Peirce and Sound Design: Summary
When describing the role of the practitioner in sound, it is tempting to rely on the industrial model of the soundtrack as a hierarchy of sounds that are either dialogue, music, or sound effects, with each crew position fitting within that same schemata. When describing the soundtrack, we have alternative models, such as Tomlinson Holman’s division of the soundtrack by function – direct narrative, subliminal narrative, grammatical (Holman 2002: xi-xii). As discussed previously, there are times when it makes sense to use both forms of classification in an examination of the practice and the product.
The usefulness of the Peircean model is that it provides a way of framing the soundtrack according to meaning. It allows us to describe how sounds of whatever kind have the potential to be meaningful and how that meaning can be created or manipulated for the purposes of storytelling or, more broadly, "meaning-making". It gives us a vocabulary to describe how meaning is made through sound-image relationships and how the different sound elements and sound processes work toward this goal. The model can be applied at both the micro-level of a single sound as well as to the soundtrack as a whole. It is flexible, in that particular sounds need not only belong to one class but may belong to multiple classes and have multiple functions. Its focus is on the meaning rather than the content of the sounds themselves. By thinking about sounds as sound-signs, the Peircean model accounts for all types of sounds, how they are interpreted, and their use in conjunction with images, which is the fundamental province of film and all other audiovisual media.
Much of the work involved in sound production is concerned with the manipulation of sound-signs in order to produce a desired effect in the mind of the audience. Whether working in fiction or non-fiction, the sound producer attempts to influence what the audience should know, think, or feel. The Peircean model can illuminate aspects of the practices of film sound that have so far evaded proper analysis since they could not be fully theorised using the tools that are commonly applied to visual aspects of cinema. Peircean semiotics can be used to elucidate the processes of practice during practice. It can provide both the conceptual framework that can be applied to the processes involved in creating elements of the soundtrack as well as a means to understand how the sounds themselves, in conjunction with the image, can be used to create the potential for meaning for the audience.
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