Lost in Sound Space

A Kaleidoscopic Hearing of Gravity

We accept seen space as real only when it contains sounds as well, for these give it the dimension of depth.

–Béla Balázs¹

Space exploration has always been an active sub-genre of the sci-fi enterprise in Hollywood and elsewhere ever since the day Georges Méliès made his Trip to the Moon (1902). In the wake of US’s effort to catch up with the space race and the formation of NASA in 1958, Hollywood has been able to put a spin on the genre and concoct new recipes combining all the traditional ingredients with a dry coating of rocket science. Despite its many varieties (e.g., the majestic 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968), the contemplative and episodic The Right Stuff (1983), the fastidious² Apollo 13 (1995)), the following generic components are often present: machine malfunction that endangers space travelers;³ overabundance of technical jargon that could have come from a NASA documentary, which this genre closely borders; the archetypal plot of overcoming disasters and returning to home triumphantly; a parallel depiction of astronaut’s life on earth as average human being (i.e., in the backyard, holding a beer) and their wives’ anxiety. The problem of the genre, or its strength, consists in balancing with what is familiar (astronauts as emotionally comprehensible and predictable; our fear projected and made visible), what is unfamiliar but attractive (the outer space experience) and what is neither familiar nor attractive but nevertheless key to the genre: the highly verbalized, extremely technical aspect of space traveling.

While Gravity’s has clearly drawn from its many predecessors⁴ in what we might call the “spacesuit genre”, it could well be the ultimate spacesuit film. Apart from the final scene, where Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) lands on earth (still no human being in sight), the entire film takes place in outer space, under zero gravity. Apart from a few remarkable moments where Stone exposes her body, for the entire length of the film, all we can see of the characters are their faces—the rest hidden in the cumbersome and asexual spacesuit. This constitutes a very realistic challenge not only to acting, but also to viewing. How are the actors and actresses able to convey their emotional states with all their body languages blocked, neutralized? How can the audience react to human beings whose bodies are barely visible behind the generic, all covering spacesuit? How can a film connect and communicate with its audience, when everything except the face⁵ (and a few interior shots) is generated by CGI and animated on computer? After all, what defines the film as a live action film, instead of computer animation?⁶

It is the sound, again, that comes to the rescue.

To say this is by no means to underestimate the visual achievement of the film. In fact, Gravity, like Kubrick’s masterpiece before it, strikes a unique position between two kinds of filmmaking. On the one hand, it is a narrative fiction with a characteristically Hollywoodian plot designated for mass audience. On the other, the visual and auditory aspects of the film significantly go beyond what the conventions of mainstream production dictate. Variety’s Scott Foundas refers to it as “the world’s biggest avant-garde movie”. J. Hoberman echoes the view by calling it “blockbuster modernism”. Kristin Thompson, even before seeing the film, compares it to Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale (1971).⁷ The film’s unprecedented camera movement, unique conception of stereoscopic imagery⁸ and intriguing workflow⁹ merit further analyses for days to come.

This case study shall focus on the film’s sonic achievement. Let us not forget: for the five Oscars the film garnered, three are located on the soundtrack. Apart from the original score composed by Steven Price, Gravity became the first film pre-mixed in Dolby Atmos to win Oscars in the categories of sound mixing (Skip Lievsay, Niv Adiri, Christopher Benstead, and Chris Munro) and sound editing (Glenn Freemantle). This is a bit ironic. Because the film begins, as it happens, with a black screen onto which the following inscriptions are shown consecutively: “at 600KM above planet earth the temperature fluctuates between +258 and -148 degrees Fahrenheit; There is nothing to carry the sound; No air pressure. No oxygen; Life in space is impossible.”

There is nothing to carry the sound. Except that the film cannot be silent. In fact, the film is not in shortage of any sound that a traditional film may embrace. Music has a strong presence in this film—already, while the titles unravel, a crescendo is building up, ultimately reaching deafening volume, synchronized with the image of a giant planet earth viewed from outer space. Throughout the film, the composer uses a skillful mix of analog (traditional string instruments and less conventional instruments such as glass harp and glass harmonica) and electronic (synthesizer) sounds whose fusion recalls the score composed by Vangelis in Blade Runner (1982). Moreover, the numerous collisions in the film are accompanied/synchronized by sonic booms, whose psychological effect straddles the category of music and sound effect.

We also hear, from the very beginning, nonstop dialogue from both visible and invisible characters (Houston, the explorer and the mysterious speaker with dog barking and baby cries¹⁰). Lieutenant Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) is an obsessively talkative character—some viewers may find it charismatic; others, offensive. But he may be forgiven on the ground that much of the film’s back plot needs to unravel through his verbal impertinence. It is also true that he is needed (not that he needs) to fill the radio communications with optimistic chattering—in a sense his voice sounds just like the country music¹¹ from his portable radio: a little naive, but certainly sunny and therapeutic. Even when oxygen level is as low as two percent, the talking must go on, least the characters would be engulfed in a vast void and silent infinity. By the same token, Houston will kindly indulge in Kowalski’s babbling, because hearing voices simply affirms the functioning of the communication channel—as long as they are talking, everything should be fine. Ryan Stone is initially more reserved; but as the film progresses, she also develops a compulsive talking habit. She has to speak out loud her thoughts, constantly, to assure herself as well as the audience. Many times, both Kowalski and Stone report to Houston “in the blind”. They do this not necessarily to communicate the gravity of situation to mission control, but to overcome their own fear by wrapping personal loss with an indifferent, official tone.

Finally, there is no lack of sound effects in the film. Critical reception tends to focus on what happened in outer space. Indeed the film has long segments in outer space perhaps more than any feature film ever made. But there are also long interior segments.¹² The soundscape of the ISS is full of beeping, hissing, metal clicking, electric sparks, grinding and all sorts of factory noises. The fire sequence, although short, is intense on sound effects (alarms, extinguisher, shaking, rumbling, explosion).¹³ True to the slogan that “no air, no sound”, the film claims to have used contact microphone to record its sound effects when characters work in outer space. Instead of airborne waves this type of microphone would only record through vibrations of physical objects in touch. The sound designer Lievsay describes it as “an extremely clever conceit” and attributes it to Glenn Freemantle. I am unable to confirm if such sounds indeed resemble what an astronaut would hear under the circumstance. But given film sound effect’s track record, there is no reason to believe that the film’s avowed sonic realism aims to be truly authentic when nobody has the experience. More likely sounds thus recorded will be further manipulated to simulate a familiar experience, namely, muffled sounds from underwater.¹⁴

In the last chapter I have used the examples of the Dolby Digital trailers to highlight the nature of a constructed sound space reinforcing the continuous camera movement yet untethered to a narrative context. Here what is involved is somewhat similar, but with a full-fledged narrative context. The Dolby Digital trailers take place in an imaginary space; Gravity takes place in the outer space. Both spaces are foreign to an average filmgoer’s experience. As the opening quote from Balázs suggests, to our perception, a space is only real to the extent that it is filled with sound. Without sound, a space film might run the danger of becoming a cartoonish blank space without depth. Although Gravity is a film set in a space that carries no sound, it cannot afford to do without sound. In fact, in Gravity the issue of sound space seems to have acquired much urgency, or should I say, gravity, since sound plays a critical role in conveying the sense of losing oneself in space. Eventually, it is also sound that infuses the immensity of the space with human presence, populates it and makes it palpable and therefore navigable.

Ultimately, the sound of Gravity constitutes a perfect illustration of the key theoretical and historical issues concerning sound space. We have established the notion of “sound space” as a useful gauge or a lens that can be used to examine the history of film sound. Such a historical narrative, in its turn, supplies the crucial context in which we can fully grasp the work of sound in a contemporary work such as Gravity. This case study therefore can be read as an extension to the previous chapter in the sense that it complements a historical narrative with a close hearing. Yet the study also raises many new issues that are not covered by the previous chapter, which is preoccupied with a major paradigm shift in terms of sound space: from the embedded to the embodying space. Here instead I shall focus on more specific issues such as voice panning, vocal proxemics, voice panning, scale matching, and etc. The first section deals with panning practices: how a particular sound (object) such as voice, music, or even heartbeat moves through speakers and creates a sense of space in the process and how this practice draws from the past and breaks with the tradition. The second section discusses how continuity editing, a tried-and-true method of constructing space through images, becomes problematic with the extensive call of spatialization. The remaining two sections deal with respectively the spatial acoustics of human voice and the body sounds, two types of sound that play important roles in the soundscape of Gravity.

The Curious Case of Voice Orbiting

Gravity begins, after its very own audiovisual big bang, with a gradual phasing in of a radio conversation. Several indistinct voices can be identified, which grow louder with the Explorer space shuttle getting bigger on the screen. One by one these voices are anchored to bodies on the screen. But the anchoring is not accomplished through showing the perfectly synchronized images and sounds of moving lips, the towering achievement of the talkie. Instead, it is accomplished by a consistent mapping of the spatial location of the voice: a voice is associated with a body, because it is perceived as coming from the precise location that a body is found on the screen. The kind of spatial synchronization at work here bears uncanny resemblance to an idea that emerged in the early years of transition, where tying the voice and the body as closely as possible in space was believed as a necessity condition for sound (talking) cinema. In a 1928 American Cinematographer article titled “New Light on ‘Talkies’” the author suggests that “the screen should be divided and so arranged that sound will be reproduced only at or as near the point of action as possible.”¹⁵ This idea entails insurmountable technical difficulties at the time: how many sections should the screen be divided? How to implement smooth transition from one speaker to another (remember only manual switching of one single track was available at the time)? It is therefore hardly surprising that the project bears no fruition whatsoever. But the idea seems to have been constantly revived throughout the century and finally realized, after almost a century, in Gravity.

Although Ryan Stone’s voice is the first that emerges from the indistinguishable sonic background, it remains disembodied before the two other astronauts are anchored. As the camera approaches the Explorer from afar, the audience is able to identify Kowalski first as the source of a narcissistically cheerful voice as he cruises from screen right to left, getting very close to the camera at one point. Kowalski’s voice and the moving diegetic music (supposedly playing from a portable device he carries but never shown in closeup) are carefully synchronized with his screen location and this spatial synchronization not only helps the audience to identify a character, but also adds depth to the space seen. Immediately after the identification of Kowalski, Houston makes a reference to a character that is for the first time brought to the audience’s attention: Shariff. A voice with a noticeable Indian accent answers. At this point what we take as Shariff’s body becomes centered on the screen and his voice sounds accordingly close-by. The identification remains partial however for its lack of either spatial movement or facial revelation. The anchoring is confirmed only when Shariff is told to take the rest of the day off and starts his “Macarena” dance (Fig 1).

Once the film helps us to identify characters in the space, it then proceeds to move the bodies out of the frame while using the spatial location of their voices to keep track of them. A character’s entrance into the frame can thus be predicted by the trajectory of his or her voice moving through the auditorium. The precision of this trajectory depends on the particular theater’s sound system—one might argue that this constitutes a true advantage of the Atmos system thanks to its ceiling speakers. Even mission control is pinned down: in the beginning Ed Harris’s voice emits from lower left corner, that is, where the blue planet is located; as the camera moves to a position where the earth is framed to the upper right corner, his voice is relocated accordingly.

If, in previous surround sound practices the screen has been acting as a giant threatening magnet enforcing a strict hierarchy of sounds’ spatial belongings, here the screen is transformed into a harmless window (I have the weird sensation that the electricity powered magnet is shutdown) that looks into the space, by virtue of the frequency and ease that all voices enter and depart from the field. “The screen is dispossessed,”¹⁶ Chion anticipates this experience more than a decade ago, and “the image comes to float like a poor little fish in this vast acoustic aquarium.” Phenomenologically speaking the audience’s visual fixation on the screen is loosened by a competing awareness of the auditorium. Each time a voice is carried outside the luminous container and roams free it calls attention to itself and becomes an attraction, like a shot of firework thrusts into the dark canvas of the night. The effect is such that I frequently find myself following the invisible sound with my eyes before I realize that I am staring at speakers on the wall or on the ceiling.

The film’s first subjective shot is also worth noticing for its intricate manipulation of space. I say subjective shot, knowing that the film’s camera movement (a Lubezki-Cuáron signature style) merges seamlessly what traditionally should have been several shots, subjective or not. To be precise, what I call subjective shot is the middle portion of the film’s second shot, which is executed in a symmetrical fashion, starting from and finishing by showing Stone’s body in the distance. Between these two extreme long shot scales the camera transits from free floating (we observe her movement) to a fixed position in relation to Ryan Stone. The camera remains at close distance to her face and eventually penetrates her helmet. While the digitally sutured camera movement manifests itself as one seamless flow, the accompanying sound marks the entrance and departure by sounding significantly different. Outside the helmet, the soundtrack has a sort of ostinato underscore that we may interpret as the ruthless rhythm of outer space. The moment the camera enters the private sphere of the helmet this ostinato is gone and a new high pitch sound is switched on. In conjunction with this change Stone’s breathing now has radically different acoustics. Thanks to the expressiveness of sound space, therefore, camera movement becomes a much more intense bodily experience for the audience. Similar to what happens in Star Wars, where Obi Wan-Kenobi’s urge “use the force” resonates in all channels, here Stone’s breathing is momentarily spread out in the auditorium before settling down to the rear. This sonic movement is justified by the camera taking up a classic subjective view, with its characteristic instability and blurred vision. Arguably the first time in cinema history, a subjective shot is reinforced by the voice of the very subject coming exclusively from the surround back, as if the audience is magically shrunk and seated inside the tiny space between her mouth and the helmet.

In consistently pushing the dialogue out of the screen (or rather, the front speakers), Gravity presents a significant challenge to the established codes of surround sound, and signifies a triumphant return to a crucial idea in the history of sound space. As I have detailed in the previous chapter, a key compromise made by surround sound technologies of the last two decades is that certain sounds can break free from the magnetic force field of the screen while others remain forever trapped. The human voice, especially that which carries vital narrative information, traditionally belongs firmly to the latter category. This is not because the previous iterations of sound technology do not possess a means to send human voice to the other end of the auditorium. Quite the contrary. Experimental stereo films in the 1950s, Dolby Stereo six track films in the 1970s, or Dolby Digital and other formats of digital surround sound in the 1990s have all attempted, at one point of their lifespan, to involve surround sound in the role of storytelling. “For a few years,” Rick Altman recalls the early days of Dolby Stereo, “every menace, every attack, every emotional scene seemed to begin or end behind the spectators. Finally, it seemed, the surround channel had become an integral part of the film's fundamental narrative fiber.”¹⁷ But the deplorable condition (limited frequency range, poor maintenance) of those surround speakers has forced sound designers to reconsider their options. Upon discovering how critical information carefully placed in the surround channels was not properly played, Ben Burtt initiates a retreat that other sound designers soon follow.¹⁸ The emancipation of the voice adds another record of failure. The deployment of narratively crucial sounds in rear speakers ended up being undesirable; it remains a possibility, albeit one seldom realized. The resulting codes of surround sound dictate a hierarchical order of channels and speakers, each designated for one specific purpose.

Gravity could have been composed with this conventional schema of frontalized sound. But instead it does not hesitate to push narratively important dialogues outside the shadow of the screen. Indeed, the film is conceived in such a way that moving voices out of the screen becomes a necessity. The film is in a unique position to treats all directions in the auditorium almost equally, as this is precisely how the images are designed to render the diegetic space. “There is nothing to carry the sound. No air pressure. No oxygen.” The film opens with these lines. To this one might also add, “no sense of direction.” Although we can only look ahead of us and the screen still possesses a degree of directionality (up, bottom, left, right), the lack of a stable reference horizon upsets the audience’s sense of orientation and their mental construction of diegetic space. Unlike other space exploration films Gravity doesn’t offer us a familiar ground (e.g., a backyard BBQ) before we take off. The audience is thrown into the space from the very first moment and stays there for almost the entirety of the film. It is only in the final shot of the film the horizontality inherent in any “earth film” returns: we are able to tell that the camera tracks horizontally and tilts up to frame, from an extremely low angle, Stone’s triumphant stance—none of these terms would make much sense if we are still in the outer space. To say “almost” is to convey the residual horizontality still implied by the camera movement—for the majority of times it does tend to frame characters in a upright position (Fig 2) while frequently upsetting it with opposites (Fig 3). Likewise the sound space needs to disguise its current “dark zone”—as it stands, sound would not yet come from underneath the floor—the camera movement acts accordingly, never allowing a character to cruise out of the frame from the bottom.

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Figure 3: What does “9 o’clock” mean if we are not facing the same direction?

Even considering the fact that voice panning is concentrated in specific segments of the film—the film does become much less radical in terms of form after the first thirty minutes—a treatment like this is intensely subversive. The film is able to afford such treatment partly because it is fully motivated by the plot; more importantly it is and supported, or should I say demanded, by the innovative camera movement. The film offers a fascinating occasion to observe the effect of constantly hearing voices from anywhere other than behind the screen. It certainly does result the audience’s attention to be divided. But whether this constitutes an attraction or distraction seems to depend on first, the narrative and emotive justification of the said divergence, and second, the currently ambiguous nature of experiencing sounds that center around us. One thing is certain, however. Instead of wasting the audience’s limited cognitive resources, the unprecedented level of spatialized voice in Gravity actually serves a purpose: it compensates for the sense of disorientation induced by the dazzling camera movement.

Last but not the least, the curious case of voice orbiting gives us a chance to revisit Mark Kerins’s ultrafield theory, discussed in the previous chapter. Clearly, if the orbiting voices in Gravity do construct a sound space, this space is hardly an accurate acoustic rendering of the diegetic space of the film. The sounds, transmitted from radio, are not sonic waves travelling through air, and therefore cannot be indicative of any particular direction. Unless a character has grown, as Vertov may have dreamt, a pair of radio-ears that can natively interpret electromagnetic waves, she would hear all the sounds equally and closely miked. The perfect spatialization therefore is entirely constructed for the sake of the audience’s sense of immersion. Even with the presence of air, one can still easily find evidence in the film where sound spatialization does not constitute an accurate mapping of the diegetic space. Instead it often suggests, albeit with considerable subtlety, crucial narrative intention long before the images have the liberty to do so. For instance, in the episode of Kowalski’s “posthumous” visit, everything looks normal: Kowalski enters, takes off his helmet, takes a sip out of the vodka bottle and proceeds to tell Stone what her next step should be. But the sound has already betrayed his presence. During their conversation, there is a heavily echoed¹⁹ version of Kowalski’s favorite country music, which is played only in the overhead speakers. That the sound is not coming from this space is already a clear hint of the nature of this encounter. Towards the end of their conversation, Kowalski’s voice starts to drift around the auditorium while he visually remains seated in the same place. By having the rambling of the voice contradicts with the visual, the film presents an acoustic dissolution of Stone’s hallucination.²⁰ The dissolution gradually leads to the return of the alarm sound that is clearly diegetic in the space of the Soyuz.

Although Gravity represents a special case that most films cannot easily take after, its presentation of sound space is still exemplary of Hollywood’s dominant ideology of spatialization. This ideology dictates that if the sounds indeed create a space, it shall be a space highly schematic in what it chooses to represent (and it carefully disguises what it cannot); it shall be created for the specific purpose to guide the audience in their make-believe. The sound space thus constructed is artificially matched to the image space, so that the two can mutually reinforce each other. What is frequently referred to as immersion, therefore, is the result of such matching of two spaces. Immersion then becomes a valuable resource that can effectively enhance the audience’s alignment with characters. Continuously tracked by sonic coordinates, Kowalski’s circling around the auditorium is meant to offer a sonic attraction as well as an aid for the audience’s construction of diegetic space. But the voice panning also serves to situate the audience at the center of his circling which facilitates our identification with the heroine. The uninterrupted vocal instructions establish a soothing presence. Like a dancing partner’s ensuring instructions it help us to overcome our own fear facing the void.

Space Matching, or Sonic Teleporting

The kind of close matching between sound space and image space as exhibited in the opening shot of Gravity works best when the camera movement presents a continuum of space of which the screen is nothing but a moving window. Sound reinforces the sense of self-movement by sketching out an invisible yet logical trajectory of objects outside that window. This kind of close matching encounters significant resistance, however, when editing is introduced. Inevitably editing presents not only discontinuous but necessarily significant relocation of humans and objects in space. The system of continuity editing, for example, dictates a movement between 30 to 180 degrees. To maintain close spatial matching in these circumstances would mean to force the audience to become aware of the previously habituated and largely “invisible” jump by accentuating it with sound.

In Gravity, the tethered space walk sequence when Kowalski and Stone make their way to the ISS is highly indicative of the problem. This sequence initially alternates two shots of both tethered together (Fig 4) and full shots of Stone (Fig 5). Kowalski’s voice jumps in the auditorium space whenever a cut happens: from right behind the screen to the left rear speakers. The pattern repeats itself three times before other shots are used (Kowalski’s POV looking at a wrist mirror; CU of Stone, a new two shot from the back). Indeed, a conventional dialogue sequence such as this would raise no eyebrow at all if it were not for the fact that the audience, having just been successfully primed with an impressive close spatial matching of two spaces, now faces a huge gap between the two. Not only does the sound call attention to the editing and make it no longer invisible, but it questions the validity of the practice of editing that breaks up the hitherto continuous space.

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Figure 5 Kowalski’s voice coming from left rear.

To understand the extent in which space matching has been taken for granted in contemporary audiovisual media authoring, consider the curious (but already customary) phenomenon of revamping films made in the monophonic or stereophonic format into 5.1 surround sound, a phenomenon that remains underexplored in film sound scholarship. Take for example the Blu-ray release of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969). The film’s original theater release has a stereo soundtrack (the first stereo track in a Bond movie). But in order to accommodate the 5.1 DTS-HD (or elsewhere Dolby TrueHD) lossless format that is the sine qua non of today’s Blu-rays, the film’s soundtrack has undergone nothing less than an overhaul. Besides relocating numerous spot effects and ambience (Ocean noise; the clop of a horse; cars zipping; skiers blasting down the mountain; pulsing helicopter blades; fireworks bursting and etc.) into the rear channels (a standard operating procedure these days), the new soundtrack also moves the voices into the surround channel where it sees fit. The dialogue sequence between Blofeld and Bond after his disguise is blown is a case in point. In this scene Bond sits on a sofa and Blofeld on a chair opposite of Bond several meters away. Instead of staging the scene with two-shots or over the shoulder shots, the camera is positioned in the midpoint of their eye line (naturally the eyeline is slightly off-kilter). The soundtrack’s renovating project sees this as a perfect opportunity to apply voice panning: as Blofeld or Bond is speaking off the screen, the voice would clearly come off the rear speaker, indicating the source’s spatial location. As the shots alternate the to-and-fro bouncing of the voice becomes very noticeable, which in turn calls attention to the editing itself. On several occasions, to maintain the consistency of the practice, a voice would jump in mid-phrase from straight ahead to behind, the experience of which is not unlike instant teleporting.

The above two examples show that editing in cinema, especially the most banal but quintessential shot-and-reverse-shot formula, might become the biggest hurdle for close space matching as an element of contemporary audiovisual aesthetics. The full gravity of the situation can only be understood by a historical lesson: this problem is in fact not a new one. Indeed, what we are voicing here is the same complain registered to many stereo films made in the 1950s such as The Robe (1953). Being the first CinemaScope film The Robe benefits from stereo recording of many of its dialogue scenes. While boosting “realism” by accurately matching the sound space and the image space, the practice was found distracting when editing is involved. Not only the voice is jumping from speaker to speaker; various shots from a same scene stand out by their distinct background sound, threatening to call attention to themselves instead of merging seamlessly into the overall flow of the sequence.

What The Robe wanted to revive is a dream conceived two decades earlier by the advent of sound. I have mentioned in the previous chapter how the early talkies produce an uncanny impression, that the audience had difficulty believing that the body and the voice are one because they don’t seem to come from a same spot in space and their spatial signatures don’t match. This problem is widely perceived in its time, as Arnheim’s reaction testifies. And it is what motivates an English engineer, Alan Blumlein, to develop a model of sound recording and reproduction to overcome it. Dubbed by BBC as “The man who invented stereo”, Blumlein is said to have coined the word “binaural.” According to some accounts, Blumlein went to see a talkie with his wife in 1931 and was troubled by the sound reproduction, especially how the sound didn’t match the image. Naturally the brilliant engineer declared to his wife on their way home that he knew how to fix it. The result is a patent that is widely held as a landmark event in in the development of stereo sound technology. Blumlein and his colleagues also made a series of experimental recordings and films to demonstrate the technology and to see if there was any commercial interest from the film and music industry. One of these films, literally called “walking and talking”, shows a stage where three men in suits or lab coats walking from left and right, and vice versa, while counting numbers and days of the week. Again, these experiments seem to work well only by neglecting editing as a fundamental tool of feature length filmmaking.

Blumlein uses a coincident pair of microphones (a clever contraption now called the Blumlein pair) that picks up phase differences and converts them into amplitude differences by a pair of loudspeakers. In contrast, the stereo films in the 1950s use an array of spaced microphones to record a scene, a technology that can be traced to experiments conducted by Steinberg and Snow in Bell Laboratories in the 1930s. Both, however, conceive the scene as rather static, with no camera movements and cuts—again, much like the canned theater or music performance in the first Vitaphone shorts.²¹ But unlike those shorts, or the early talkies, a multiple microphone setup doesn’t really solve the problem, as each microphone would introduce its own sound space, easily perceived as in conflict with others. It is fairly fortunate for cinema, in a sense, to be without sound for thirty years. For if it had sound from the very beginning, probably neither camera movement nor cutting would have been invented! Without the tethering and burdening of sound space, the camera is free to move around and the image track enjoys an exclusive liberty to construct space at its own pace. All these become problematic once the sound space is involved.

In my view Hollywood’s answer to the conflict of interest between editing, camera movement and sound space integrity consists of essentially two strategies: either the sound space is reduced to a barely legible sketch (as in the majority of 1930s films) or it is entirely reconstructed from scratch, as if it were a case of cartoon. Instead of using various stereo recording techniques that register the spatial location of voices and their movements, a manual process is introduced to locate and pan sound across channels. This technique, called “pan pot” (panoramic potentiometer), was first developed in Disney’s Fantasound. It consists of a painstaking process that extenuates a sound from one speaker and substantiates it in another. According to John Belton, by 1958 Fox’s CinemaScope films no longer used stereo to record dialogue and sound effects.²² Instead it went back to what Fantasound did two decades earlier and revived the panning practice. Panning may achieve good results when applied carefully, so that its inherent technical complications (divergence control, spread, etc.) could be controlled. It may work fine if what is involved is on-screen or off-screen continuous movement. But when it comes to cuts that place the characters into opposite end of the auditorium, the effect is somewhat jarring. For this reason, and the complexity of the process itself, “by the 1970s dialogue panning had all but died out.”²³ Most mixers stuck to the convenient solution of leaving dialogue to the center.

Despite its inherent disruption, examples such as the ones I offered earlier suggest that the practice of closely matching image and sound space is being revived again. At this point it is unclear to what extent the use of sonic teleporting has become an established norm by the industry. The phenomenon remains somewhat inexplicable to sound designers and mixers themselves. But if indeed a new generation of filmgoers will eventually take the orbiting voices as a fairly unobtrusive phenomenon, it is hard to imagine that anyone can be habituated to the effect of instant teleporting (unless that, too, has become a banal reality). Mark Kerins claims in his theory of the ultrafield that an accurate (I would suggest instead the term “close”) matching of the sound space and the image space helps the audience to locate characters in the diegesis independent of the image. While this is quite true if, as we have seen in the opening shot of Gravity, the two spaces are presented in a continuous fashion, the theory of ultrafield may have significant difficulties explaining dialogue sequences based on the most banal shot-reverse shot structure. How can the acoustical information be of any help if it keeps contradicting itself? How could anyone locate the character in the diegesis with eyes closed if they keep jumping every two seconds? If, as in Kerins’s examples, this kind of disorientation is precisely what is needed in the plot—it might be said that every blockbuster needs a scene of this nature—then disorientation is what you get. But what about other circumstances (i.e., the majority of time) when disorientation is not wanted? Regardless of what path cinema sound might take, the issue of space will certainly play a key role in its future negotiations.

Hearing a Voice in Outer Space: Proxemics, On-the-air sound, and the Radio Mike

I have detailed above how the radio communications in Gravity are all spatially located and “accurately” mapped to their relative position to the screen. And this is despite the fact that a voice transmitted through radio should carry no spatial signature whatsoever. In other words, although all the voices are closely miked, they are made to be highly indicative of space because they are deployed spatially in the auditorium. To understand the paradoxical nature of this practice, let us reverse our steps and examine how the voice embodies space in the age of radio space, and what its creative possibilities and inherent problems are.

Except in specially treated space that eliminates reverb and echo systematically, any sound recording will include the architectural acoustics as part of the information. But if all sounds have a spatial dimension, the human voice deserves our special attention, because for a human listener, the meaning of an utterance is always a synthesis of, among others, the verbal meaning, the intonation and other temporal aspects of the delivery and the perceived proximity and other spatial clues, which all help the listener to identify the intention of the speaker. Our ability to distinguish the acoustic nuances of a voice has been explored by filmmakers to great effects. The next chapter deals with the perceived spontaneity of voice. Here my concern is how the spatial dimension of voice affects its meaning. To identify the relative distance of the speaker is a special application of spatial listening, and a central one at that.²⁴

An adult human being sensitive to the social context of speech can adjust his/her vocal intensity accordingly. A child yet to internalize such adjustments, on the other hand, tends to speak in constant volume and makes sound inappropriate for some occasions. The cultural significance of our bodily distance in social gathering is the subject of proxemics, developed in the 1960s by Edward Hall. Aural perception may not be as precise as that of vision, nevertheless in terms of proximity, similar categories may apply. Hall distinguishes four spaces in his theory of proxemics: intimate (<18 in), personal (<4 ft), social (<12 ft) and public. Since the human auditory faculty has a coarser discernibility, roughly speaking we may distinguish three ranges of the voice: the intimate voice heard close to one’s ear signifies physical contact—should such intimacy be unwarranted, it becomes a menace. The normal, natural voice implies a conversational distance. Finally, a raised voice is perceived as addressing the public. In the above cases, the volume of the voice has a natural correspondence to perceived spontaneity and both contribute to the definition of schematic listening: a pillow talk is the opposite to a public lecture not only because of the subject matter, but also because of the acoustic properties of the speech sound.

In cinema the auditory range of human voice is reduced through a process of normalization. For the majority of cases our categories are more less lumped into one: the rather constant distance between the actors and the boom, or, if it is post-synchronized, between the dubbing actor to the dubbing microphone. Borrowing the terminology of the visual, Rick Altman observes that voice in cinema is mainly taken from close-up and medium close-up.²⁵ Television sound may have an even narrower range, given the less dedicated listening environment and less capable sound reproduction hardware. In other words, in cinema (and even more so in television), we speak like a child, with a constant voice. We should not push the analogy too far, however, since the voice in the cinema is essentially a mediated voice whose intended earshot²⁶ is often made irrelevant. This produces a curious, almost Frankensteinian artifact: a whispering voice can be amplified and heard across the whole auditorium, without losing its sonic texture of intimacy.

Godard in Two or Three Things I Know about her (1967) has famously used a hushed voice to philosophize on society, truth, subjectivity and the world, eventually settling over the extreme close-up of a kaleidoscopically swirling cup of espresso that is not unlike an image of the universe. More recently, Sokurov has used the technique of overdubbing that manipulates a character’s perceived vocal proximity, makes it sounds closer than what the image should suggest. Overdubbing creates for the audience an effect of hearing voices inside one’s head—for Faust (2011), this can be interpreted as presenting an auditory perspective from the author, Goethe. It also generates a perceptual discrepancy that is never really so striking as to call attention to itself, yet remains unsettling throughout the course of the film. But perhaps the best example of schizophonic voice comes from Kane’s dying whisper “rosebud.” The extreme close-up image of the parting lips seems to suggest that this is a most private utterance, one that has the shortest intended earshot. Yet the giant image itself, the cavernous sound of the voice, the intense anticipation induced by a brief interruption in Hermann’s ominous music all serve to amplify the word to a monstrous degree. The implausibility that anybody in the diegesis actually heard it becomes irrelevant, precisely because it is no longer a whisper, but rather, a thunderous whisper.

The above examples show how the mediated voice in cinema lends itself to a decidedly unnatural operation that disentangles vocal intensity (whose direct result is the volume of sound) from its concomitant vocal texture, that is, the specific movements required of the speech organ to make a louder or lower sound. But cinema’s mediation of voice doesn’t stop here. A voice can also be transmitted through radio, telephone and other technological means in real time. Referred to as “on-the-air” sound, Michel Chion observes that “these sounds from television sets, clock radios, and intercoms are taking on a unique status in the films they appear in.”²⁷ Instead of embodying the natural space that a sound has to travel through, the sound is now possessed by the characteristic laws of the media. A telephone conversation features often a narrower dynamic range and characteristic frequency response that we all learn to recognize. Radio communications, such as those we hear in Gravity, are closely miked and sprinkled generously with static. But the medium can also choose to be transparent, “as if the film’s loudspeaker were directly plugged into the radio, telephone, or phonograph depicted on the screen.”²⁸

There exists a whole spectrum of vocal proximity from the “barely audible” dying whisper to the elevated, amplified and heavily echoed public address delivered to a gathering of thousands in Citizen Kane. Using vocal proximity as a stylistic device doesn’t happen, however, very often in Hollywood (or elsewhere). In fact, it is rare to find a film from Hollywood’s golden years that does speak like an adult, that is, having a comprehensive vocal range. The case of Kane constitutes a rarity, an exception rather than the norm. American cinema has to wait three decades for someone that is likewise obsessed with the soundtrack and benefits from technologies developed for radio: Robert Altman. Known from his earliest days by the desire to disrupt the Hollywood norm of a narrowed down vocal range, Altman nevertheless takes off in an entirely different direction than his predecessor. To solve the problem of variations in sound clarity in recording improvised dialogue, to edit overlapping lines (to separate them), and to enable a freer range of movement for the actors, Altman again turns to radio for help: the Sony ECM-50 lavalier microphone first released in 1969 and soon established as the broadcast standard. From California Split (1974), Nashville (1975), Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), Three Women (1977), to A Wedding (1978), Altman’s sound recordist Jim Webb regularly uses the electret lavalier microphone combined with a radio transmission unit and a multitrack recorder. This solution untethers the boom and the camera, and makes the point of audition and the point of view almost irrelevant to each other. The elimination of boom facilitated the kind of zoom in and out that was fashionable in the 1970s. In addition, Altman was able to keep all the voices separated so that they could be mixed at a later stage, significantly increasing his creative freedom. Most importantly, in Altman’s films actors and actresses speak considerably more spontaneously, because they know the radio mike doesn’t need them to raise their voices or to “straighten” their articulation as if they were speaking to a microphone hanging precariously from a distance. The resulting soundtrack achieves a vocal density, overlapping and authenticity that Welles could only dream about.

The use of radio mike, daring, experimental, and stylistic in Altman’s time, has now become a norm. According to Rick Altman,

Altman’s “radio” approach is now seen throughout the film industry as an accepted alternative to the traditional “perspective” system, as it is now termed. In the words of Alan Rudolph (assistant director of California Split and Nashville), Altman's sound men Jim Webb and Chris McLauglin are “like astronauts as far as the sound world is concerned.”²⁹

This final comment brings us back to the subject of this case study: a film that is indeed about astronauts. Intriguingly, although Altman’s soundmen use the astronaut analogy to describe their recording practice, hearing astronauts in a film such Gravity turns out to be the exact opposite of what one would hear in an Altman film of the 1970s. Gravity makes the use of radio mike fully justified; yet the film’s dialogue finds little use for the gadget.

Radio mike’s ability to boost intelligibility and spontaneity is certainly desirable. There is nevertheless a price tag tied to this practice, one that filmmakers sensitive to the spatial qualities of sound (such as Orson Welles) might not be willing to pay. The radio mike minimizes the space that sounds need to travel. Consequently the voices no longer have any spatial anchoring. Since all voices are tightly recorded from a fixed distance they are no longer indicative of any space. In other words, these voices, layered as they are, lose their proxemics features and reside in a flattened space. The audience see in the images characters moving about, some closer, some far away, yet they all sound as if they were speaking from one same close distance. They float around weightlessly—an “on-the-air” voice in this case becomes literally floating “in the air”— the effect of which can be confusing, or, as Murray Schafer calls it, “schizophonia.” Rick Altman mentions that this “radio” approach has been accepted by the industry as an alternative to the “perspective” system. This happens clearly because of the production as well as creative advantages it offers. But it by no means indicates that the perceived vocal proxemics is no longer a desirable quality. The credibility and unobtrusiveness of the “radio” approach hinge on the audience’s innervation of this new code of film sound. Yet it might prove to be a reversible habituation. The case of Gravity shows how, even when all the voices are closely miked, they don’t necessarily form a flattened space, as dialogue in numerous previous space films have been guilty of. Instead the film recreates a new habitat for these voices where they live and prosper.

An Extended Suspension in Space: the Hidden Charm of the Breathing Body

“Considerations of sound in the cinema,” Mary Ann Doane claims in her seminal essay, “engender a network of metaphors whose nodal point appears to be the body.”³⁰ Doane’s intuition is right on the money. Yet her theoretical efforts are almost entirely geared toward one particular sound that the body makes: the voice. “Who can conceived of a voice without a body?” she asks. To bring the issue of the body to the table, therefore, serves to highlight the carnal dimension of the vocal sound that is normally buried under its semantic meanings. But perhaps even more essential than the voice in this body-oriented dimension are the non-voice body sounds. Clearly, having a voice doesn’t warrant a body—God, plus computer-generated voices are two examples. On the other hand, a body that makes no other sound than the voice sounds implausible. Thus I wish to conclude this study by focusing on a particular category of body sounds that is featured prominently in Gravity’s soundtrack: the sounds of breathing and heart-beating. The film’s heavy reliance on these body sounds, I argue, is revelatory in terms of how it conceives the relation between the triangular voice-body-space relationships.

The human body, naturally, makes a lot of noises. And the sound of breathing has received increasing attention in film studies. Anthropomorphizing the cinematic apparatus, Vivian Sobchack has likened “the regular but intermittent passage of images into and out of the film’s material body (through camera and projector) to human respiration.”³¹ Following this line of thought Laura Marks³² has developed the notion of the “haptic” which Lisa Coutland combines with “aurality.”³³ Recently, Davina Qinlivan’s study of Breaking the Waves (1996) states that while the von Trier film pays homage to The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), “the lack of sound in Dreyer’s film denies the viewer the same kind of access to breath that von Trier offers”. While Dreyer relies on “the recurrent image of his martyr’s open mouth and her almost palpable gasping breath, von Trier’s inclusion of breath on his soundtrack introduces a dual layer of meaning in relation to both the symbolic narrative of the film’s diegesis and its role as an affective device.”³⁴

A study devoted to how the body sounds are represented in the filmic world would surely make a healthy contribution to film sound scholarship. What is even more urgent is to situate the body sounds both in the history of sound effects and in relation to other elements of the soundtrack. In line with this dissertation’s main argument that the film presents a world for the audience to hear, the role played by body sounds seems far from dispensable. In fact I would argue that the institution of Foley sound, whose primary focus is either the noises made by human body itself (footsteps, clothes) or those made by human body reaching out to other things (doors, furniture), signifies a new anthropomorphic stage in the history of sound effects. The breathing sound, seen in this light, is an even more radical proposition than footsteps, the clothes sounds and the movement sounds (hence its late manifestation in the history of cinema). It is not only a more articulated (i.e., the ability to signify an individual) body sound, but also considerably more connected with a person’s emotional state. In other words, while some body sounds reinforce the physical movement of the body in accordance with what the images already depict, the sound of breathing is about what happens inside the body; it offers a world inaccessible to the image. Additionally, under normal circumstances we do not hear breathing sounds. This brings significance to the cases where we do: physiological deformation, physical exertion, sexual arousal, emotional struggle, panic, and excitement. Hearing the sound of breathing therefore enables a secrete access to the filmic world; it conjures up a mechanism of projection that images are unable to supply. Recall the extremely memorable hissing that accompanies Darth Vader’s voice (impersonated by James Earl Jones but sweetened by Ben Burtt’s sound effect), a voice that Chion characterizes as “ambulatory acousmètre inside the image.”³⁵ In cinema, the breathing sound seems to appear whenever the body is concealed.

In Gravity, hearing the sound of breathing compensates for the invisibility of the screened body; it asserts the existence of body by showing us its internal resonance. To play with the famous catchphrase from Alien’s poster, “in space all you can hear is your own breath.” When and how is the sound of breathing used in Gravity? To what effect? How does the sound of breathing articulate the genre’s key concerns? Perhaps the most productive way to answer these questions would be a comparative study of two films that both have remarkable use of breathing sound. The other film in question is of course 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In fact, as hardly any review of the Cuarón film fails to mention the connection, a comparison is inevitable. Given the two films’ clearly distinct orientations, the comparison works best if we are only concerned with specific segments where the sound of breathing is featured prominently.

The relevant sequences in 2001 are found in the “Jupiter Mission” episode. There are three sequences bearing one extremely similar (if not the same) sonic signature, which might be called the “helmet mix”. It is composed of a loud hissing (source unclear) and a regular albeit heavy breathing. The first of these (1:12:12-1:18:52) details how one of the astronauts Dave Bowman goes out of the spaceship to retrieve a unit before its failure, predicted by the ship computer, HAL 9000. Interestingly, although the heightened breathing sound, especially its perceived proximity, suggests the unmistakably subjective nature of the whole sequence, there is not a single POV shot and the film frequently cuts to shots where Bowman is not even visually present. The “helmet mix” accompanies three types of shots: those of Frank Poole observing Bowman on computer monitors; exterior shots in which two meteoroids fling towards the camera silently; shots of Bowman, inside the pod or the ship. But they are distinguished by a subtle ambience layer in the first category, and the lack thereof in both the second and the third categories.³⁶

Since no fault can be found on the unit retrieved, HAL’s infallibility is cast into doubt. Inside the pod (the ambience of the ship is turned off here) the two astronauts talk about taking the control of ship from HAL, leaving only “the purely automatic and regulatory systems.” The conversation leads to HAL’s decision to terminate all human beings on board. The second sequence (1:30-1:32:30) begins immediately after the “intermission”. Poole is on a mission to replace the supposedly faulty unit and the same sound pattern resumes. After Poole exits the pod it turns toward him and opens its mechanical claws in a menacing position, apparently controlled by HAL. The hissing reaches an almost unbearable intensity. Both the hissing and the breathing stop abruptly in the middle of a series of axial cuts of HAL’s “eye,” until the red “iris” takes up the whole frame. Poole (in yellow suit) is then seen struggling without any sound. The termination of sound here signals the termination of life.

Seeing this, Bowman goes out in another pod to rescue his fellow astronaut. Because Bowman in a hurry does not put on his helmet, the sound of this sequence is treated differently. Here the point of audition coincides with point of view of the camera. The soundtrack cuts with the image track: the shots in the space are completely silent (radio communication with HAL seems to be exempt from this rule); the ones inside the pod and the ship have their own ambience sounds. The third helmet sequence begins when Bowman successfully enters through the emergence air lock. As he goes about dismantling HAL, with his helmet on, we hear the same breathing sound, with an understandably different kind of hissing.

The presentation of breathing in the above sequences has several particularities that are worth noting. First of all, in the Kubrick film breathing is associated invariably with a non-customary condition of its production: it is not breathing per se that is highlighted, but rather, breathing with effort, in a helmet. What it does therefore is to demarcate the moments of donning and doffing of the helmet, which seem to possess a ritualistic significance. The helmet isolates a person from the life-threatening vacuum in the outer space or the harmful atmosphere on other planets. But it is also an act of trust (or distrust) to the environment that surrounds us. In Mission to Mars, for instance, the discovery of breathable air labels a human habitat, a green pasture amidst the Martian desert. In numerous space films one finds indispensable a little gadget, usually strapped to the wrist, that can read not only the amount of air left but also to see if the external air is suitable for human being (often turns green when it does). Once the air is diagnosed as breathable, what follows immediately is the ritual of taking off the helmet. Sometimes the act is also followed by other gestures such as taking off the gloves, or even the entire spacesuit. These acts are not always performed out of necessity. Instead they signify a different stage in the emotive interaction between the viewer and the film: the elimination of immediate danger and the procurement of momentary safety. In Apollo 13 there is a revealing example of this implicit statement. Even if the three astronauts are on the verge of freezing to death (because the spaceship has to turn off heating to save energy), they never thought about putting on the suit, as if there were a rule in NASA saying that spacesuit is only for use outside spaceship! In Gravity after Stone finally manages to enter the ISS, she immediately undresses herself to the point of getting half naked.³⁷ This unexpectedly intimate gesture cannot be fully justified except to drive the point of her female vulnerability home. In contrast, Bowman’s first act before dismantling HAL is putting on his helmet. Like putting on a war mask, this is a declaration of war, a gesture of distrust to the atmosphere of the spaceship, treating it as equal to the menacing outer space.

Second, the way in which the breathing sound (allegedly provided by Kubrick himself) is used in 2001 is more like an ambience than point-of-audition. This is especially true for the first two sequences where the sound (makes sense only when heard inside the helmet) and the image (never taken from inside the helmet) do not match. Although the sound’s diegetic status is clear, there is no justification offered for its magnification on the soundtrack: the sound is not accompanied by a subjective view. Either this is a device that aims to convey a sense of suffocation and induce breathing difficulty in the audience—I can personally testify that this strategy is successful—or the helmet sound is in fact transmitted to the ship and broadcast through speakers—a plausible but not entirely convincing explanation. Apparently disregarding the sound-image literalism, Kubrick makes the breathing more than exaggerated—even if the microphone were placed right under the nostril, a normal breathing would never produce a sound of this intensity. Also, Kubrick’s breathing contains minimal variation³⁸, which does not correspond to the physical action performed or emotional status of the characters. A close listening would cast doubt on its authenticity, for the phrases (e.g., “open the pod bay doors, HAL”) uttered in the same helmet space sound quite different: the spatial signatures of the two don’t match; the ease of the verbal delivery belies the strenuous breathing.

Compared to 2001’s limited “scope of breathing” —it becomes rather monotonous after repeated hearing—Gravity’s presentation of the sound of breathing is much more expansive, varied, dynamic and subtle. In the Soyuz sequence Stone’s voice is interspersed with sniffing and blowing through the nose. When Shenzhou enters the Earth’s atmosphere, we hear the same gasping as if she was still spinning in space. With or without her helmet, Stone’s body, thanks to the sound of breathing, remains highly “visible” throughout the film. Most interestingly, breathing seems to have bridged a gap between her voice and the sound effects created by her bodily movements. There is a varying degree of semantic thickness, one might say, manifested in these three different body sounds. At its most gentle moment breathing takes the form of an almost imperceptible sigh, followed by a throaty “The silence. I could get used to it.” But its heightened form, the panicked exclamation and hyperventilation mark a high point in the range that borders on obscenity.³⁹ If films that feature breathing sound are far from unheard of, Gravity’s sheer dynamic range of breathing is most likely unprecedented. In addition to Sandra Bullock’s performance, the film’s unabashed foregrounding of her voice plays a decisive role in forming this impression. No wonder Sandra Bullock expresses in an interview, “breathing was our third character.”⁴⁰

Indeed, through the use of body sounds, the film accomplishes a paradoxical move: it conceals and foregrounds the body at once. The effect can be likened to a pair of electrodes that carries invisible chemical reactions in-between. Long before the camera identifies any human being in the image, there is already a peculiar kind of attention devoted to Stone’s body. “Dr. Stone, Medical is concerned about your ECG readings.” Houston asks. “I’m fine, Houston.” “Well, Medical doesn’t agree, Doc. Are you feeling nauseous?” “Not any more than usual, Houston,” Stone Answers. For an attentive listener, these exchanges cue her to notice the different quality of Stone’s voice. Compared to the disembodied female voice from the Explorer, Stone’s voice is constantly interrupted by pauses, as if she runs out of breath; it is accompanied by clearly audible breathing and brief air expulsions from her nose. Breathing becomes an pathway through which the film accentuates, or should I say predicts, because we are only forming hypotheses at this point, her vulnerability—her lack of training in outer space; her traumatic loss in the past.

After a long journey, the camera finally centers on Stone, as if it has been searching for her all along. Moving to Stone entails significant changes in terms of sound. A barely perceptible and irregular beating sound starts to emerge when Houston points out that her heart-rate has risen to 70. As the camera finally approaches her, the soundtrack becomes more and more populated by sounds that only she can hear, that is, sounds supposedly recorded by a contact microphone. These sound effects prove to be another way to bring out the invisible body. The effect becomes quite pronounced when Kowalski turns off his music. Notice this effect is mostly applied for Stone and partly for Kowalski, when he is visually foregrounded. But we never hear any such effect from Shariff, although at one point he is visibly jumping and pulled back by his tether—the soundman is certainly not doing a topographical reading here. Most crucially, although we should be receiving all radio transmissions equally, the fact that we can only hear Stone’s breathing suggests unmistakably an alignment. The effect is not dissimilar to the Susan Alexander Kane’s suicide scene I described earlier.

After the camera has identified Stone’s body, its status is constantly brought to our attention. In response to Kowalski’s inquiry “how do you feel?” she answers, “like a Chihuahua that’s being tumble-dried.” In contrast to mere words (albeit imaginative ones) the foregrounding of her body sounds (voice, breath, and the transducer sfx) supplies a more physical and tangible answer to such inquiries. By supplying sounds that only she can hear inside the spacesuit, the audience is sonically projected, so to speak, inside the spacesuit. Almost involuntarily, the audience is cajoled into a diagnostic procedure that is not unlike what Stone is doing in the diegesis: something needs to be fixed; and it is not only the comm cards.