Among the very few good books (cultural/film theory-wise) on the auditory in “audiovisual” media, is Michel Chion’s Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, which I just flogged off a friend’s desk. The book’s lyrical foreword by Walter Murch is a more than sufficient antidote to my recent frustrated conviction that media and cultural studies are almost profoundly deaf:

We begin to hear before we are born, four and a half months after conception. From then on, we develop in a continuous and luxurious bath of sounds: the song of our mother’s voice, the swash of her breathing, the trumpeting of her intestines, the timpani of her heart. Throughout the second four-and-a-half months, Sound rules as solitary Queen of our senses: the close and liquid world of uterine darkness makes Sight and Smell impossible, Taste monchromatic, and Touch a dim and generalized hint of what is to come.

Birth brings with it the sudden and simultaneous ignition of the other four senses, and an intense competition for the throne that Sound had claimed as hers. The most notable pretender is the darting and insistent Sight, who dubs himself King as if the throne had been standing vacant, waiting for him.

Ever discreet, Sound pulls a veil of oblivion across her reign and withdraws into the shadows, keeping a watchful eye on the braggart Sight. If she gives up her throne, it is doubtful that she gives up her crown.

The opening point being, of course, that cinema reversed this ordering of the senses – cinema “gestated in Sight, and was born into Sound”; further, Sound is often effaced but sooooooooooooooooooo very important and constitutive of the experience of cinema. Interesting (but maybe not surprising) that Sound is primal, submerged, visceral, feminine; Sight is insistently apparent, mercurial, masculine. Looking forward to reading on.