tape, disc, or as a digital file and re-presented in a number of ways. Yet broadcast television, even when recorded, retains at all times markers of its basic streaming structure, which in turn has a determining effect on the medium’s variety and complexity of textual strategies and techniques.2

This leads to a complicated analytical situation, and ironically it could be that scholars’ efforts to understand sound in the much more ‘closed’, formalised, and visual situation of film have actually worked against an understanding of the special circumstances and opportunities of televisual

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1 Michel Chion recog- nises this when he refers to cinema as ‘a place of images, plus sounds’, with sound being ‘that which seeks its place’ in distinction to television (Chion 1994: 68). In fact he titles one section ‘Television’s Optional Image’ and notes, ‘The properly televisual is the image as something extra’ (ibid.: 159), though without noting television’s heritage from radio.

2 Both John Ellis (1982) and Raymond Williams (1975), along with many subsequent scholars, note this ‘segmentation’ and ‘flow’ characteristic of broadcast television, though both, I believe, go too far in attempting to essentialise them as an intrinsic, rather than historically and cultur- ally contingent, aspect of ‘television’. Neither notes the roots of tele- vision’s narrative and aesthetic structures in the historical particu- larities of radio broad- casting, and both dismiss the textual integrity of television forms that, despite their varied diegetic levels (as I will argue below), still retain an integrity that is well known both to viewers and to those who produce television’s episodic series.

Television Sound: Why the Silence?

MICHELE HILMES

sound overall. The term ‘film’ typically denotes a dominant textual form (the narrative feature film), as well as a consistent medium (the materi- ality of film itself), and a central, though changing, technology of produc- tion, with modes of distribution and exhibition that can vary widely. The same might be said of the music video, when considered on its own and divorced from its televisual context, as it often is. The term ‘television’, on the other hand, denotes a unified (until recently) mode of distribution and exhibition, but specifically not a unified textual form, material medium, nor technology of production. Thus, conflating ‘film’ and ‘tele- vision’ as separate but equivalent media forms may have helped to produce the scholarly silence, a particularly unfortunate one since sound’s heightened importance in television makes its analysis all the more necessary if we are to arrive at a better understanding of the medium and its central expressive modes: subject to present-time inter- ruptions; permeated with markers of the streamed transmission context; never static but constantly flowing past and renewing itself in the present; derived from fundamentally aural origins.

Attempts to examine TV sound to date have focused either on fictional texts treated as filmic (despite difficulties which are usually simply glossed over) or on the short, self-contained form of the music video, framed by the conventions of popular music (see Donnelly 2005; and Beebe and Middleton 2007). Other theorists, like Chion, pounce arbi- trarily upon one limited type of televisual text – in his case, sport – and leave the rest implicit (1994: 61). ‘Television’ has no ur-text, no one dominant form like the narrative feature film, and it is much more strongly tied than film to the representation and transmission of real-life events, ‘live’ as they occur. These characteristics of broadcasting cannot simply be chalked up to technology but must be understood as part of television’s cultural role; during the days of early radio the transmission of recorded sound was actively discouraged, for political and social reasons, and the transmission of any and all ‘live’ programming actively rewarded by regulatory benefits. This did not begin to change in radio until the late 1930s. Early TV, as well, had its reasons for retaining a live serial streaming aesthetic – competition between networks and defense against possible dominance by Hollywood studios, in the US; expense and resistance to cultural intrusion in many other countries – though filmed programmes always made up a certain amount of televisual fare, becoming prevalent in the US by the early 1960s.

Thanks to such historical conditions, broadcast forms span a wide variety of uses, genres, aesthetics, and modes of address, drawn from a broad scope of events and performances either created or adapted for the medium, all central to the multiple textuality of television and impos-

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sible to marginalise. This contrasts with our rather homogeneous under- standing of ‘film’ which certainly has been and still is (as a material medium) used for recording sporting events, preserving news actualities, shooting televised dramas, comedies, documentaries and quiz shows – indeed, most television until very recently was actually produced on film. Now both are moving to digital, and the differences between the two can be more clearly seen to rest in historically contingent and shifting practices (both industrial and scholarly) rather than essential qualities. The study of sound in video games, proceeding apace, also helps to bring attention to TV sound since it too breaks open some of the arbitrary conventions upon which our understandings of film sound are based.

So how can we dig ourselves out of this hole and bring some produc- tive attention to TV sound – attention which I believe will be useful for understanding other forms of media as well as they develop in the ‘streaming’ digital age, including film? First, we must begin to define our object of study more clearly, making distinctions between the various types of television text rather than attempting to generalise and essen- tialise as we have permitted ourselves to do with ‘film’. Second, we must recognise the very different and complex role that sound plays in televi- sion, as distinct from that in film. Especially important to consider is the prominence and importance of metadiegetic and extradiegetic sound (nondiegetic narration, particularly) in television’s varied levels of textu- ality – episodic text, series text, and supertext3 – that grew out of the broadcast environment as institutionalised in the days of radio.

The Non-reductiveness of Television

To address the first point: distinctions between the various types of tele- vision texts must take the specific historical evolution of television into account, along with a nuanced understanding of their conditions of production and reception. Thus, just to begin a complicated process, we must distinguish fictional/dramatic forms, such as the drama series, sitcom, mini-series, made-for-TV movie, etc., from the non-fictional forms that make up so much of television’s output. Television’s fictional forms, of course, owe much to the aesthetics of film, and film-based theories can take us a large part of the way through our analysis. But they also derive from the aesthetics and textual forms of radio, complicating film-based analytical categories, as will be discussed below.

However, non-fictional forms make up a majority of the material created for and distributed through television – news and documentary, sports, reality programmes, game shows and contests, broadcasts of live

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3 My use of the term ‘supertext’ owes some - thing to Nick Browne’s definition: those parts of the ‘television text- as-viewed’ that fall outside the diegesis of the episodic text and mark the larger context within which television is produced, distributed, and experienced (1984). Here I am less concern - ed with the concrete aspects of the institu- tional and economic structure of television, as Browne is, than with the ways in which tele- vision texts use sound to bridge the different textual levels and mark them within the diegesis.

events of all descriptions, advertising, talk and discussion programmes – and while these share some of the same aesthetic characteristics of their fictional counterparts (and of their more extensively analysed counter- parts in cinema, such as the documentary film), they must also be under- stood as differing fundamentally in their use of sound.

For example, one of the key distinctions in film sound theory is between the diegetic and nondiegetic use of sound.4 Diegetic sound, posi- tioned as emanating from a source within the narrative world of the film, fundamentally comprises dialogue and environmental sound/sound effects, with diegetic music the relatively rare exception (for most film genres). Though some excellent work has explored the cinematic work of dialogue and narration,5 it is rare; most film sound studies have focused on music – not surprising, perhaps, considering that the study of music is itself an established discipline that gives its analysts a well developed vocabulary to use and certain cultural parameters within which to work. And it is non-diegetic music, the film score, that has received the most attention, as the most ‘creative’ and distinctly sonic part of the filmic audio/visual text. Certainly television employs musical scoring practices similar to film (and many film composers developed their skills in radio and also worked in television – radio’s influence on the early film score and vice versa is an almost completely unexamined field). However, with the majority of television programming flouting almost all the textual assumptions made in this body of work, we must clearly branch out.

Let us consider, for instance, the problems that a sports broadcast, say a major league football game, presents to the analyst of television sound. What is the diegesis here? Can we talk in terms of the ‘storyworld’ of the football game? Clearly the diegetic/nondiegetic distinction does not work well, but we would still want to mark some fundamental differences between the sounds picked up from the event going on in the stadium – which would include the noises made by the players, the crowd, the stadium music, the stadium announcer6 – from the commentary provided by the sports reporters and analysts, both those present on or near the field and those back in the studio nowhere near the live event though also an intrinsic part of the televisual one. Such participants appear and disappear visually but remain consistently present aurally and in fact interact with each other and with players in the diegetic world, as Chion notes; in this they cross over between the classic (nondiegetic) voice-over narrator and the (metadiegetic) in-text narra- tives of participant narrators, yet they retain a strong diegetic function as ‘characters’ in the ‘game (episode) text’ as well.

Such elements differ again from the supertextual ‘interruptions’ of the

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4 Though these terms of analysis were developed specifically for fictional narrative films, they have obvious relevance to documentary and non-fiction forms as well, since all narratives, whether fictional or nonfictional, are constructed and organised as a narrative.

5 In particular see Sarah Kozloff ’s two ground- breaking works, Invisible Storytellers (1988) and Overhearing Film Dialogue (2000).

6 The last three of these categories represent forms of television’s ubiquitous ‘internal audience’ identified by Altman (1986: 57–60).

game text such as commercials, network and NFL promos, news updates, scrolls containing scores of other sporting events taking place during the game, and such materials. They also differ from the frequent irruptions of the ‘NFL theme’, the ‘Fox Sports’ intros and bumpers, and the recorded sequences from past games that form part of the ‘sports serial text’ as a whole, not to mention the animated figure jumping up and down intermittently in the corner of the screen. It seems that in a non- fictional text, especially one in which ‘liveness’ is a crucial part of the aesthetic, accepted categories must give way to first-order, second-order, and perhaps even third-order diegetic elements, relating more to the dimensions of the event as mutually understood by producers and viewers than to anything intrinsic to ‘the-text-as-viewed’. Old unities do not stand. Clearly, to borrow a term from Chion, this makes the ‘audio- visual contract’ developed between television producers and their viewers very complex indeed.

Or, for another example with perhaps more weighty implications than the one above, take the case of a news broadcast. What are the diegetic layers that exist in a typical broadcast, consisting of either filmed or live action taking place on location with a reporter providing commentary from that location, interviewing participants in the event (and in the case of those speaking a different language, with someone unseen providing a translation of that sound bite, perhaps with the actual voice of the inter- viewee played underneath), and the narrative that surrounds it delivered by news anchors at a desk thousands of miles away? Not to mention the nondiegetic music now so much a part of the news experience along with any number of nondiegetic visual/verbal elements such as scrolling text, pop-up network IDs, etc. Documentary filmmakers have long struggled with nondiegetic sound as somehow less authentic, as detracting from the real, since the days of Flaherty and Grierson; this distinction is main- tained in news programmes where ‘nondiegetic’ music may intrude over network logos and anchors’ introductions, but is kept strictly out of the news reports themselves: imagine 60 Minutes running an ominous musical score beneath an interview with Fidel Castro, or Anderson Cooper developing a distinctive leitmotif to introduce the appearance and accompany the comments of each of his regular guests. So we do maintain quite central and rigorously observed distinctions in non- fictional television sound that relate in some way to the diegetic/non- diegetic distinction, but so far we have developed a very poor vocabulary for talking about it – when we talk about it at all.

Even in the more film-like arena of fictional programmes, the condi- tions and practices of television complicate standard categories of analysis. For instance, the laugh track has been a standard part of the

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soundtrack for US comedy programmes, particularly for the sitcom, for at least fifty years. What is the narrative status of this sound? Many sitcoms are in fact shot before a live studio audience, a practice developed during the days of radio comedy/variety programmes when performers used to the vaudeville stage found themselves unable to perform well without the immediate feedback of an amused crowd. Later, as recording technologies developed, it became possible simply to dub in various kinds of supplementary laughter in the post-production process, eliminating unwelcome variables in audience response. We might think of the laugh track as a form of metadiegetic sound – sound that seems to come both from inside and outside the narrative world of the text (expressing a character’s feelings, for instance) while possibly gesturing to the presence of viewers and the constructedness of the text – yet the laugh track gestures to the presence of a laughing audience completely distinct from the one presently viewing the programme, unknown either to textual actors or to the viewer: a third universe (distinct from the on-screen ‘internal audience’ of talk shows or sports events). It is clearly not part of the sitcom storyworld even though actors might adjust their timing to take account of prolonged laughter, yet it is an intrinsic part of the text- as-viewed. It therefore blurs the boundaries of the diegetic, nondiegetic, and metadiegetic – and if, while we laugh aloud in our living room at such a moment, a computer-generated image of The Closer’s7 Deputy Chief Brenda Johnson (Kyra Sedgwick) leaps up in the corner of our screen, shines a flashlight around, and disappears, we have just experi- enced a completely extratextual visual element as well, a category sure to give film scholars apoplexy. What a medium!

Television’s Fundamental Seriality

As with video games, we require terms of analysis for television sound (and narrative as well, I would argue) that take into account broad- casting’s fundamental streaming seriality: present-time transmission combined with episodic, often open-ended, structure. These two linked attributes8 mandate a far higher presence of a far wider range of extradiegetic narrative information, across all textual types and genres, than is typical in film, with sound as a central element. Broadcast televi- sion’s streaming transmission engenders the frequent use of a type of sound I would define as supratextual, relating less to the specific programme text being viewed than to the supertext understood as the television viewing experience as a whole – the voice of the network announcer touting upcoming shows, the ebullient narrator of commer-

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7 Turner Network Television series, 2005– .

8 No one, as far as I know, has explained the historical link between broadcasting’s streaming transmission and the structure of daily/ weekly/season seriality that emerged early in the 1920s. It was resisted by the BBC, who stead- fastly preferred a ‘special events’ schedule to what they called ‘fixed-point scheduling’ until the late 1930s. In the US, the concept of the regular daily or weekly programme was in place as early as 1923 on some stations.

cials, news bulletin interruptions, etc. These are all a part of television’s live/streaming aesthetic inherited from radio. They make unusually explicit and frequent use of direct address narration – speaking to ‘you’ the viewer – compared to cinema where such direct address is rare.

Besides these supratextual manifestations, also central to television’s characteristic seriality is the use of metadiegetic sound to address the viewer outside the storyworld of the specific episodic text foregrounded on the screen at any given time, while remaining within the series text under- stood as the entire narrative arc of the serial (usually broke up into ‘seasons’). The most notable example of this on television is the title song and/or sequence, along with the ‘intros’ and ‘bumpers’ also derived from radio practice. Like film opening title and closing credit sequences – which have been little theorised – such uses of music and sound are clearly nondiegetic, gesturing towards recognition of the supertext,9 yet in television they frequently provide key information about the programme’s basic narrative situation, characters, and plot elements that are necessary for an intelligible reading of the episodic text.

This can become particularly important for long-running and narra- tively complex serialised dramas. Take, for instance, the opening of the Fox show Alias (2001–6). Over a montage of various action scenes featuring lead actress Jennifer Garner, a voice (that we soon understand as hers) breathlessly intones:

My name is Sidney Bristow. Seven years ago I was recruited by a secret branch of the CIA called SD-6. I was sworn to secrecy, but I couldn’t keep it from my fiancé. And when the head of SD-6 found out, he had him killed. That’s when I learned the truth: SD-6 is not part of the CIA. I’ve been working for the very people I thought I was fighting against. So, I went to the only place that could help me take them down. Now I’m a double agent for the CIA, where my handler is a man named Michael Vaughn. Only one other person knows the truth about what I do, another double agent inside SD-6. Someone I hardly know – my father.

This enigmatic and tantalising recap contains key information without which the viewer would have serious difficulty following the narrative. It lays out the basic storyworld of the series, occurring every week at the very beginning of each episode broadcast, sometimes followed by an immediate immersion into the episodic text, sometimes by rapidly cut- together scenes from past episodes that provide further reminders of the ever-unrolling series text. Then, very likely, we cut to commercial, preceded by a ‘bumper’ with the ubiquitous announcer’s voice intoning, ‘Alias … brought to you by …’ and a bit later we are back, first to the series textual level, with the show’s title music invoking mood over the

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9 Rick Altman gestures towards the notion of a cinematic ‘supertext’ in his essay ‘Film Sound – All of It’, in which he includes not only the sound emanating from the film itself but also the sounds of projection, of the theatre audience, and even of the promo- tional materials screened before the feature, as part of a film’s sonic totality (1999).

unrolling credits, then finally to the diegetic world of the episodic text. This kind of rapid alternation between levels of textuality, much of it dependent on the soundtrack for cohesion, is unique to television and traces its roots to techniques developed in radio in the 1930s and 40s.10

Some of these, but far from all of them, will be dropped (and replaced with menu sequences, a new diegetic form dominated by sound) when the series is released on DVD.

In many recent television dramas, a selected popular recording fills the function of both theme song and a type of narrative/emotional situation recap, such as the Rembrandts’ ‘I’ll Be There for You’ on Friends, or The OC’s use of the song ‘California’ by the Phantom Planets. Work is just emerging on the dramatically increasing use of popular song tracks in television narratives, from Miami Vice to Nip/Tuck, drawing on Jeff Smith’s key work on the role of popular music in film. His study provides a model for consideration of the various linkages between the popular music industry and the increasing use of songs in film, and gives television scholars a good jumping-off point.

Conclusion

Yet, if this essay has driven home any single point, it is that television’s complex and varied texts require a mode of analysis that draws on cate- gories and concepts based on film study, but is not limited by them. Sound is extremely important in television, but not for the ideological, technological, or essentialised reasons that many scholars have imputed to it. Once we understand that television owes its most basic narrative structures, programme formats, genres, modes of address, and aesthetic practices not to cinema but to radio – and once we begin to see television not as a failed or lesser form of cinema but as a portfolio of inventive narrative forms each with its own highly effective techniques, compre- hensible to and highly valued by audiences around the world – we can begin to appreciate the unique and complex narratives that television’s sonically-oriented streamed seriality has made possible. Though currently on the brink of change, as digital distribution replaces the nearly 100-year history of over-the-air broadcast transmission, and streaming is captured on DVD, digital downloads, TiVo menus, and video-on-demand services, I believe it unlikely that audiences will be willing to give up the dense, twisting, compelling, multi-layered and aurally ingenious serial texts that are broadcast television’s cultural legacy to whatever comes next. Cherchez le son.

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10 I explored some aspects of this multi-level address in Chapter 4 of Hollywood and Broad - casting (1990), looking at The Lux Radio Theatre.

References

Altman, Rick (1986) ‘Television/Sound’ in Tania Modleski (ed.) Studies in Entertainment, Bloomington: Indiana University Press

— (1999) ‘Film Sound – All Of It’, iris: A Journal of Theory on Image and Sound 27, Spring, pp. 5–12

Beebe, Roger, and Middleton, Jason (eds.) (2007) Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones, Durham, NC: Duke University Press

Browne, Nick (1984) ‘The Political Economy of the Television (Super) Text’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 9:3, Summer, pp. 183–95

Chion, Michel (1994) Audio-Vision: Sound On Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman, New York: Columbia University Press

Donnelly, K. J. (2005) The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and Television, London: BFI

Ellis, John (1982) Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul

Hilmes, Michele (1990) Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable, Urbana: University of Illinois Press

Kozloff, Sarah (1988) Invisible Storytellers, Berkeley: University of California Press

— (2000) Overhearing Film Dialogue, Berkeley: University of California Press

Smith, Jeff (1998) The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music, New York: Columbia University Press

Williams, Raymond (1975) Television: Technology and Cultural Form, New York: Schocken Books

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