For this essay ill be critically discussing the sound design from the film Alien directed by Ridley Scott. I’ll be focusing on the scenes in the film with the first encounter of the alien on the ship, as one of the characters attempts to find a cat he ends up finding the alien, I will be looking at this scene from a standpoint of disassembling the structure that connects the sound and vision together and conceptually analysing the techniques employed in its audial visual structure and relating these to the ideas of Michel Chion from the book audio-vision. Specifically I am focusing on his notion of added-value and conceptually linking and directing the focus on this topic on the sound and moving image of the film alien. The scene of interest starts with one of the crew searching for the crew’s cat, as they make there search he detaches from the main group in search, as his brief tour leads him to and around the cooling towers he finds the cat only to be stalked by the alien culminating in the first cinematic glimpse and killing by H.R Gigers alien.

Sound vectorizes or dramatizes shots, orienting them towards a future, a goal, and the creation of a feeling of imminence and expectation. (Michel Chion, Audio-Vision, sound on screen p14)

Visually the scene’s industrial damp, cold and metallic. Water and chains dangle from the cooling towers illuminated distantly above futuristic cybernetic machinery, this dark machinic atmosphere created by these settings are backdroped against an equally dark soundscape composing of an array of twisted sharp sounds and internalised heartbeat tensions. Juxtaposed and contrasted, these sounds are designed to navigate and summon the most primitive of feelings by sonic and visual temporaliazation in the audience. The very setting brings the audience into bearing of the time based sequence of events through suspense and an animated feel through the combination and unification of visual settings and sounds.

Visual and auditory perception are of much more disparate natures than one might think. The reason we are dimly aware of this is that these two perceptions mutually influence each other in the audiovisual contract, lending each other their respective properties by contamination and projection. (Michel Chion, Audio-Vision, sound on screen p9)

The sound in this scene follows and reinforces the vision which we see, such as when the man slowly walks towards the cat, internalised sonically, a heart beat is heard along with the quiet tread of foot steps and breathing. The sound in this sequence accompanies what we expect to hear, although sounds not attributed with distant sonic events create disjointed textures (suggesting an alien movement) these factors of sonic linkage accompany the trajectory of vision. In the classic film apocalypse now the first scene with the ceiling fan and the accompany sound of the helicopter is an excellent example of how different sound when combined to visual events create a whole new context in viewing them thought the juxapostioned displacement of expected sound /visual events.

By added value I mean the expressive and informational value with which a sound enriches a given image so as to create the definitive impression, in the immediate or remembered experience one has of it, that this information or expression ”naturally” comes from what is seen, and is already contained in the image itself. (Michel Chion, Audio-Vision, sound on screen p5)

This accompaniment of tense sounds from heartbeats or orchestral scratches giving rise to the killing blow along with the cats hissing gives classic example of the notion of added value Proposed by Chion’s work, added value means the sound essentially adds to the overall impact of the visual element within the production, for example if an aircraft crashing has sound of the explosion occurring rather than without the sound happening the sound adds to overall impact of the visual aspect. Added value literality means the informational and expressive value that sound adds to a given image. Now I want us to look specifically at how added value occurs within Ridley Scott’s alien. Within the scene composition and sound design, interfolds of sound support and strengthen the visual component through parallel sound events, the reverb space of the sounds in the scene starts in a small closed space building to a open area after the kill, let me give you an example, this classic sequence in which the man dies due to the alien runs along previous conventions in cinematic horror, a anempathetic effect were the sound reflect and add to the emotional impact of a visual audio amalgamation is created by textures of heart beats and a rich tapestry of narrative noises rather than music. The sound builds up ramping upwards as the alien makes its kill, visually the tension is evident as the man slowly and obviously is going to get himself killed.

What I mean is that by anempathetic sound is when the sequence in which the characters violent death occurs is followed by a sonic process which continues although not indifferent to what’s going on, the sound of hanging chains and water continue the feel of the killing sequence, were as in the film reservoir dogs the scene in which the character saw’s and cut’s the police officers ear off with a sharp knife while listening to the downbeat track by Steelers wheel called “stuck in the middle with you” would be perhaps a more refined example of anempathetic sound. However Sound which follows the vision is a convention of sensory hierarchy from sight downward to the other senses, this is the crux of Chion’s work in audio-vision, that within cinematic history vision and the image has been predominantly held as more important over the over sense’s.

Going back to though, added value is much different from sound that mimics the visual, the sound in the film alien is in essence fortifying the visual format of the scene from its own unique modality stand point, this does give a more unified and strengthened audio-visual finished product production wise. Added value in this sequence is also evident as the alien makes it first kill; the sounds of chains and raining water are attached to a sound layer of stretching leathery type sounds, visually the alien’s presence is heard before being seen and when it is seen it can be heard by the weird twisting sound of wet leather. Also when the crewman locates the cat and the cat hiss’s as the man attempts to catch it, unknown to him the cat is really hissing at the alien behind him, this hissing is essentially a primal sound and echoes a deep resonance of fear which when combined to the visual serve to emotively excite the audience as well as convey the fearsome aura of Giger’s Alien.

The cats hissing and the alien sound movements are engaged and solidified by addition with the visual. Chion describes how a contract of such is entered in the joining of cinematic images with sound; essentially reciprocal perceptual traits emerge from the union of these two different mediums. The sense of added value becomes apparent when we look at how Ridley has taken these dark haunting sounds and marinated them in the visual content of the stalking alien and play of light and vision of the scene.

Added value works reciprocally. Sound shows us the images differently than what the image shows alone, and the image likewise makes us hear sound differently than if the sound were ringing out in the dark, however for all this reciprocity the screen remains the principle support of filmic perception. Transformed by the image it influences, sound ultimately reprojects onto the image the product of their mutual influences. (Michel Chion, Audio-Vision, sound on screen p22)

However the sound supports the cinematic sequence of visuals on screen are added to sound’s that affect each other greatly; if someone sees an explosion and hears a bang they put two and two together and get twenty two, perception is greatly contextualized and coloured by what we see and hear at the same time when put together, the difference inherent in the sense modalities are the embodiment of there informational gathering uniqueness. Such as an image is instant, but to explore an image and get closure (which is characterized as “getting it” in layman’s terms) takes a few second, were as sound can be layered infinitely and is instant in affect and source recognition. The set difference in the way the eye and the ear perceive moving image and sound together are ultimately drawn more and more inline with one another as a new Audi-visual entity when joined, also the juxtaposition image with sound still joins, creating something new but with traits of its parent components, the reciprocal mixing through putting sound and image together is something new in itself but different from its ingredients.

Within the production many different layers exist. The sound adds to what we are seeing, obviously by the sound of foot steps and things but also the tension of the situation and the feel. These strata formed by the sound element within the film create a conjunction between emotional and information substance conveyed though the sound it’s self, especially when combined with the highly evolved setting visually portrayed by good set design, camera work and lighting, theses factors expand and modify upon the overall content contained in the sound and vision itself when merged. My feeling on this piece is that that there exist’s added value throughout the film but the famous scene in alien in which H.I Giger’s Alien makes is first kill is the cherry on the cake, also I feel the source of sound pervades everywhere in the scene as the alien makes its kill taking the claustrophobic feel of the crewman searching for the cat and then suddenly opens up to a acoustic wide space, Ridley’s Awareness and careful construction both acoustically and visually is evident and the classic film clearly breaks and crystallizes the genre of horror sci-fi movies one step ahead of those gone before.

I conclude in this analysis that the above hypothesis of added value in the Audi-Visual structure is affected and created my the unification and select choice of sounds that are married to the visual portion of the production, on a purely elementary plane of analysis, the scene of focus cuts to bone as tension and release are created through the merry go round joining of these sounds and vision, however Chion’s notion of added value in which sound adds emotional content and reinforces the overall impact of the vision is conclusively at work in alien, but it also works on the flip side, for if the film was made sound first then the vision added value would work aswell.

The sound used and settings from shady lights, futuristic sets and twisting orchestral sounds unwinding and stretching, when put together are designed to summon fear and terror in the audience, the alien itself not only looks like humanity’s worst advisory with its slick wet black carapace of a body and razor sharp teeth and talons but it also sounds horrific, it hiss’s and stretches its slender form around the chains hanging from the cooling towers creeping and stalking, its chitin armour sounds wet and humid, the sounds identify its sonic presence to the audience even before its seen, this alchemy of sound and vision leads us to believe as an audience the creature’s movement’s are silent and its presence deadly. The cat hissing masks the aliens initial presence and create a sonic and visual reminder of our genetic past, the teeth, the hiss, theses are primitive echoes deployed by Ripley to grasp the audience in fear. The teeth and hiss are both used for fighting, feeding and defending.

Bibliography --Audio-Vision, sound on screen, Michel Chion Columbia University press New York. 1990

Audio Culture, readings in modern music, edited by Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner. Continuum books 2004

Our Sonic Environment and the Soundscape, the tuning of the world, R. Murray Schafer, 1994 destiny books