School of Sound 2007

LARRY SIDER is the Director and co-founder of the School of Sound. He studied Radio-TV-Film at Northwestern University (Chicago) before coming to London in 1976 to work with filmmakers Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey, 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, Institute Benjamenta, The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes), 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).
From 2002-2006, Sider was Head of Post-Production at the National Film and Television School (UK) where he continues as a visiting tutor. He has taught at various film schools including the Royal College of Art, IFS (Köln), European Film College, CalArts, Surrey Institute of Art and Design, Maurits Binger Institute and Bournemouth Media School in addition to giving seminars on sound and post-production to industry professionals, in the UK and abroad. He has contributed to the periodicals PIX, Framework, Vertigo and Filmwaves. From 2000-2003, he took part in LISTEN, an EU-funded research project on audio-augmented environments. He is Co-editor of Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures 1998-2000 and Associate Editor of The Soundtrack journal.

DIANE FREEMAN is producer of the School of Sound. She is also a writer and qualified trainer, an Associate Member of the Institute of Personnel and Development, and provides training in business skills for freelancers in film and television, as well as disability equality training for major organisations including the BBC.Diane was formerly a production manager and independent producer, working latterly on arts documentaries with Keith Griffiths and director Chris Petit.She was also Deputy Chief Executive of PACT, the trade association representing independent film and television production companies in the UK, and has been on various government committees dealing with training and diversity in the media.She serves on a voluntary basis as an Associate of the Broadcasters and Creative Industries Disability Network, working to improve the representation of disabled people in film and television, and increase their numbers working in the industry. She is Co-editor of Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures 1998-2000.

RAY BECKETT has worked in production sound for over 20 years, gaining credits across a wide variety of features, TV dramas, music and TV documentaries. His feature credits include work on Ken Loach’s last eight films, amongst them Raining Stones, Land and Freedom, My Name is Joe and more recently Sweet Sixteen. His collaboration with James Ivory on several films culminated in a BAFTA nomination for A Room With a View in 1985. His television drama credits include Stephen Poliakov’s The Tribe and a 6-part serial, Born to Run.

FRANK BEHNKE was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1955. He attended music school from 1965­–1970 after which he played saxophone in a free jazz band. From 1972–1981, he trained and worked as a nurse in Detmold, West Germany meanwhile playing guitar in rockbands. During this time he founded the ‘Anti-Art-Movement’, KULTURWACHE, wrote for a small newspaper, worked as a janitor and paperboy and realized his first videofilms.
Behnke attended the Berlin Film and Television Academy (DFFB) in Berlin from 1983–89. In this period he worked as a sound apprentice with Alan Splet on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet , and made several of his own films, winning a prize for The Neighbour at the European Filmfestival.He played the bass in the Berlin punkrock band, Camping Sex (1 LP), and from 1986–2002he played guitar in Mutter (7 CD’s). In the 90‘s he worked with the Sputnik Cinema Group and specialized in location sound recording (The Philosopher by Rudolf Thome, Run Lola Run by Tom Tykwer), picture editing (Nick Cave – The Road to Go Knows Where by Uli Schüppel, Pathfinder by Georg Maas) and sound design (England by Achim von Borries).
Since 1996 Behnke has taught at filmschools on film sound, editing, film music and sound design (Zurich, Münster, Bozen, Berlin and Munich). He is the author of ‘The glass-sound’ (Der Kameramann, 2004).
He lives in Berlin and part-time (with daughter Nora) in San Francisco.

MICHÈLE BOKANOWSKI was born into a family of musicians and studied composition with Michel Puig and electronic music with Eliane Radigue. She also spent two years (1970-1972) at the Service de la Recherche de l’ORTF under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer. Between 1972 and 1984, she composed mainly concert works Korè, Trois chambres d’inquiétude, Tabou, as well as the music for the films of Patrick Bokanowski. In 1985, she also started composing for theatre (for the stage director Catherine Dasté) and for dance (collaborating with choreographers Hideyuki Yano, Marceline Lartigue et Bernardo Montet). Since the early 1990s, she has worked on several sound environments: Arbre Musical for the Gutenberg library in Paris, made in collaboration with Christian Daninos and architect Franck Hammoutène (1990) and Angel’s Feathers Whisper, in the Nucourt caves, commissioned by Aki Kuroda (1992).
About her work for Patrick Bokanowski’s l’Ange, Michel Chion wrote, “The music by Michèle Bokanowski escapes all the usual rhetorics of film music and represents one of the most astonishing adventures in conjugating sound and picture.” (usa.re-voir.com)

MICHEL CHION was born in Créil, France, in 1947. He is a composer of music concrete, a writer, and a visiting lecturer at the University of Paris III and various international colleges.He has also directed short films and videos.Chion has developed the study of sound, particularly the sound of cinema, in several books of which two, Audio-Vision, Sound on Screen and The Voice in Cinema were published in English by Colombia University Press (translated by Claudia Gorbman). He has also written numerous essays on film directors, and films as well as music.The BFI published his monograph David Lynch and two essays on Kubrick, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey and Eyes Wide Shut. His most recent works are The Thin Red Line, about Terrence Malick and The Films of Jacques Tati. Married, he lives in Paris. His important essay, Un art sonore, le cinema, which came out in France in 2003, will be published by Columbia University Press in 2007, in English translation.

STEVEN CONNOR is Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birbeck College, London and Academic Director of the London Consortium, a Graduate Programme in Humanities and Cultural Studies taught in collaboration between Birkbeck, Tate, the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Architectural Association. He is the author of books on Dickens, Beckett, Joyce and post-war British fiction, as well as of Postmodernist Culture, Theory and Cultural Value, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism, The Book of Skin and Fly. He is currently writing a book about the historical poetics of the air. He is a regular broadcaster for the BBC, for whom he has scripted and presented sound-essays such as Noise (1997), Rough Magic (2000), An Airmail From the Monster (2001), Smog (2002) and On The Air (2004). He has many interests in 19th and 20th century literature as well as in cultural theory and history. Specific areas of interest include magic; medicine; the cultural life of objects and the material imagination; relations between culture and science; the philosophy of animals; and the history of the senses. www.stevenconnor.com

 GUSTAVO COSTANTINI began his career as a musician (synthesizers, keyboards) and graduated in Arts from the University of Buenos Aires. He began his academic work studying music semantics with the award-winning composer 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 French composer and theorist, Michel Chion. The project discusses Chion’s theories and other approaches by film scholars in combination with Costantini’s own ideas and analyses.
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 Film Editing at the University of Buenos Aires, in which he also was Director of research projects. Under two international fellowships he has conducted research into the aesthetics of two Toronto-based filmmakers’ – 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, Germany and Brazil. Some of his work can be found at www.filmsound.org and more recently in the British film magazine Filmwaves (articles on directors such as David Lynch, Spielberg, Egoyan, William Friedkin, and also theoretical and technical articles about sound and editing). 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.
His most recent publication is an essay about the soundtrack in Argentinean Cinema for the Spanish Cuadernos Hispanoramericanos, and an article about the Sound and Music in Brothers Quay films. His most recent work is about the Sound Mix and Sound Editing of Le Printemps de Notre Temps, a documentary by Julian Creuzet made for Canal +, France, 2006.

STEPHEN DEUTSCH has had his concert music performed by eminent artists, including the Medici Quartet, David Campbell, The Gaudier Ensemble, Andrew Ball, The London Mozart Players and many others. He has composed over thirty scores for film, theatre, radio & television. His many collaborations with the playwright Peter Barnes include the Olivier Award-winning play, Red Noses (1985) and the feature film Hard Times (1994). He is Professor of Post Production at Bournemouth University. In 1992 he founded the University’s MA in Music Design for the Moving Image and in October 1997 he started the MA in Sound Design for the Moving Image and in 2005 added Editing to create a Post-Production course. From 2002-2006, he led the Composing for Film and Television MA course at the National Film and Television School (UK). He is the Editor of The Soundtrack Journal published by Intellect Books.

PAZ ENCINA was born in Asunción, Paraguay in 1971. She graduated from the Paraguayan University of Cinema in 2001 with a Master in Cinematography and then went on to teach audiovisual expression and directing at the Catholic University of Asunción and the Paraguayan Institute of the Arts and Sciences of Communication.
Paz Encina began writing and directing short films while she was still at University. Hamaca Paraguaya is her first full length feature which she developed from a previous short by the same title. It was selected for the 2006 Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section and won the FIPRESCI award.
Hamaca Paraguaya is the first feature shot on 35mm in Paraguay since the 1970s. Structured as a requiem for the country and its people, it unfolds in 1935, in the remote countryside, where an elderly peasant couple awaits the return of their soldier son. The sense of loneliness and time passing are palpable. One critic described the film’s highly formal approach as “Chekhov adapted by Beckett and filmed by Tarkovsky.” Encina says,
“When I wrote Hamaca Paraguaya, it was like writing a score. I only thought about the time, about the rhythm of the words, and about how two persons, with words, could sing a funeral response…Ever since I conceived the temporal aesthetics of Hamaca Paraguaya, I decided that each image would last as long as it was necessary to fully express itself, and not as long as others needed to look at it. In each shot, small actions last as long as they need to last; the beginning and end of a breath, a fan that takes its time to refresh the air, the chirping of a cicada, an orange peeled and eaten at just the right moment. My main interest is that each images captures not only the beauty of things, but also the precise moments evoked by a perfect detail emanating from each action that lasts until it is truly seen.”

HEINER GOEBBELS, born August 17, 1952 in Neustadt/Weinstrasse, has livedin Frankfurt/Main since 1972. He studied sociology and music.
While making several record productions and concerts with the Sogenanntes Linksradikales Blasorchester (76-81), the Goebbels/Harth-Duo (76-88) and the art-rock-trio Cassiber (82-92), he also wrote music for theatre, film and ballet. In the middle of the 80s he began composing and directing audio plays of his own, most of them based on texts by Heiner Mueller.
Since 1988 Heiner Goebbels has composed chamber music for the Ensemble Modern and the Ensemble Intercontemporain. In 1994 followed Surrogate Cities, a composition for orchestra commissioned by the Alte Oper Frankfurt. In 1996, as a commision for Donaueschingen, he composed Industry & Idleness. Walden for extended orchestra was created in 1998 for the first tour of the newly founded Ensemble Modern Orchestra.
He created his own music theatre pieces Or the hapless landing (1993), The Repetition (1995), Black on white (1996) and Max Black (1998). In 1997 he participated in Documenta X in Kassel with his musical theatre sketch Landscape with man being killed by a snake. Together with the Ensemble Modern he created a tribute to Hanns Eislers’ 100th anniversary called Eislermaterial(1998). In 2000 Goebbels created the sound installations timeios and fin de soleil at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the music theatre piece Hashirigaki in Theatre Vidy and the staged concert …même soir.- with Les Percussions de Strasbourg. Nearly all of his compositions and music theatre works have been performed in Europe as well as in the USA, Asia, Australia and New Zealand.
In 2002 Goebbels premiered his first opera, Landscape with distant relatives. In the context of his 50th birthday Heiner Goebbels released his first book Komposition als Inszenierung. In 2003 he premiered his orchestra piece From A Diary commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. In 2004 he premiered his latest piece, Eraritjaritjaka – museé des phrases, from words by Elias Canetti, for which he has been awarded with more than six european theatre prizes.
From his numerous CDs at the label ecm two productions have been awarded with a grammy nomination. He is honorable fellow of the Dartington College of Arts, and was among several music-, theatre- and numerous radioprizes awarded 2001 with the “European Theatre Prize – New theatrical Realities”.
Since April 1999, Goebbels has worked as a professor at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in the Justus Liebig University in Giessen (Germany). The institute is dedicated both to scientific research and to artistic practice (contemporary theatre and performance). Since 2003 he is managing director of this institute, since 2006 president of the Theatre Academy of Hessen.

ALAN HALL has been producing radio since 1990 and has built a global reputation for long- form features, music programmes across the genres and what’s been called ‘impressionistic radio’. Recent credits include Three and the Third, a playful celebration of 60 years of Radio 3 and the Third Programme, and Icons, the music interview series with Tom Robinson (both on BBC Radio 3); William Thompson IV’s War about a reluctant soldier-musician in Iraq, The ‘Frisco Quake, marking the centenary of America’s greatest urban disaster, The Workaday World a major series presented by Bill Morris, 84 Book Crossing Road, a trans-Atlantic literary adventure, and Challenging the Silence, a series presented by Martin Sixsmith about artists in the Soviet Union under Stalin (on BBC Radio 4).
He’s also recently had programmes commissioned by the ABC in Sydney (Once Around Joby Talbot), Danish Radio (Tin Pan Alley) and Chicago’s WBEZ (Studs Terkel – The Last Touch). Non-broadcast work includes the production of numerous audio tours for art galleries and museums and running the Creative Radio segment of Goldsmiths College’s Radio MA (1998-present).
His programmes – and those produced by Falling Tree Productions Ltd – have received many awards, including two prestigious Prix Italias, two Third Coast Festival Awards, a Prix Bohemia and several Sony Radio Academy Awards.
Visit www.fallingtree.co.uk/about.

GRAHAM HARTSTONE joined Pinewood Studios in 1961 as a ‘cable monkey’. Mixing was a very different business then. “In those days there was a film sound crew of five – a mixer, a boom operator, a sound camera operator, a maintenance man and an assistant – that was me, the cable monkey. We were called monkeys because we had to shift the heavy cables that ran everywhere. It took two men to lift the mixing console that was carried from stage to stage. It was connected by three enormous cables to a terminal box on the studio wall that was trunked back to the sound department where the recorders were located.” In his 44-year career, he worked his way up from sound assistant to Head of Post-Production at Pinewood. As a re-recording mixer, working with the cinema’s leading directors, Hartstone has mixed dozens of films which stand out as creative landmarks as well as commercial successes: Blade Runner and Thelma and Louise, Ridley Scott; Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick; Aliens, James Cameron; Ae Fond Kiss and Sweet Sixteen, Ken Loach; High Heels, Pedro Almodovar; A Passage to India, David Lean; as well as eight James Bond films. This has reaped three Oscar nominations, three Golden Reel Awards, three BAFTA nominations and the BAFTA Best Sound award for Pink Floyd – The Wall by Alan Parker.

ANN KROEBER began her film career at the Office of Radio and Television at the United Nations. One day a colleague there asked her to record fireworks and ambient sound at a Chinese New Year Celebration. Her world changed that day when she put the headphones on. Textures and tones surrounding her became intensely fascinating. She broke recording conventions and returned with an aural pastiche that delighted her employer. After her assignment at the UN, she did freelance production sound in NYC.
She moved to San Francisco in 1978 and was hired by Alan Splet to record sound effects for the Black Stallion. It was her recording samples and unconventional miking techniques that landed her the job. Splet became a mentor, collaborator, and friend. They delighted in their work and married in 1981.
Kroeber was a sound fx recordist and later fx editor with Splet on such films as The Elephant Man, Dune, Never Cry Wolf, Wind, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Mountains of the Moon, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, Henry and June, The Mosquito Coast, and Dead Poets Society. She was the production mixer on Blue Velvet.
Since Splet’s passing in 1994 she formed a company called Sound Mountain and has recorded and/or provided sound effects for such films as the Star Wars trilogy, The Lord of the Rings: Pirates of the Caribbean, Gladiator, The English Patient, The Horse Whisperer, A Bug’s Life, K-19, etc., and a number of games. She was Sound Designer on Carroll Ballard’s recent Duma and Fx Editor on his Fly Away Home as well as on Affonso Arau’s Zapata. She has produced a 3 CD set of sound effects for the Hollywood Edge called Sounds of a Different Realm.

NATHAN LARSON was a former lead guitarist for the influential American art-punk band Shudder to Think, and as a composer continues to create highly acclaimed and challenging work. His bands’ early scores for October Film’s High Art and First Love Last Rites (on which Nathan wrote and/or produced tracks featuring such artists as Billy Corgan, Jeff Buckley, and The The’s Matt Johnson) earned rave reviews, as did his songwriting for Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine.
Nathan’s score for 20th Century Fox’s Boys Don’t Cry established him as a film-scoring force on his own. Since then he has made a solo record for Danny Goldberg’s Artemis Records, recorded/ performed /wrote and/or produced several albums by other artists, including the Manhattan/Blue Note debut from Angela McCluskey. He has created scores for many more controversial and critically-acclaimed films;among them are Todd Solondz’s Storytelling, and Palindromes, Joel Schumacher’s Tigerland and Phone Booth, Lukas Moodyson’s Lilja 4-Ever, and Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things. More projects include A Love Song for Bobby Long and The Woodsman, for which he was awarded the Gras Savoye Award at Cannes 2004. Filmmusik, a CD compilation of his selected works, is out now in the states on Commotion Records/ Rykodisc.
See www.nathanlarson.com and www.myspace.com/hotonerock for more information.

LUCRECIA MARTEL was born in 1966 in Salta, Argentina, studied at Avellaneda Experimental (AVEX) and attended the National Experimentation Filmmaking School (ENERC) in Buenos Aires. Emerging from the ‘nouvelle vague’ of Argentinean directors, which includes A. Caetano, D. Burman, U. Rosell, B. Stagnaro, S. Gugliotta and J. Gaggero, she directed a number of short films between 1988 and 1994.  Rey Muerto (Dead King) in 1995 was part of Historias Breves I (Brief Tales I). In 2001, she directed her first feature La Ciénaga (The Swamp), an award-winner at Berlin, Sundance, Havana, and Toulouse among other festivals. Selected for the 3rd edition of the 2002 Festival’s Residence, she has since written and directed La Niña Santa (The Holy Girl), a reflection about adolescence, and the awakening of desire and faith, selected in Competition at the 2004 Festival de Cannes. In 2006, she served on the Feature Film Jury at Cannes.

ANNABELLE PANGBORN is Head of Editing, Sound and Music at the National Film and Television School (UK). She trained as a singer and composer at the London College of Music and with English National Opera. She later went on to graduate from the Film School at the Royal College of Art, specialising in Music and Sound for Film. She has created sound tracks for award-winning dramas, dance films and animation, both for broadcast TV and cinema. Recent credits include The Death of Klinghoffer, Penny Woolcock’s acclaimed feature length film of the opera by John Adams, and Pleasureland, Channel 4’s confrontational feature length drama on teenage sex directed by Brian Percival. She has also worked with award winning directors Beeban Kidron, John Henderson, Simon Pummell, John Dower and Sara Sugarman. She has been awarded the Fuji Zonal Scholarship Award for her soundtrack for Ben Hopkins’ film, The Holy Time, and the Kodak Short Film Award for her short film, Stung.

 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 a Gold Award for documentaries in the 1997 Sony Awards and ditto in 1998 for ‘Services to Radio’. In November 2006, he was the winner of the Audio Luminary Award at the Third Coast Radio Festival in Chicago. He retired from the BBC in 1997 but continues to listen, look and lecture.

ALAN SPLET (1939–1994) began creating unusual dramatic sounds when he was growing up in Philadelphia. He and his friends designed plays, which they broadcast on their pirate radio station after school.
Later, while working in NYC as an executive accountant, he returned to Philadelphia one weekend to help his old radio pal, Bob Collum, rewire an industrial production company’s sound studio. He had such a good time that he immediately quit his high paying job (much to his mother’s horror) and joined Bob at the studio.
One day a young art student, named David Lynch, came to Bob needing post-production sound on his school movie. He was busy and Alan was assigned to help David instead. David was not pleased. But they started to find cool sounds together. This turned into a lifelong collaboration and friendship.
Splet designed the sound tracks for Lynch’s Eraserhead, The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet, Carroll Ballard’s The Black Stallion, Never Cry Wolf and Wind, Peter Weir’s The Mosquito Coast and Dead Poets Society, Phil Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Henry and June and Rising Sun, Hector Babenco’s At Play in the Field of The Lord and Bob Rafaelson’s Mountain’s of the Moon.
Splet helped change the way we now hear movies. He created rich tapestries of multi-layered sound effects, that evoked moods that had previously been music’s domain. On Lynch’s films the sound effects often evoked fear, foreboding, and mystery while the music represented the heart. For Lynch the sounds were often dark and industrial. In Carroll Ballard’s movies they were a symphony of nature sounds. In Peter Weir’s films there was a touch of mystic added. Phil Kaufman used Alan’s knowledge and love of classical music to choose and edit the music for him.
Splet had a long working collaboration with Ann Kroeber whom he married in 1981. They both shared the joy of finding and making cool sounds. And at home he played the cello and she the violin together.

IMOGEN STIDWORTHY uses sound and moving image to focus on aspects of language and communication. She is interested in voice as a sculptural material, as body, space, sound and language. Her work ranges from large-scale installations using sound, video and architectural elements, to audio works and short films, and has been shown widely in recent solo exhibitions such as Get Here at Gallery Hohenlohe, Vienna, Dummy at FRAC Bourgogne, 2005 and The Whisper Heard at Matts Gallery, London, 2003. Group shows include Walk On at Shanghai Biennale 2006, Rogue Wave at FACT, Liverpool and Spool at Het Consortium, Amsterdam; in 2005, Be What you Want but Stay Where you Are at Witte de With, Rotterdam, Murmur at TENT., Rotterdam and 7AM for Amovie Commissions in the Artists Cinema at Frieze Art Fair; in 2004, How do we Want to be Governed at Art Central, Miami, Becks Futures at ICA London, With Hidden Noise at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds and Versions at Kunsthal Bergen, Norway. In 1996 she was awarded the Dutch Prix de Rome for Film and Video, and in 2004 was shortlisted for Becks Futures. Her work is in the collections of Centre Georges Pompidou and FRAC Bourgogne, France. In 2007 she presents new work for Documenta 12, Kassel.

MARINA WARNER was born in London in 1946, of an Italian mother and an English father who was a bookseller. She was educated in Cairo, Brussels, Berkshire, England, and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.She a prize-winning writer of fiction, criticism and history; her works include novels and short stories as well as studies of female myths and symbols. Her most recent book is Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media (Oxford University Press). She is Professor in the Dept of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex where she teaches courses on Fairy-Tales and other forms of narrative. www.marinawarner.com

 JIM WEBB graduated from USC School of Cinema-Television in 1962. After two years of Army service as a radio/teletype operator, he worked as a soundman for CBS and NBC news. From 1967-1974 he was one-half of Creative Film Associates, producing television specials and concert documentaries for performers such as Peggy Lee, Joe Cocker and Elvis Presley. After this period he became a freelance film sound mixer working with Robert Altman who admired the multi-track concert film credits that Webb had worked on. This led to the creation of a multi-track location system for film dialogue that helped shaped Altman’s very particular narrative style.
Webb recorded location sound on such notable features as Altman’s Nashville (1975), which won a BAFTA Award for Sound, and All The President’s Men (Alan Pakula), which received an Academy Award for Sound. His other credits include The Rose (1979), nominated for both BAFTA and Academy Awards for Sound, The Long Riders (1980), Coppola’s One From The Heart (1982), Flashdance (1983), nominated for a BAFTA Award for Sound, Robert Redford’s The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), Pretty Woman (1990) and Stephen Soderbergh’s The Limey (1999). Webb retired in January 1999 after a career spanning 32 years, 60 feature films and 65,000 hours of recording.