Foley sound effects – those sounds that are created in post-production through live performance and then added to the sound mix of films, television, video games and animation – are ubiquitous. But effective Foley should not be heard. It is one of those creative labours in the making of a film that, to be considered successful, must erase itself. While film studies has begun to redress theory and practice’s bias towards the visual, film sound studies has yet to sufficiently acknowledge this hidden body in the sound process and fully reckon with the individual contribution made by the Foley artist to cinematic expression and cinema’s capacity to represent the world in motion and the exertion of bodies on-screen. To the extent we consider sound cinematic, what does the Foley artist contribute when they supplement images of a rock, a chair, a phone with sound or pay attention to the way paper brushes wood, metal rattles against metal, sand pushes back against a finger? This introduction establishes how refocusing attention to Foley sound extends our understanding of cinema as a medium, as well as addressing the current cultural and scholarly ‘visibility’ of Foley sound. It outlines the way the issue seeks to open up new theoretical perspectives on Foley sound and explore its interdisciplinary potential for theories of the soundtrack and film theory more broadly.
Holding and moving objects to create a sound effect requires a performer to navigate by feel, directing their listening from the solid (dried peas on a drumhead) to the imaginary (sea waves). The illusory properties of sound have long been exploited by sound effects performers for the purposes of Foley, silent cinema and theatre. While sound may provoke the imagination or emotional response of the audience, it also does its affective work on the performer operating the effect. In the moment of practice itself, sound binds to the object being manipulated, blurring the known boundaries of its physical properties. The Foley artist crosses a threshold between the tactility of the material and the dissolved representations of the intangible, as the sound itself feels like it is the material being manipulated. Simple hand actions become a gateway to the imaginary. This article considers the affective experience of creative bodily guided soundmaking, and how the successful operation of a sound effect requires the performer to deliberately navigate between modes of listening, attuning their movements and engaging with a perceptual space where things, while making sound, are no longer what they seem to be. Focusing on sound effects beyond the screen allows for an exploration of the aesthetic, dramatic and syncretic in real-world experiences of sound and movement.
Closed captions are a vital tool of sonic access for D/deaf and hard of hearing audio-viewers, detailing dialogue alongside notable sound effects and music. As evidenced by the recent virality of the captions in the Netflix series Stranger Things, captions are increasingly playing a key role in the sonic experience for many audio-viewers. From captions such as [tentacles undulating moistly] to [wet footsteps squelch], captions shape and articulate sounds, working both alone and alongside other sonic elements. Yet, while captions crucially anchor sonic meaning for a growing audience, captions are still a critically understudied dimension of film and media sound. Drawing upon the visceral captions and squelching sound effects of the fourth season of Stranger Things, this article details the parallels between closed captions and the custom synchronized sound effects of Foley. Captions crucially emphasize the narrative and characterizing effects of Foley sounds, from an oozing moist [squelch] that turns the stomach to the vivid snap of [bones cracking]. In turn, Foley sound offers a vital new framework from which to understand the sonicity of captions. As an artistic practice of reconfiguration and substitutions, Michel Chion’s seminal distinction between real and rendered sounds underpins theorizations of Foley, where a broken celery vividly renders the emotive impact of bones breaking. This article contends that captions can similarly be understood as rendering sound, a move that ultimately folds captions such as [wet writhing], [creatures chittering] and [flesh tearing] into larger sound theories, highlighting the sonic significance and generative possibilities of access tools.
In 2006, Canadian director Guy Maddin premiered a semi-autobiographical film at TIFF called Brand Upon the Brain!, which featured live Foley sound and orchestral accompaniment. Adopting the aesthetics of silent film, Maddin presents a warped version of his childhood traumas, filtered through the funhouse mirror of Sigmund Freud, Fritz Lang and the Brothers Grimm. Further emphasizing the discordances of recollection and actual event, Maddin’s theatrical presentation divorces sound from screen, reimagining the film’s soundscape (and by extension, that of his childhood) as an exaggerated live reproduction, mirroring the very process of replaying a memory. Two years after this film premiered, Maddin made a faux-documentary about the original Foley process called Footsteps (2008), which centres upon the sound artists themselves. Employing the same aesthetic conventions, this short film depicts the craft of Foley as a surreal science of the subconscious, an act of symbolic projection carried out by strange figures in lab coats. If watching and listening to these films is to be momentarily trapped inside ‘the fevered brain of Guy Maddin’, as one critic puts it, then this article sets out to interrogate the role of the sound artist in enabling and enacting such fantasies within the director’s singular psychodramas. Maddin’s foregrounding of the Foley artist is, I argue, analogous to the exhumation and display of unconscious material.
In this article, sound artist Julie Rose Bower examines the relationship between the Foley ‘cloth pass’ and the ‘fabric sounds’ autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) trigger. Starting with Serres’s sensory appraisal that ‘the world is a mass of laundry’ the tactile qualities of cloth are proposed as a key component in accounting for the ‘felt rather than heard’ status of Foley sound. Writing from a practitioner perspective, Bower argues for textile manipulation as a form of embodied sound design and cloth sounds as a curiously generative media object. Through theorizing developments in the scope of attention within screen cultures, Bower develops a speculative ontology of soft glitch and conceptualizes a politics of folded listening. Alongside accounts of sound practice from industry Foley artists Vanessa Theme Ament (Die Hard, Edward Scissorhands), Joanna Fang (Sony PlayStation) and from her own ASMR work using costume and textiles (ASMR at the Museum for the Victoria and Albert Museum [V&A]), Bower argues for cloth sounds as transcendent cyberfeminist technique.
