Approaches to Craft: You Are Only As Good As Your Research (so they say….)

Finally, we should look at how a black idiom and the sensibilities it has come to imply are appropriated for the associative value they lend to modernism - hip, sophisticated, ultra-urbane.

Toni Morrison - ‘Playing In The Dark’

The oracle spoke. I wanted to play with the words above, to move in and out of music, sound, and the voice within filmic space, and to reference it with the context of how they can be used in the most subtle (and gregarious) ways as troupes in which to depict the emotional core and sonic environment of a film. Contextually situated within the black (Africanist) idiom, as an ethnomusicologist, I am duty bound to broaden that category to all touched by the hand of imperialism, and/or suffered the fate of self-inflicted civil genocide.

I had also initially determined this series would be concerned with approaches to craft, not process (eye roll...)

Craft is beyond process, in fact, this is a good time to see where craft and process separate. If the above adage holds true, your craft will highlight this - there will be nowhere to hide; emotional and/or ancestral baggage will regurgitate at every instance, embed. Process is what you do; craft is the result of how you do what you do over time. The difference: craft is defined purposefully here as ‘the accumulation of what you have done over many years that has now determined and/or produced a specific, unique signature in an oeuvre’ e.g. Martin Scorsese’s use of diegetic music within a sonic space; Tan Dun’s materiality in compositional form; Ousmane Sembène‘s bold refusal to allow music’s emotionality to compromise the narrative space; the emotional sonic space of Jane Champion; Wong Kar Wai’s positioning of western songs as sonic signifiers etc. This is craft: it is borne out of processes applied to constructing a product.

And process? Well, they are the many accumulated ways of ‘doing’, the many faceted approaches to what we do: what we find, capture, structure, reproduce, imagine, and re-imagine as sound and music; what we attach and reattach to sound and music as constructs.

Initially, (I said). Now? Well, I realise that if research is mentioned the two become inextricably linked in a way that I do not have the word count here to divorce them in this context. So for now, they stay married, and you’re all coming for the ride….

A few pointers regarding research: educational approaches to taught subjects i.e. curriculum modules, literature reviews etc, are aspects deemed essential and foundational that continue to promote and uphold specific points of view enabling cannon formation, history, gender bias, knowledge construction, cultural appropriation and adaption (is there really a need to remake every Japanese film? And so badly??) It would be wise to approach these ecosystems of knowledge production and epistemologies with the following in mind: there is the industry of academia, the industry of education, the commercial industry, and the industry of hustle. They all bare a certain verisimilitude. Industry has become the bedrock of knowledge formation and (re)production. Industry was the production of a product, now the product is industry.

And, there are useful approaches to consider that are essential:

• Theories: how is sound and film music written/engaged with as a historical body of work? From whose perspective? With what agenda? As this generates meaning, how does it set the tone of the scene, and tone of the music concerning environment, and narrative arch? (Arggh, the homonym...) Be very aware of the point of view that delineates epistemologies of the West that lack and/or cannot contain an overall perspective that incorporates and encompasses competing and comparative historiographies. An inherent lineage or outline is needed to depict corresponding chronological and postcolonial timelines: what happened in East Asia and the Eastern Caribbean in the 1960’s are both of equal importance (especially as the Eastern Caribbean had historically inherited a considerable amount of East Asians due to indentured labour).

• Existential aspects and practical concerns: Why do we create? (Cosmology/ phenomenology); how/why, we see/hear, what we see/hear, and, how we learn to do this (enculturation), are incredibly important here: imbibing sound and music as a core of filmic space is predicated on how we are schooled - educationally and culturally - to listen, perceive, and engage with sounds and music, and will denote our uses of such.

• Tripartite aspects of voice, sound design, and music in the (non)diegesis functioning together (I’ve incorporated Foley, ADR, Mastering, location (background) into these three categories). Do you have a working idea of how they function distinctly?

• Methodologies and aesthetics: what does sound mean to, and in, different cultures? What is it used for? The lack of sonic silence in the west - what does this tell us; the properties of sound and how they are archived, collected, stored in the digital sphere, algorithms, and cymatics (as a philosophical construct, and mathematical theme in waveform construction and vibration); the cultural uses of sound and music - what are gendered sounds/taboo sounds, and, depicting sound i.e. what does heat and cold sound like?

Therefore, I ask (as should you): What is my sound? Do I know my sound?

Walk Tall,

The Anomaly – ahwnotes.