The Dance of Making: The expanded role of sound in multi-screen film

The modular autonomy of multiscreen presentation expands the dominant single-image single-frame rhetoric of traditional film viewing conventions. Whilst such ‘expanded cinema’ has often focused on eliminating a linear reading of images, synchronised multiscreen presentation retains the dynamic of standard single-screen composition whilst allowing for an expanded narrative path. In such contexts, functional conflicts between screens form a critical mode of engagement in which opposing visual forces, rates of change, content and information density play a central role. The analysis and coexistence of such conflicts, although satisfying in the visual domain, presents very different challenges to the audio domain. Whilst auditory scene analysis can segregate individual streams of sound, multiscreen presentations offer a far more complex set of environments from which vastly different diagetic sound environments might emerge. The sound designer is thus faced with the responsibility of determining a hierarchy between screens, facilitating cognition of parallel channels and balancing information density. This paper discusses the challenges of composing and designing sound for multi-screen film and presents these in the context of “The Dance of Making”, a three-screen film installation by Mary Wycherley and Jürgen Simpson. This work explores the physicality and embodied knowledge of handcrafts and relies heavily upon sound design and musical features to order and draw attention to the human and non-human movements central to the work. The multiple streams of diagetic sound are interleaved with non- diagetic components through a series of unfolding choreographic sequences such that gesture, texture and symbol form a composite and coherent space of reception.