What They Want, and What They Think They Want

Dear Filmmakers, “realism” and “naturalism” can be straitjackets.

Too many directors are under the illusion that sounds are more about physics than about story.  Sounds are characters. 

“What sound would that gun really make?” is usually the wrong question. (I’ve heard it so many times.)  The right question is almost always something like “What sound would make us feel the way we should feel to help the story work?”

If realism and naturalism were the main goals in movie-making, then Steve Buscemi, Wallace Shawn, Paul Giamatti, and William H. Macy would play leads in a lot more films.  Like most of us, they don’t look like Greek Gods. They look like perfectly natural dudes.  So, if Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise get to play leads, I say that certain sounds deserve to have a little sex appeal too, mainly because it makes the movies better.

Here’s a real-life story, with names changed to protect me, the innocent:

A while back I was asked to create the sound of a creature character.  I’ve done a lot of those.  This one was a mosquito. Well, it wasn’t really a mosquito, but I’m saying it was a mosquito to avoid embarrassing anybody. It was a fifteen-foot-long mosquito, and it didn’t just bite you; it pierced you with its three-foot needle-like mouthpart called a proboscis, and it ate you.

The director’s main concern was that the audience might not believe it looked real enough. For various reasons relating to quantum field theory, a fifteen-foot-long mosquito created with computer graphics will never look exactly like a normal sized mosquito.  The director knew this, and it made him nervous. So, he decided that the sounds the mosquito made HAD TO BE EXACTLY LIKE the sounds a real mosquito makes … just … somehow … bigger.  A lot bigger.  This is what is called “magical thinking.”

It turns out that in real life there are no fifteen-foot mosquitos.  Nobody can calculate exactly what one would sound like. In a normal mosquito, the buzzing sound comes from their wings, specifically the rapid beating of their wings, which oscillate at somewhere between 300 and 600 times per second depending on the species and the sex of the mosquito. Humans perceive that sound as irritating, probably not so much because of its acoustic properties as the fact that we associate that sound with being bitten.

Interestingly, female mosquitoes beat their wings slightly slower than males, and research has shown that males actually adjust their wing frequency to match the female’s when they’re courting, a kind of aerial harmonizing … those wicked little incels.

There’s also a secondary contributor to mosquito sound: the base of the wings connects to a structure in the thorax that itself vibrates and amplifies the sound. So it’s less like a single buzzing source and more like a coupled mechanical system, similar in principle to how an acoustic guitar body amplifies string vibration.

The reason the buzz gets louder and more urgent-sounding as a mosquito gets close to your ear is simply proximity — the sound hasn’t actually changed, but your ear canal acts as a small resonant chamber that amplifies it further when the mosquito is right at the opening. Doppler and phase relationships also shape the perceived sound. That’s the science.

I mentioned all this to the director, and he loved it.  Like I said: it’s all about the physics.

But it’s not about the physics. The physics is interesting, and it’s mostly irrelevant to the story. I knew that, so I largely ignored the physics and created a set of sounds that felt to me like a fifteen-foot monster of a mosquito.  I played it for the director, and he didn’t like it. He said it sounded like a monster. It has to sound exactly like a mosquito, he scolded.  I obeyed. The next draft sounded like a very, very large mosquito.  The director was temporarily happier, but still concerned.

Enter the most unlikely set of heroes imaginable:  Studio Executives.

After an in-house test screening, the main note the Execs had was about the sound of the mosquito. “It sounds like a mosquito,” they complained. “It’s a fucking monster!” they blasted. “It’s gotta SOUND like a fucking MONSTER.”

I don’t tell this story to self-aggrandize.  I’m often wrong.  My intuitions about sound are sometimes dumb. I’ve been internally humbled lots of times by directors who had incredibly more insight into what something should sound like than I did. But here’s the thing I know for sure:

Realism and naturalism have their place.  It’s usually a good idea to at least tip your hat to them in a meaningful way as you create the sound that is going to serve the story best. But all sound, every sound, functions partly as music functions. It makes us feel certain ways.  It’s almost always a good idea to take some artistic license to hit the emotional notes that need to be hit.

By the way, the movie was a hit, the mosquito looked great, and nobody in the audience ever asked why it sounded like a monster.