Toward Constructing a Theory of Point-of-Audition: Walter Murch’s “Metaphorical Sound” and Auditory Representation in Cinema

Abstract

While numerous studies have addressed the mechanism and history of subjective techniques in cinema, including point-of-view shots, voice-over narration, and flashback, the theoretical foundations of point-of-audition (POA) sound——a method of representing a character’s sense of hearing——have yet to be established.

This paper aims to resolve the theoretical problems surrounding POA sound and to present a new type of this technique, which is deeply related to “metaphorical sound”——an excessively foregrounded diegetic sound that can be a metaphor of a character’s state of mind——a concept pioneered by engineer Walter Murch, a Francis Ford Coppola collaborator.

The paper’s first section scrutinizes the multiple definitions of the concept of POA. The second section discusses the difficulty of creating the conditions that can engender subjective POA sound, or how we judge whether a character hears specific sounds. The third section classifies POA sound into three types: “perceptual POA” (when a character listens to sound outside of them), “mental POA” (when a character hears sound imagined by them), “compound POA” (when the former two work doubly). Finally, by referring to specific films, I attempt to correlate Murch’s metaphorical sound practices with “compound POA” within a theoretical framework.