The Sound of Cinema? The Cinema of Sound?

Is it just me or has audio taken a new role in cinema in the past decade or two? Take for example nearly any television show from the 1960s. It seems any audio work done during this period focused on capturing sound instead of the creation of sound. Most of the audio heard is the dialogue, basic sound effects and, occasionally, some kind of backing orchestration or laugh track. Of course, there is some explanation for this phenomenon.
During this early period of television, many technologies were still new enough that merely capturing the audio that occurred was challenging enough without adding in experimentation or creation into the mix. The technology was also not of the highest quality and thus, attempts to experiment with sound in a visual context may not have yielded any results worthy of being placed in the final product. Also, a lack of training may have forced early sound workers to focus more on doing their basic job competently rather than worrying about the abstract possibilities.
In film, audio experimentation was more readily achieved however it was not received as widely as it is now-a-days. Looking purely at recent examples we can see this happening. The opening sequence of There Will Be Blood goes for an extended period of time (approximately five minutes if memory serves me correctly) without any dialogue. The only audio eard are the sound effects of the action (the sounds of work, people moving) and an orchestra playing a slow and quiet crescendo to provide a musical background. With the recent Pixar movie, WALL-E, the main character communicates with seemingly human inflection and dialogue (though there isn’t much dialogue to speak of.) However, there is no voice actor for WALL-E. WALL-E’s ‘voice’ (and that of secondary character, M-O) is the creation of a sound engineer. Many people connected emotionally with the little robot even though he was purely a digital creation.
Although this could all be my (mis)perception, I am curious to find out if other people have noticed this similar trend.


I don’t want this initial blog to be all boring academia and supposition. God knows I don’t claim to be an academic. In fact, I think I may have wasted all of my good ideas (all two of them!) here so I think I’ll cut my losses. In order to lighten the boredom I am posting another type of ‘Cinema.’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SelmnDWnULY

Don’t hate me Dr. Twombly because my music is beautiful. : P