There a many terms used when describing sound design and if you don’t know some of them, you can find yourself quite unsure of what is meant when sound designers are discussing sound design principals. The following are descriptions of a few i have found helpful to have an understanding of.
‘Synchresis is the forging between something one sees and something one hears - it is the mental fusion between a sound and a visual when these occur at exactly the same time. Synchresis is an acronym formed by telescoping together the two words synchronism and synthesis’ (Chion 2016)
Synchresis is the root of sound design for film. It is what creates the immersive experience and sells the world we are presented with as realistic and worthy of our emotional investment. It is also the stage on which many tricks are performed by filmmakers and sound designers.
As the human mind seems so ready to accept that an event has occurred when a sound accompanies a visual cue, any action or event on screen can have its value altered by what sound is put up (or, importantly, not put up) against it.
While Oxford dictionary describes Valence as a Chemistry term meaning.
‘The combining power of an element, especially as measured by the number of hydrogenatoms it can displace or combine with ‘carbon always has a valence of 4′.’ Or ‘Relating to or denoting electrons involved in or available for chemical bond formation ‘molecules with unpaired valence electrons’’ Or even ‘Linguistics The number of grammatical elements with which a particular word, especially a verb, combines in a sentence.’(Oxford 2016)
The world of Psychology knows it by a different meaning and thus Sound Designers being the devious beings that they are.. (insert Verhagen reference), know it too.
It refers to emotional states and inparticular, positive or negative emotional states.
So you have a scene where some one is falling in love, the audience is supposed to be drawn into a state of Positive Valence. Conversely if you want to get dark, you are going to want to induce a state of Negative Valence.
Salient just means important.
Well it also means ‘a peice of land or section of fortification that juts out at an angle’, but i don’t think we need to go into that.
Diegtic and Non-diegetic sound
Another Chironism and definately worth getting a good handle on ( still waiting for my copy in the mail), filmsound.org describes Diegetic sound as,
‘Sound whose source is visible on the screen or whose source is implied to be present by the action of the film:
sounds made by objects in the story
music represented as coming from instruments in the story space ( = source music)
Diegetic sound is any sound presented as originated from source within the film's world
Digetic sound can be either on screen or off screen depending on whatever its source is within the frame or outside the frame.’
and describes Non Diegetic sound as,
‘Sound whose source is neither visible on the screen nor has been implied to be present in the action:
sound effects which is added for the dramatic effect
Non-diegeticsound is represented as coming from the a source outside story space. The distinction between diegetic or non-diegetic sound depends on our understanding of the conventions of film viewing and listening. We know of that certain sounds are represented as coming from the story world, while others are represented as coming from outside the space of the story events. A play with diegetic and non-diegetic conventions can be used to create ambiguity (horror), or to surprise the audience (comedy). ‘
filmsound.org, synchresis, http://filmsound.org/chion/sync.htm.
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/american_english/valence#valence
http://filmsound.org/terminology/diegetic.htm
