Sound Design Concepts

Sound design is often created to give "reality" to a scene, to provide reinforcement or counterpoint to an actor's performance, character's behavior, etc. Sounds and effects are often used to enhance the narrative, and to pull us into the world of the characters.

• Walls - added human sounds, such as crowd noises and telephone voices that complete the world of the scene
• Foley - the creation of sound effects synchronized to the image (footsteps, gunshots, clinking glasses, etc)
• Music - diegetic and nondiegetic
• Room tone - the sound of the location when no one is talking (combined with dialogue postproduction)
• Character's corona (Walter Murch's term) - sounds associated with a character (such as corduroy or silk) that magnify the character's screen space

• POA (point of audition) sound - represents the experience of hearing within the diegesis, or the world of the story, normally the hearing of a character. May include muffling sounds, use of Doppler effect to indicate rapid passage of a sound source, increase or decrease in volume, sense of acoustics of a particular location, etc.
• Off-screen sound - "source" of a sound is off-screen- a sound heard without its source being seen (voice behind a curtain, off-screen which may or may not be visualized)
• Sound bridge - sound of scene begins before image changes or sound lingers while image changes
• Sound-over - sound represented as not being directly audible within the space and time of the images on the screen
• Voice-over - voice of character or external narrator
      -Subjective (internal diegetic, a character within the story) or objective (external diegetic, an omniscient narrator).
• Leitmotif - A leitmotif is a musical term (though occasionally used in theatre or literature), referring to a recurring theme, associated with a particular person, place, or idea.Leitmotif can refer to the significant repetition of any element in a film. Leitmotifs (or motifs) become significant to the meaning of the overall work when they develop thematic importance. In film, a motif is most frequently a plot device, image, character trait, or element of the mise en scène.