Soundscape Analysis

Soundscape

In As Media, We have been learning about soundscape and the effects that sounds have in a movie. In this task I was asked to watch and listen to a film's title sequence as explain the effect the sound has upon the story of the film.

In ‘G.I. Joe: Rise Of Cobra’, a song is played in the beginning, where the institution is shown; the song then bridges on to the main title sequence that shows ‘spyglass entertainment present’. The song is a ‘Score’ as it is not a soundtrack that everyone knows, it is especially composed for this film. From listening to the sequence in which the title is displayed, we may guess that this film may not be one that has a really dark or uncomfortable story throughout the film, like a ‘Horror’ film. From the title song we might be able to tell that it might be an action or superhero film due to loud and upbeat banging noises that happens twice in the sequence, it really drowns out the composed music that is playing, the instrument used, sounds like those that you would expect to hear in a ‘Superhero’ genre film, the sounds that we may hear might give off the impressions that maybe there are some link to heroes. As the song is quite sad and mysterious it may be associated to ‘evil’ and the loud beats within the song has some association and denotation of ‘good’, this may help set the binary opposition for this film being ‘good versus evil’. This film does not have a long title sequence and goes straight into the action of the film. In the beginning, we hear horses galloping, metal clanging and people speaking English and another language (If you know your languages then you may be able to identify that they are speaking French) this makes it seem that the film may not be within an English country and may be set in period of time that was far before the modern era as the horses were used for transport in the past and as we can hear the horses instead of cars then we could suggest that it may be set in the past. Later on after the first scene we start to hear more modern and futuristic music, we connote 21^st century and beyond. This challenges the sounds we hear in the first scene as one had all the ambient sounds in the past whereas another have all the ambient sound we would usually hear in this time we live in. This may create enigma codes as the sudden change in setting due to the sound and language we hear in the second scene may cause question to arise, such as, what does the two period of time have in connection with one another?

Overall the film’s sounds does well to create enigma codes and help give us the provisional location that parts of the film may be based in and what kind of genre could be. This film is not straight forward to determine the time period and genre from just the sounds we hear, unlike a film like ‘Tron Legacy’ which has a sci-fi tone to it, using sounds that we would usually associate and stereotype to ‘the future’ and the fact we can only hear this type of music helps give off a clear indication that the film will be of a ‘Sci-fi’ genre and due to the accents of the voices in the background, then it may be set in America.