School of Sound 2003

KIRSTY MALCOLM has over sixteen years experience in television and films, combining producing with research. She has worked extensively in documentaries and drama, specialising in co-productions. Her credits include the feature film Darkness Covers the Earth (Antenne 2/NDR/RTP); Round IX, coverage of the Documenta art event (Illuminations for Channel 4); The World of Geo (Bertelsmann for BBC/Discovery; for four years she chaired sessions for the European Association of Animation Film (CARTOON). Recently she co-produced The Score, a documentary directed by Michael Grigsby for BBC 2 and the Arts Council of England’s ‘Sound on Film’ series.
Her most recent projects include researching a Channel 4 documentary series on the Vichy regime for Nicolas Kent and Oxford Films. She has been the consultant researcher on a 5-part series, History of the Vietnam Wars, for an MDR/ARTE/ARD/Canal Plus co-production. In 2000-01, she was the Senior Field producer and researcher in Germany for Charles Guggenheim’s GI Holocaust for WNET/PBS.
This is her fifth year overseeing the School of Sound event.

LARRY SIDER is the Director and co-founder of the School of Sound and Head of Post-Production at the National Film and Television School (Beaconsfield). He studied Radio-TV-Film at Northwestern University (Chicago) before coming to London in 1976 to work with Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey on Riddles of the Sphinx, a relationship that continued through many of their features and documentaries. Since then he has worked extensively with Keith Griffiths and Koninck Studios, editing and sound designing with the Brothers Quay (Street of Crocodiles, The Comb, Institute Benjamenta), Patrick Keiller (London, Robinson in Space, Dwelling Spaces) and Simon Pummell (Secret Joy, Rose Red, Blinded by Light). His work crosses between documentary, drama and animation as evidenced in projects that include The Brother With Perfect Timing, about the jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim (Chris Austin); the prize-winning animated short Death and The Mother (Ruth Lingford) and My Mama Done Told Me, a documentary about romance and torch songs (Elizabeth Taylor-Mead).
In 2002, he was appointed to his post at the National Film and Television School with the brief to more closely integrate editing, composition and sound in a single, post-production department. In addition to the NFTS, Sider lectures at the Royal College of Art, the Surrey Institute of Art and Design and the London Institute in addition to giving seminars on sound and post-production to industry professionals, here and abroad. He has contributed to the periodicals PIX, Framework, Vertigo and Filmwaves. Currently he is taking part in LISTEN, an EU-funded research project on audio-augmented environments.

SUSANNE ABBUEHL
Swiss/Dutch singer and composer, Susanne Abbuehl was born in Berne in 1970. Drawn to music and language early on, composing songs and writing words in her own language, she started studying the harpsichord at age seven. At age seventeen, she moved to Los Angeles where her main interest shifted from instrumental to vocal music and from classical to jazz. Back in Europe, she studied jazz and classical voice and earned a Masters Degree at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague.
Abbuehl also studied North Indian classical vocal music with Dr. Indurama Srivastava in Amsterdam and later became a student of famed master singer Dr. Prabha Atre in Bombay, to whom she regularly returns. She is currently studying composition with Diderik Wagenaar.
Her international debut recording April, for ECM Records, was produced by Manfred Eicher and released in 2001. It featured musical settings of the poetry of E. E. Cummings and renderings of compositions by Carla Bley. April received worldwide critical acclaim and won an Edison Music Award in Holland. With her group, Susanne has performed at numerous festivals in Europe and in Canada. As the only non-American singer, she was chosen by the Downbeat Critics Poll 2002 in the category ‘Best Female Vocalist Talent Deserving Wider Recognition’.
She has been commissioned to write for various instrumentations, including work for radio theatre and sound environments for installations. She has worked as a singer and composer in radio productions of Deutschlandfunk, Swiss Radio DRS, Südwestrundfunk and Radio Netherlands International. Her concerts have been recorded and broadcast by Radio France, RAI Italy, NRK Norway, Dutch NPS and Swiss Radio DRS and RSR. She is on the faculties of the Musikhochschule Basle and Lucerne and has taught masterclasses in France, Switzerland, Italy and Holland.
For her new recording for ECM, she composed music for English translations of Japanese poetry. She also includes music from film and spoken fragments.
In her music, she is looking for a non-performing, ‘private’ quality.

GUSTAVO COSTANTINI began his career as a musician (synthesizers, keyboards) and was graduated in Arts by the University of Buenos Aires. He began his academic work studying music semantics with the award-winning composer and Professor Francisco Kröpfl as advisor. This led to research into film music and film sound and their relation to the cinematic image which, in turn, has evolved into his current studies. He is now a Ph.D candidate for the UBA, under the co-direction of the prestigious and award-winning French composer and theorist, Michel Chion, author of Audiovision and more than 30 books in the field. The project discusses Chion’s theories and other approaches of film scholars in combination with Costantini’s own ideas and analyses, in order to extend Chion’s work.
He participated in the Academic Committee that created the Sound Design Programme in ORT University at Montevideo, Uruguay. He is professor of Sound Design and Montage at the University of Buenos Aires, in which he also is the Director of a research project on Sound Design Rhetorics and Production of Meaning. Under two international fellowships he has conducted research into Toronto-based filmmakers’ aesthetics (David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan) and the transition between silent and sound cinema and how sound affected film representations.
He has published many essays and articles on sound design and cinema in Argentina, England, Mexico and Brazil. Some of his work can be found at www.filmsound.org and more recently in the British film magazine Filmwaves (articles on David Lynch, The Exorcist and Stephen Spielberg). As a musician and sound designer he has created the scores for short films, documentaries and features films in Argentina, and also the music and sound design for stage productions.

DOGME SOUND TEAM
Sound engineer MORTEN HOLM has been the sound recordist and editor on Celebration (Festen). His latest production is Song for a Raggy Boy.

SØREN BJERREGAARD-RYAN was the post-sound consultant on Festen. His latest production is Fear X for which he is the editor and rerecording mixer.

RUNE PALVING has been the sound recordist and editor on Italian for Beginners, Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself and Truly Human.

NIGEL HELYER
Nigel Helyer (a.k.a. Dr Sonique) is a Sydney based Sculptor and Sound Artist with an international reputation for his large scale sonic installations, environmental sculpture works and new media projects.
He has recently developed a ‘Virtual Audio Reality’ system in collaboration with Lake Technology and is engaged in ongoing research projects in Architectural Acoustics at the University of Sydney; Virtual and Environmental Audio at the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales. He is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the ‘Symbiotica’ bio-technology lab at the University of Western Australia.
Nigel is a co-founder and commissioner of the ‘SoundCulture’ organisation; a VACB fellow of the Australia Council and the winner of the Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award 2003. http://sonicobjects.com http://magnus-opus.com

ISAAC JULIEN was the first in a new wave of black British independent film makers. He originally studied painting at St Martin’s School of Art in London and, in 1980, he had a painting accepted by the Royal Academy Summer Show. He was a founding member of the Black Workshop, Sankofa, the pioneering black film and video collective, which led to his first television collaboration with Channel 4, the award-winning drama-documentary, Looking For Langston (1989), inspired by the enigmatic sexuality of the US poet Langston Hughes.) Julien’s first feature film, Young Soul Rebels (1991), received the Critics’ Prize at the 1991 Cannes Festival. In 1993, with friends Jimmy Somerville, film-maker Steve McLean and writer/producer Mark Nash, he set up Normal films, a production company specialising in queer documentaries and films. Their productions include The Attendant (1993), A Darker Side of Black (1994), and Postcards From America (1995).
His films and videos have been shown at the Tate Gallery, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and at the MIT List Visual Art Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts. A solo exhibition of his work travelled to the United States, Australia, Sweden and Finland and he was recently commissioned by the Bohen Foundation for Documenta11. His work has been included in numerous festivals around the world including those in Berlin, Cannes, and Utah (Sundance). His new film on black action films from the 70’s, Badasssss Cinema, was screened at the London International Film Festival 2002 and was recently broadcast by the Independent Film Channel. His more recent work, such as Long Road to Mazattan and Vagabondia – for which he was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2001, has moved from the cinema into the gallery.
Julien was recently appointed as a Research Fellow at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His awards include the Pratt and Whitney Canada Grand Prize, the 15th International Festival of Films on Art Award and The Eugene McDermott Award for Visual Arts. In 2002 he received Frameline’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

REN KLYCE’s work is the epitome of modern sound design. His credits include Panic Room (nominated for a Golden Reel Award), Fight Club (Oscar and Golden Reel nominee) and Se7en – all with David Fincher with whom he has worked since he was fifteen – and Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich. He is also a composer and musician.
A review of Panic Room captures Klyce’s approach:
“ ‘The film takes place inside a house, all in one evening,’ Klyce says, ‘and when you read the script or watch a rough cut of it without anything added in, it seems like, “Oh this will be pretty easy to do. All you need is some rain and some hard effects here, and the panic room door, a gun – easy.” But it turned out to be very complicated and very difficult; in fact, it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever worked on. I think that part of the challenge in keeping being stuck inside of a house for two hours interesting is that you really have to reach for the subtle little nuances to keep your ear engaged. It’s tough.’ Klyce says that Fincher was looking for a sound design that was ‘very detailed, very elaborate, very subtle, very real; not overstated. All is present but not necessarily demanding attention. So it’s very difficult work because it’s not at all showy.’
Klyce, Fincher, and cinematographer Conrad Hall Jr. worked hard on giving each room of the house its own look and sonic personality — another way of making a potentially claustrophobic film more interesting … For the Panic Room itself, which is isolated by thick walls and filled with surveillance monitors, Klyce combined more than two dozen different noises just to create an overall ambience. ‘It’s got this low rumbling sound, these oscillating sounds,’ he says. ‘I used samples of choir pieces that we slowed down to create this sort of groan. We’ve got television buzzes. Fincher wanted to have this feeling that when you’re closer to the television monitors and the VCRs, you’re hearing the whirring. You hear the buzzing of the fluorescent light, a whole lot of different subtle things.’
In the end it came out just fine – big but not hyperbolic. Actually there’s a surprising restraint evident in the sound design of the film; Klyce and Fincher know that a silence can be as frightening as a loud crash – though there are plenty of those as well. This movie is about dread as much as cold fear, and Panic Room succeeds beautifully in capturing both.” – Blair Jackson © 2003, PRIMEDIA Business Magazines & Media Inc.

JERZY KUCIA is a graphic artist, painter, scriptwriter, production designer, animator and producer of animated films. From 1961-1967, he studied painting, graphics and animated film at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. Since 1980, Kucia has been the Head of the Animated Film Studio at the Academy where he now teaches. He has been a member of the ASIFA Board, holding the position of Vice-President from 1994-1997. Since 1996, he has run the annual international Kraków Animated Film Workshops for young artists. He lectures extensively around the world.
Kucia’s first film was Powrót (The Return) in 1972. Since then, each of his animated productions has collected numerous international film awards. Films such as Krag (The Circle), Refleksy (Reflections), Odpryski (Splinters), Parada (The Parade) and Przez Pole (Across the Field) have received prizes from all the major animation and short film festivals. His most recent film from 2000, Strojenie Instrumentów (Tuning Instruments) received first prizes or special awards in Kraków, the Ukraine, Ottawa, Siena, Espinho, Stuttgart, Zagreb and London.
Of his work, Kucia says:
“In each film I use different techniques, chosen to suit the idea of a particular film. I seek the simplest possible solutions and regard technique as a secondary element, something unimportant in itself. I ‘speak’ with situations, rather than drawings or technique. By hiding technique I bring out situations, emotions, meanings. Emphasising techniques would chase away the mood and break the flow of the film.
Visual form, soundtrack and the story should blend and work in such a way so that they are inseparable. That to me is the ideal of the animated film. An art in its own right.
I define my concept of music and the other elements of a film in the script and storyboard, but the soundtrack is usually created after filming. Music and sound are as important in my films as the visual side or the story. I realise that the ‘signals’ that I transmit by means of the screen are not received the same way by everyone. So, when I am making a film, I try to take into account the many possible audiences, their idiosyncrasies and the ways in which they may look at art.”

RICHARD LEACOCK and VALERIE LALONDE
“The first film that I shot with synchronous sound was in 1941, a folk music festival atop a mountain in southern Virginia where there was no electricity; filming on 35 mm and recording on 35 mm optical; powered by a station wagon full of car batteries feeding an electric motor, coupled to an AC dynamo via a resister and a frequency meter so that we could hold it at the right frequency!!! Each and every shot. Filming Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story in 1947 we recorded on 14 inch glass disks coated with acetate. Then to Lenny Bernstein in Israel conducting a symphony orchestra recorded on 16 mm. single system with optical sound 1957 and to Van Cliburn on 16 mm film and a Synch Nagra in 1965 and on to an all women’s Mambo band in Cuba recorded on Video-8 in 1996 and finally the Yeketerinberg Symphony orchestra videoed and recorded with mini-digital… which is where it is at! Valerie Lalonde and I will bring these and other examples of sound recorded as we think it should be. Including excerpts from films we made or worked on such as Monterey Pop, A Stravinsky Portrait, Company, Bernstein in Moscow, Les Oeufs a la Coque… etc.
I once said ‘…if I were to film a long shot of Mt. Everest, I would do it with synch sound’ and yes, I would.”

SKIP LIEVSAY
Eschewing the title ‘Sound Designer’ in favour of ‘Supervising Sound Editor’, Lievsay has created the soundtracks for many of the most successful and influential American films of the last two decades. His credits are testimony to the role of close collaboration with directors and composers in the crafting of effective soundtracks integrated with the images rather than mere post-production exercises.
His breadth of style can be seen in the wide variety of genres and directors he has worked with: Fargo, Barton Fink and all the Coen Brothers films (working with composer Carter Burwell); Goodfellas, Casino and The Age of Innocence for Martin Scorsese; Mo’ Better Blues, Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever for Spike Lee; Men In Black (Barry Sonnenfeld), Y Tu Mamá También (Alfonso Cuarón), Prèt-È-Porter (Robert Altman) and Matewan (John Sayles)
Philip Brophy, organiser of the Cinesonic conference, wrote: “For over 15 years, Skip Lievsay’s sound post-production company C5 has been based in New York. This in itself may not appear significant – until one notices that Skip Lievsay has sound designed, 6 films for Martin Scorsese, 7 films for Spike Lee and 8 films for the Coens, as well as having worked on a number of films with John Sayles, Errol Morris, Barry Levinson, Jonathan Demme and Robert Altman. With a CV boasting work completed more for directors than producers or studios, Skip’s experiences and views on sound post-production provide a rare insight to the audiovisual matrix of contemporary American ‘auteur’ filmmaking. It is particularly in his work with Scorsese, Lee and the Coens that Skip has had the opportunity to develop a dialogue with directors whose authorial traits are well-noted.
In the realm of sound-design, it has been acknowledged time and time again how important it is to have a type of ‘dialogue’ with the director of a film. Like film composers, sound designers relish being brought in on a job early – even at script stage – rather than receiving a phone call 3 weeks from final mix. And numerous sound designers have noted how that it is only through having more time to discuss their ideas with a director do they then contribute interesting, integral and vital work for a film. Skip Lievsay’s work is proof of this. From his supply of intricate shapes, gestures, movements and moments of multi-leveled sound editing and mixing in Scorsese’s Goodfellas, to his carefully modulated sonic nuances in Demme’s Silence of the Lambs, to the gorgeous detail and ambience in the Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Skip Lievsay stands as a major figure in that strange beast labelled ‘Hollywood cinema’.”

WALTER MURCH was born in Manhattan in 1943. Having studied art history in the United States, Perugia and Paris, he received a Master’s degree from the Department of Cinema, University of Southern California. In 1969, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, joining Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas in forming TransAmerica Sprocket Works which later became American Zoetrope. Their first production was The Rain People.
In 1971, Murch co-wrote, sound-edited and mixed THX-1138 with Lucas. He went on to supervise sound editing on The Godfather, sound edit and mix American Graffiti and picture edit, sound edit and mix Apocalypse Now for which he received an Oscar for Best Sound. He was also the film editor of Zinnemann’s Julia, Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Minghella’s The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley. In 1998 he re-edited and remixed Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, guided by a long memo written by Welles after he had been fired from the film. Murch also wrote and directed Return to Oz (1985). He is currently editing and mixing Minghella’s adaptation of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain.
In a recent interview, Murch spoke of his interests outside film-making. “My other passions are translating Italian poetry, and astronomy. Translation is transformative; and astronomy is the discovery of an underlying order in apparent chaos. Both good descriptions of the editorial process.”

FRANCOIS MUSY is best known for his work with Jean-Luc Godard. Starting with Passion in 1983, he has produced most of Godard’s soundtracks including Hail Mary (1983), Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988), Forever Mozart (1996), Eloge de L’Amour (2001), Helas Pour Moi (1993) and the masterful Nouvelle Vague (1990), which has been released on CD by ECM. Trained as a graphic artist and sound engineer, Musy is an avid practitioner of ‘direct sound’, the traditional method of sound recording in France but practiced increasingly infrequently in other parts of Europe and the US due to the evolution of digital sound post-production. His collaboration with Godard is marked by their shared philosophy of continually investigating the possibilities of technology to discover new ways of using sound with image. His technique interweaves Godard’s intellectualism, location sound aesthetic, eclectic combinations of music and a elegant sense of mood and space.

PIERS PLOWRIGHT was born in London in 1937 and spent a lot of his childhood listening to the radio and going to the near-by Everyman Cinema, where he saw the classics of European, American and Asian cinema. After a time teaching in Borneo, Iran, and the Sudan, he joined the BBC in 1968, working first for the overseas service and then moving to the Radio Drama Department where he discovered the power of the radio documentary and feature. Since 1977 he has been making radio programmes about real people and events but which often make use of the techniques and structure of drama. He has also been much influenced by film and its use of sound.
Piers has won two Italia Prizes and a RAI prize for his radio documentaries and, most recently, a Gold Award for documentaries in the 1997 Sony Awards and ditto in 1998 for ‘Services to Radio’.

MARK RANCE is a documentary filmmaker (Mom, Death and the Singing Telegram) whose films have appeared at the Berlin Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, the Flaherty Seminar, the LUX and many other festivals and screening series. A student of Richard Leacock at MIT, Rance’s work in cinema verite has been praised for its intimacy and beauty. For the last ten years, Rance has created ‘special edition’ laserdiscs and DVDs, first for the Criterion Collection and later, under his own company, Three Legged Cat, for the major Hollywood studios, the BFI and others. One of the first DVD producers, Rance’s work has pioneered the uses of the format. Many of his special editions have set the standard for DVD. His work for DVD includes That Moment, a feature-length cinema verite portrait of director Paul Thomas Anderson during the making of Magnolia. More recent projects have created the best-selling DVDs of Cast Away, Seven, and Insomnia. All his titles include documentaries that explore the filmmaking process and the themes of the films. His 10^th Anniversary edition of Reservoir Dogs has been listed as a must-have DVD. It features several hours of documentary exploring the history of noir and Tarantino’s emergence from that tradition with a new kind of dialogue for crime. Rance lives in Los Angeles.

PAUL ROBERTSON has been leader of the world renowned Medici String Quartet for nearly 30 years. He combines an international concert career with his passion for exploring the basis of musical response through scientific research. His particular interest in the neurology of musicality led to the making of his recent highly successful TV series for Channel Four (U.K.), Music and the Mind.
Robertson believes that there is a deep significance in the patterning of sound, which we call ‘music’. Such patterns reflect the profound relevance of neurological and physiological structures to education, management, and medicine. All three of these strands are increasingly reflected in his work.
In the field of education Robertson has addressed The Learning Society Exchange at the Royal Society of Arts; the Northern Ireland Curriculum Council on Arts in Education ands the SEAL Conference on The Sound of Learning in Budapest. He has also given workshops and lectures in Finland, Sweden and Switzerland. He is currently Visiting Professor of Music (in relation with neurology) to the Department of Education at Kingston University, and Bournemouth University (U.K.).
He presents compelling seminars on Management as an Art Form. These are designed to share the powerful experience of direct musical inspiration, which offer valuable personal insights into the processes of organisational structure, development and change. In February 2000 he gave a presentation to the World Economic Forum in Davos. In January 2001 he repeated this with the Medici Quartet, sponsored by Lloyds Bank.

The growing awareness of the role that music plays in the healing process led to an invitation from the Academic Medical Centre of Amsterdam for Robertson to take part in the annual Anatomy Lesson lectures at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam followed by a performance with the Medici String Quartet. He also gives a regular series of lectures and concerts with the Medici String Quartet at the University Hospital of Geneva and in 1998 they presented a six-part series of lectures, concerts and workshops at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. http://www.esws.co.uk/Robertson

CHRIS WATSON is a sound recordist with a particular and passionate interest in recording the wildlife sounds of animals, habitats and atmospheres from around the world. As a freelance recordist for film, TV and radio, Chris specialises in natural history and documentary location sound together with track assembly and sound design in post production. His work for television includes BBC TV’s The Life of Mammals and The Life of Birds (BAFTA Award for Best Factual Sound). For radio he has made A Small Slice of Tranquillity (BBC Radio 4) and A Swallow’s Journey (BBC Radio 4, Sony Radio Award nominee 2002). Watson also records and produces CDs for Touch (Outside the Circle of Fire, Stepping Into the Dark). His Stepping Into the Dark won the Award of Distinction, 2000 Prix ARS Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria.

LAURA WRIGHT is University Lecturer in English Language at the University of Cambridge. She works on the history of the London dialect, and broadcasts weekly on the subject on BBC London 94.9FM. She works within the filed of historical sociolinguistics, which is concerned with how social attributes, such as class, age and gender, are encoded in the voice. Central to her work on London English is the history of early extraterritorial Englishes, as Londoners – who were mostly very poor – took their language with them when they relocated or were transported to the plantations. She has published on the origins of American English, and is currently researching early St. Helena English. Recent books include Sources of London English: Medieval Thames Vocabulary (1996), and The Development of Standard English, 1300-1800: Theories, Descriptions, Conflicts (ed., 2000); and she is author of over 30 articles on the history of London English; the development of Standard English; and the medieval business practice of codeswitching between Middle English, Anglo-Norman and Medieval Latin.