Extended vocabulary for describing musical phenomena Aura.docx

Extended vocabulary for describing musical phenomena
Aural / oral
Aural icon
Oral transmission, oral history
Genre /
Style
Melody Rhythm /
Metre
Tempo Timbre Dynamics +
articulation
Texture Harmony
Rock music
(electric guitar
shredding)
Classical (piano,
string quartet,
instrumental
without vocals)
Jazz (saxophones,
trumpets,
improvisation)

Folk music
(banjo, fiddle,
acoustic guitar,
harmonica,
lyrics)
Blues (12-bar
blues – chord
progression,
Modal
Tonal
• Major
• minor
Atonal
(Teleological)
Rhythmic
Arhythmic
Metric
Ametric
fast
quick
slow
accelerando
(gradually
gets faster)
ritardando
(gradually

gets slower)
Bright/dull
Warm/cold
Reedy
Gritty
Raspy
Speech-like
Whiny
Nasal
Monotone
Dolce
Sweet
Clear
Fluttery
Controlled
Twangy
breathy
loud / soft
really loud
really soft
crescendo
(gradually
getting
louder)
decrescendo
or
diminuendo
(gradually

getting
softer)
legato
(smooth)
Solo
Group
Monophonic
Unison
Sing in
harmony
Melody and
accompaniment
Chorale-style
Hymn-style
Homophonic
Fugal
Contrapuntal
tonal
modal
consonant
dissonant

(crunchy)
harmonica, slide
guitar, singing)
Rap
Techno/electronic
Hiphop
House music
Soul
Oompah – polka
Pop
Ska
Doowop / swing
Afrobeats
Country
Hymn
Salsa
Celtic

staccato
(detached)
Vocal
polyphony
Polyphony
Western Medievalism in Film
• Summary of first four classes
Discussion of: what do we think of when we think of the Middle
Ages? And what sounds
and/or music do we think of?
From individual elements (people, things, ideas), we came up
with some broader themes
of how the Middle Ages is represented:
• Grime and disease (the plague)
• Hierarchical systems (political, social)
• Fantasy (magic, fantastical creatures, witchcraft)
• Town formation
• Pastoral (small farms, farm animals)
• War (knights, armour)
• Chivalry

• Religion (monks, nuns, monasteries, cathedrals)
• Learnedness (universities, Latin)
Three approaches to medievalism in film and television:
• Focus on specific medieval figure or event
• Medieval fantasy world
• Uses medieval trope/theme but in different setting
Three kinds of sound in film:
• Dialogue
• Music
• Sound effects
Viewed a film clip and discussed relationships amongst the
sound, the action, and
the visual elements, reviewing and introducing terminology:
Opening of Princess of Thieves (2001) - up to the cow-
milking/Latin lesson scene
• Opens with mountains and mist (visual icon or convention for
the medieval or the
distant past)
• Voice-over (non-diegetic narrator) introduces the narrative
(informational
prologue) with a long, anticipatory drone in the underscore and
the sound of birds
to place the outdoor scene (establishing sound)
• Heroic theme in underscore (Fr. Horn, leaping and rising

melody with dotted
rhythm) with horse and rider galloping through the forest;
“pastoral” setting
emphasized with the sound of the horse’s hooves and splashing
water
• Dark interior scene and cold stone walls in castle fit with
foreboding music (low,
drawn-out string drones and dissonant chords); Sherriff of
Nottingham and his
men express violent ways (“price on the infant’s head”), and
misogynistic attitude
(“a girl” + evil cackle)
• Dissolve to image of infant with diegetic off-screen voices of
mother and child’s
protector
• Rooster cawing establishes the place (confirmed by simple
interior)
• Montage sequence - musical underscore provides continuity as
time is
compressed and we see Robin Hood’s daughter, Gwyn, growing
up; underscore
uses harp and celtic flute with alternating chords to establish
gentle, protective
and historical setting (medieval or distant past)
• Sound lag bridges to outdoor scene of cow-milking and Latin
lesson (Latin, so we
know it’s the Middle Ages) with a young monk or novice

Terminology:
• diegetic / non-diegetic
• diegesis – story or narrative of film
• voice-over
• underscore
• soundtrack – all audio in a film (often refers to the music)
• montage (single shot has meaning only in relation to another
shot)
• shot – single take (seconds, minutes)
• scene – several shots
• sequence – several scenes
Review of 5 general categories of music in the Middle Ages:
• Chant
• Vernacular song (Troubadours and Trouvères)
• Instrumental fanfares
• Dance music
• Vocal polyphony
Viewing and discussion of Alexander Nevsky (1938)
• Discussion of Brown 1994 and close collaboration between
Eisenstein and
Prokofiev
• Representation of the medieval through sound and image,
while simultaneously
promoting communist ideals under Stalin: men fishing together
collectively,
music is worker’s song sung in unison, all men (including
Alexander) dressed in
simple fisherman’s clothing

• Sounds of the medieval: war (clashing of swords, horses);
church (bells, organ,
droning music)
• Meaning of the film in 1938: pre-war, Soviet Union fearing
German invasion and
recalled an earlier Russian national hero, Alexander Nevsky
from the thirteenth
century
• non-aggression pact in 1939 – film pulled from circulation;
June 22, 1941,
Operation Barbarossa: Germany abandoned pact and invaded
Russia
2-shot
An image frame containing two principal characters.
A
Top
acousmêtre
This is a term of Michel Chion's meaning "acoustical being". A
character who appears in a film only or mostly as a disembodied
voice but is diegetic (different from a non-diegetic narrator
doing a voice-over).
audio dissolve
When diegetic accompaniment becomes non-diegetic or is
"sweetened" by non-diegetic elements. Rick Altman's term.
C
Top
counterpoint
Counterpoint is a musical term that is used in film contexts in
two different ways. Eisenstein (as explained by Royal S.

Brown) uses counterpoint to mean the conveying of a similar
idea, expression, or sentiment through the two different senses
of sight and sound. What is significant for him is that the two
are not synchronized, but yet still work together to express
something. Buhler and Neumeyer use the term counterpoint to
mean when the visual and the audio are at odds with each other,
either because of poor film-making technique or deliberately to
create emotional distance. In the Buhler and Neumeyer
definition, counterpoint can also be called anempathetic.
D
Top
dialogue
Speech delivered by or between characters. One of three
components of the soundtrack (dialogue, music, sound effects).
diegesis
Story or narrative world of film.
diegetic / non-diegetic
Diegetic sound can be heard by the characters. Non-diegetic
sound cannot be heard by the characters.
dissolve
A transitional device in which one shot fades out as another
fades in.
E
Top
establishing shot
A general view of the physical space to begin a scene.
establishing sound
Sound used to establish a physical space at the beginning of a
scene (Rick Altman's term).
F
Top
Foley
Named after Jack Foley, Foley refers to the production of
everyday sounds added to film in post-production to enhance
the audio track (creaking leather, clicking heels in an empty
hallway etc.)

H
Top
hard cut
Transition from one shot to another accomplished by an abrupt
shift in both image and sound.
harmony
The combination of musical tones simultaneously to produce a
chord or a series of chords.
I
Top
informational prologue
Voice-over narration at beginning of film to provide background
for the narrative of the film.
M
Top
medievalism
An investigation of the influence or appearance of the medieval
in a later period, and of attitudes towards and meanings of the
medieval in all areas of culture.
melody
A melody is a tune or a musical line made up of a series of
pitches (or notes or tones). It's the part of music you might find
yourself singing, or humming, or whistling.
montage sequence
A type of editing. Involves a series of shots, in which any
individual shot is only understood in relation to the others.
Often used to show the compression of time. Often uses music
as a sound bridge to link the images into a single unit.
music
One of the three components of a sound track (dialogue, music,
sound effects).
musical convention
A musical stereotype such as a rising, leaping, driving melody
played on the trombone being associated with heroism.
O
Top

onscreen/offscreen
Onscreen is the part of the world of the film that is within the
camera's frame, while offscreen is what we know is there in the
film's world but that is not within the camera's frame.
P
Top
point-of-view shot
A point-of-view shot is when the audience sees through the
character's eyes.
R
Top
rhythm
An arrangement of musical sounds according to duration and
stress.
S
Top
Scene
A number of shots (or very occasionally a single very long shot)
brought together for narrative purposes, unifying time and
space.
Sequence
A series of scenes related as a narrative unit. Sometimes used to
refer to any series of shots that are related.
shot
A single take (or single strip of film); could be seconds or
minutes.
sound advance
A sound is heard before its associated image appears; this
technique can be used in a cut or dissolve.
sound bridge
Sound (music, dialogue or sounds effects) create a smooth
transition between two shots (and/or scenes).
sound effects
All sound that isn't music or dialogue/speech. See also Foley.
sound lag
A transition in which the sound from one scene continues

through to the beginning of the next scene (less common than a
sound advance).
sound link
A sound bridge between otherwise unrelated cuts.
sound match
A transition in which the sound belonging to one scene is
followed by a similar or identical sound belonging to the next
scene.
soundtrack
All audio in a film, although people often use the term to refer
to the music soundtrack.
stinger
A sudden and sharp sharp accent, such as a cymbal crash, but
can also be applied to speech (a scream or cry) or to sound
effects (door slamming).
synchronization
Synchronization refers to a close relationship between the audio
and visual elements in a film or in a scene. Close
synchronization is also referred to as empathetic.
T
Top
timbre
The character or quality of a musical sound or voice. Terms
people use to describe timbre include grainy, tinny, pure, gritty,
reedy, bright, warm, thin, harsh, gentle, wooden, ringing etc.
tonality
In western music, a system revolving around a single pitch or
chord, which functions as a centre of gravity.
U
Top
underscore
Non-diegetic music. Sometimes called the accompaniment or
scoring.
V
Top
voice-over

When an unseen person, a narrator, speaks directly to the
viewer.
W
Top
wipe
A type of transition in which a boundary line (or shape)
replaces one shot with another (often from side to side, or from
top to bottom, or bottom to top).
180-Degree Rule
The 180-degree rule of shooting and editing keeps the camera
on one side of the action.
3-D Film
3-D film has a three-dimensional, stereoscopic form, creating
the illusion of depth.
A
Aerial Shot
An aerial shot is typically made from a helicopter or created
with miniatures (today, digitally), showing a location from high
overhead.
Aspect Ratio
Aspect ratio refers to how the image appears on the screen
based on how it was shot–the ratio of width (horizontal or top)
to height (vertical or side) of a film frame, image, or screen.
B
Black-and-White Film
Black-and-white film contains an emulsion that, when
processed, changes colors into various shades of gray.
C
Camera Angle
Camera angle refers to where the camera is placed in relation to

the subject of the image.
Camera Movement
Camera movement refers to the actual or perceived physical
movement of the camera apparatus through space.
Canted Angle (Dutch Angle)
A canted angle is when the camera is tilted, usually to suggest
imbalance, transition, or instability.
Celluloid
Cellulose nitrate was the original transparent material used as a
base for film, which was then coated with light-sensitive
emulsion.
Chiaroscuro
Chiaroscuro refers to strong contrasts between light and dark.
Cinema Verité
Cinema verité is a French term that means "true cinema" or
"cinema truth."
Cinematography
Derived from the French word cinématographe, cinematography
literally means "writing in movement" and is generally
understood as the art and process of capturing visual images
with a camera for cinema.
Cinerama
Cinerama is a process of simultaneous filming by three cameras.
The cameras are pointed at different angles and are then
projected by three synchronized projectors and shown on a
curved screen.
Circular Pan
A circular pan is a shot in which the camera rotates 360 degrees
around a fixed axis.
Clapboard (Slateboard)
Before each take, a clapboard appears in front of the camera,
with the number of the take written on it.
Close-Up
A close-up is a shot in which a person’s face fills most of the
screen, although the term can also refer to any shot that appears
to have been taken at close range (or through a telephoto lens),

and in which an object appears relatively large and in detail.
Color Film
Color film has been a possibility since the beginning of cinema.
Technical problems and economic circumstances early on meant
that it was not until the 1950s that color was viable in the film
industry.
Crane Shot
A crane shot is achieved by a camera mounted on a platform,
which is connected to a mechanical arm that can lift the
platform up, bring it down, or move it laterally across space.
D
Day for Night
Day for night refers to the creation of a night effect while
shooting during the day, through the manipulation of filters,
underexposure, or printing.
Deep Focus
Deep focus is a style or technique of cinematography and
staging with great depth of field, using relatively wide-angle
lenses and small lens apertures to render in sharp focus near and
distant planes simultaneously.
Depth of Field
Depth of field is the area, range of distance, or field (between
the nearest and farthest planes) in which the elements captured
in a camera image appear in sharp focus.
Dialogue
Dialogue is speech delivered by or between characters.
Diegesis
From the ancient Greek for “recounted story,” diegesis is a term
used in film studies to refer to the story (or narrative) world of
a film.
Diegetic Sound
Diegetic sound is any sound that emanates from the story (or
narrative) world of a film, which is referred to in film studies as
diegesis.
Dissolve

A dissolve is a transitional device in which one shot fades out
while the next shot fades in, so it is briefly superimposed over
the first and then replaces it altogether.
Dolly (Dolly Shot)
A dolly is a mobile platform on wheels with a camera, which
can be driven or pushed by a dolly pusher or dolly grip.
Double (Multiple) Exposure
Double exposure is the superimposition of two images, one over
the other, which results from exposing the same film twice.
E
Editing
Editing is the process of putting a film together–the selection
and arrangement of shots and scenes.
Establishing Shot
An establishing shot is a long shot at the start of a scene (or
sequence) that shows things from a distance.
Exposure
Exposure is the act of making film available to light so that an
image is formed in the emulsion.
Eye-Line Match
Eye-line match is a method of continuity editing whereby a cut
between two shots creates the illusion of the character (in the
first shot) looking at an object (in the second shot).
F
Fade
The fade is a means of gradually beginning or ending a scene,
and is achieved in the camera by opening or closing the
aperture; in an optical printer, this is achieved when the
exposure light is increased or decreased.
Fisheye Lens
A fisheye lens is a wide-angle lens that takes in a nearly 180-
degree field of view.
Frames-per-Second
Frames-per-second is the rate at which film is exposed in a

camera.
Freeze-Frame
Freeze-frame is achieved when a single frame is repeatedly
printed on a duplicate copy of the film.
H
Handheld Shot
A handheld shot is one in which the cameraman or -woman
holds the camera and moves through space while filming.
High-Angle Shot
A high-angle shot is one in which the camera is placed above
eye level, creating a frame that looks down at the subject. Early
examples of high-angle shots represent the point of view of a
distant onlooker, as in James Williamson’s Attack on a Chinese
Mission Station (1901) and Frank Mottershaw’s influential early
crime film, Daring Daylight Burglary (1903).
The consistent use of high angle objective, expressive shots
taken from close to the subject emerges in France in the 1920s
with films such as Jean Epstein’s l’Auberge (1923) and
Maurice L’Herbier’s L’inhumaine (1924).
Depending on the stylistic language established by the
filmmaker, a high-angle shot may suggest that a character has
lower status or is needier than another character.
CLIP proposed: Wild River (1960) dialog between Montgomery
Clift and Lee Remick
It is tempting but inaccurate to read high angle shots
consistently through an easy literal metaphor: in “looking
down” on a subject, a high angle confers vulnerability and low
status. If this were true, Hitchcock’s use of high angles would
be illegible when, for example, in North by Northwest(1959),
Van Damm decides to murder his mistress by pushing her out of
an airplane.
Extreme high-angles can suggest surveillance, such as in the
following shot from The Conversation (1974):
CLIP proposed: (Last shot of Conversation)
High-angle shots can imbue a sub-human character to a subject,

as in this shot from Taxi Driver (1976):
CLIP: (Shot of Travis walking into diner)
A high angle shot may reframe authority, as in this shot from
Ousmane Sembene’s Moolaadé, where Collé defies village
traditionalists who seek to circumcise girls in her protection:
CLIP: (Shot of Village in stand-off.)
I
Iris Shot
The iris shot is a shot masked in a circular form.
J
Jump Cut
A jump cut is an editing technique in which some frames are
taken out of a sequence.
L
Lighting
Lighting is responsible for the quality of a film’s images and
often a film’s dramatic effect.
Long Shot
A long shot shows characters in their entirety, as well as some
of the surrounding environment.
Long Take
The long take is a shot of some duration.
Low-Angle Shot
A low-angle shot is achieved when the camera is placed below
eye level.
M
Medium Shot
A medium shot is one that can include several characters in a
frame, usually showing a character from the waist up.
Mise-en-Scène
Mise-en-scène originated in the theater and is used in film to
refer to everything that goes into the composition of a shot--

framing, movement of the camera and characters, lighting, set
design and the visual environment, and sound.
Montage
At the core of montage is the idea that a single shot has
meaning only in relation to another shot.
N
Non-Diegetic Sound
Non-diegetic sound is sound whose origin is from outside the
story world.
P
Pan Shot
A pan shot is achieved with a camera mounted on a swivel head
so that the camera body can turn from a fixed position.
Parallel Editing
Parallel editing is a technique whereby cutting occurs between
two or more related actions occurring at the same time in two
separate locations or different points in time.
Point of View
With POV, the audience is, in effect, looking through the
character’s eye.
R
Rear Projection
Rear projection involves the projection of either a still or a
moving picture onto the back of a translucent screen.
S
Shot, Scene, and Sequence
A shot consists of a single take. A scene is composed of several
shots. A sequence is composed of scenes.
Slow Motion
Slow motion is typically achieved by shooting at a fast speed
and then projecting at a normal speed.
Sound

Sound is the audio portion of a film.
Soundtrack
Soundtrack refers to all the audio elements of a film–dialogue,
music, sound effects, etc.
Split Screen
Split screen is the combination of two or more scenes films
separately which appear in the same frame.
Steadicam Shot
A Steadicam shot employs a kind of special hydraulic harness
that smoothes out the bumps and jerkiness associated with the
typical handheld style.
Superimposition
Superimposition is when two or more image are placed over
each other in the frame.
Swish Pan
A swish pan looks like a blur as one scene changes to another–
the camera appears to be moving rapidly from right to left or
left to right.
T
Take
A take is one run of the camera, recording a single shot
Tracking (Trucking) Shot
A tracking, or trucking, shot is one in which a camera is
mounted on some kind of conveyance (car, ship, airplane, etc.)
and films while moving through space.
V
Virtual Camera Movement
Virtual camera movement refers to the creation of the
perceptual sense of movement through space by the
manipulation of focal length or by more irregular techniques.
Voice-Over
Voice-over is dialogue, usually narration, that comes from an
unseen, offscreen voice, character, or narrator.
W

Wide-Angle Lens
A wide-angle lens has a short focal length, which exaggerates
the relative size of objects within field of view.
Wide-Angle Shot
A shot with a greater horizontal plane of action and greater
depth of field is known as a wide-angle shot.
Wipe
Wipes allow one scene to effectively erase the previous scene
and replace it.
Z
Zoom Shot
A zoom shot is one that permits the cinematographer to change
the distance between the camera and the object being filmed
without actually moving the camera.
Neil Verma
Wall of sound: listening to
Game of Thrones
Loopholes
With a coiled horn hanging by a restless chain behind them, the
two brothers
of the Night’s Watch kill time at the precipice of the Wall
discussing – what
else? – sex. ‘The interesting thing is, our vows never
specifically forbid intimate
relations with women,’ Samwell Tarly points out to Jon Snow,

pleased for
having noted the loophole with his keen ear. Facing long odds
against Mance
Rayder’s army, Jon and Sam pace crenellations that recall Great
War trenches,
speaking of Snow’s tryst with the wildling Ygritte.
Jon: There’s this person, this whole other person, and you’re
wrapped
up in them and they’re wrapped up in you, and you . . . for a
little
. . . for a little while you’re more than just you. You’re . . . oh, I
don’t
know. I’m not a bleedin’ poet!
Sam: No, you’re really not.
As Sam descends to Castle Black’s library (where he meets
Maester Aemon,
another keen listener), we see an owl spying for a telepathic
warg at the edge
of the camp of a gang of raiders nearby. The owl’s screech is
heard in a
subsequent shot at the camp, conveying proximity with scant
interval, lending
an airlessness to the episode that is confirmed twenty minutes
later with a
bird’s-eye shot that situates the Wall as the diameter of an
imploding circle of
attackers from twin arcs north and south, and then reiterated by
a showpiece
forty-three-second pan of swordplay around the periphery of
Castle Black. In
the camp, Jon and Sam’s colloquy is repeated as a farce, as
wildling leader
Tormund boasts of copulating with a bear (‘No, she was no

ordinary beast’),
prompting Ygritte’s ridicule. Next, we see refugee Gilly and her
baby listening
just outside the camp, a second eavesdropper fleeing to the
castle. Nearly
turned away at the gate, her voice carries into the courtyard
where Sam catches
it and insists on taking her in. Off-screen cries from above
(‘Make haste!’
‘Prepare!’) resound, as well as the peal of an unseen horn just
like the one we
almost didn’t notice hanging dead centre atop the Wall.
That is the prologue to ‘Watchers on the Wall’, the ninth
episode of the most
recent season of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’s HBO series
Game of Thrones,
based on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire.1 For all
its visual excess,
it is a sequence in which circuits of watching (and watching of
watching) are
braided with nonvisual actions and elements: loose talk,
eavesdropping,
surrogate listeners, vocal projection and mobile earshots. What
has been
depicted so far is a ‘sound loop’ that descends and ascends the
Wall, and, in a
parallel geometry, circles from north to south and back again.
Close your eyes
for the remainder of the episode and you will hear similar sonic
shapes and
vectors, including spirals of voices and swords, gates straining
against

groaning mammoths, the grunt of a giant drowning out an
hysterical
recitation of the Night’s Watch oath, the cries of defenders
stretching off
toward vanishing earshots, the audioposition (where we ‘are’
according to what
we ‘hear’) of Jon’s wolf Ghost charging into battle.2 Our
apprehension of all
this sonic geometry is somewhere between the unconscious and
the automatic
– as Rick Altman has explained, our ears are frequently ‘doing’
narrative
analysis of sonic information even if we are not aware of it.3
What I want to call attention to is the fact that along with many
other
episodes of Game of Thrones ‘Watchers’ seems wrapped up
with a certain
sonic mystique, a matter that has gone almost unnoticed in
discourse on the
programme in the press, online and among fans. Indeed, despite
intellectual
booms in sound studies and television studies in the academy
for which a
programme like Game of Thrones is a logical point of
convergence, there is
almost no critical listening out there when it comes to this
series. This is a
shame, because as the most-watched programme on a leading
network in the
new ‘golden age’ of television, Game of Thrones is a laboratory
for habits of
auditory imagination and for the critical equipment with which
we might
engage them. In an attempt to unpack that, this essay draws on
sound theory

and philosophy to explore a few ‘sonic habits’ in the series,
offering not quite a
study of the sound design of Games of Thrones but rather a
study of Game of
Thrones with sound in mind, an effort to ‘think’ the series as
keenly as an ear.
My hope is that the result will not only call sound to the centre
of discourse
about the programme, but also summon discourse of the
programme to its
aesthetic edge, a point at which the show can be considered
vernacular sound
art. As Mladen Dolar has argued, sound is in many ways ‘an
entity of the edge’
– something between sleep and waking, between inside and out,
between the
one and the multiple.4 This essay catalogues a few of the ways
in which Game
of Thrones inhabits such an edge, employing it as barrier and
lure, a shelter
and alibi.
Edge and axis
Game of Thrones’s outsize commitment to sound precedes its
imagery. Three
of the four seasons awaken with a brief sound effect that
functions as what
Altman calls a ‘sound advance’: a rising portcullis in a tunnel
under the Wall,
72| CRITICAL QUARTERLY , VOL. 57, NO. 1
a battle at the Fist of the First Men, the sound of a smith’s

forge.5 The title
sequence with Ramin Djawadi’s stylised score is dappled by
another excess,
as objects on the map of Westeros and Essos emit sounds whose
great scale
contradicts the size of the miniatures to which they visually
correspond,
including rustling branches, thudding islands rising from the
sea, and the
great arms of the colossus of Braavos falling into place.
Prominent sound
events also mark the edges of episodes. ‘Garden of Bones’ (2:4)
begins with a
guard passing gas, and ends with Melisandre giving birth to a
wet shadow. The
first season ends with the cry of a baby dragon lingering three
seconds in the
darkness after the image cuts, dissolving into a reverberation
between
storyworld and credits. The latter is often used expressively.
Credits feature
both the oddest musical selection in the series with a bright bar-
room
rendition of ‘The Bear and the Maiden Fair’ immediately after
Locke hacks
off Jamie Lannister’s hand (3:3), and arguably the most
sonically beautiful
moment with Shireen Baratheon’s a cappella ‘It’s Always
Summer Under the
Sea’ (3:5). Within episodes, sounds link separated storylines
suggestively.
In ‘Garden of Bones’ the cry of a prostitute being tortured in
Joffrey’s
bedchamber turns into to the whinny of a horse in Renly’s war
camp, while in
‘The Lion and the Rose’ (4:2) the sound of Tyrion smashing a

cup in
frustration as he discards Shae turns into the sound of a woman
screaming in
a sacrifice bonfire on Dragonstone.
But a tendency to lay prominent sounds at the edge of an
episode, a scene
or a love affair stands in tension with a countertendency to plot
those same
events along open axes within and through episodes, much like
the sound loop
in ‘Watchers’. Consider the most aestheticised scene in that
episode, when
Ygritte spares Jon’s life in a moment of sentimental pause –
hasn’t this blood-
soaked episode been about sentiment all along? – then is fatally
shot. The
sound of singing arrows and crashing steel bleed away in the
otherwise
detailed background soundscape, as sub-glottal noises issue
from Ygritte and
the lovers remember the moment of their passion in a northern
cave. This
quiet nucleus of the episode dignifies the ‘bleeding poetry’ of
love, of two
people wrapped up together until only one is still alive. But that
very same
pocket of hush can be understood otherwise, as a predictable
sonic detail
common to every season, which may be surprising for a series
known for
instability.6 In ‘Baelor’ (1:9), the beheading of Ned Stark
begins with a
cacophony of the crowd, but concludes with only Ned’s
breathing and the
sound of escaping birds. In ‘Blackwater’ (2:9), the battle

outside the gates of
King’s Landing suddenly goes half mute as we see Loras
Tyrell’s forces arrive
to turn the tide. In ‘The Rains of Castamere’ (3:9) a boisterous
bedding
ceremony and diegetic band score featuring Sigur Rós fades as
Walder Frey
calls for silence in a sequence that ends in Robb and Catelyn
Stark’s deaths.
Not only do these three hushes take place at the just same
moment in their
WALL OF SOUND: LISTENING TO GAME OF THRONES | 73
seasons – all are the ninth episode, just like ‘Watchers’ – but
they occur near
the same minute within the episode in question (54′, 50′, 49′ and
42′
sequentially).
In this way, Ygritte’s quiet death ‘belongs’ equally to the arcs
of the episodic
text, the seasonal text, and the series text, a swirling eddy in
what Raymond
Williams famously called television’s ‘flow’.7 The hush, in
other words, serves
as a metadiegetic feature that links several levels in the
‘streaming seriality’ of
the programme, to borrow Michele Hilmes’s terminology.8 With
that in mind,
think of ‘Watchers’ as depicting three axes emanating from a
single point in
time and space. One runs the lateral dimension in a line from
Rayder’s army

in the North down to the wildling camp in the South. Another
axis runs
orthogonally to the first up the vertical axis of Castle Black
from the tunnel
underneath to the Wall aloft. And near the interstice of these
two axes is the
silence of Ygritte and Jon, whose sound aesthetic prompts a
third direction
that flows backward through time to Ned’s death, the trigger
from which the
programme’s core sentimental mode – mourning – flows
outward, only to
return.
Sticky, slippery, smooth
Suppose that we distribute all sounds in Game of Thrones to the
body to which
it is most firmly lodged, beginning with vocal marks: Viserys’s
whispers;
Baelish’s growl; Melisandre’s droop when she utters ‘the night
is dark and full
of terrors’; Robert Baratheon’s bulbous laughter, the lightest
note in the entire
show. Game of Thrones’s underscore also contains dozens of
themes and
leitmotifs. There are the otherworldly strings accompanying
Jaqen, the low
synth of the cannibal Thenns, and the urgent drum of Stannis
Baratheon’s
martial theme that disappears after Blackwater and returns with
the rout of
Mance Rayder seasons later. Many other sorts of sounds attach
to characters.
Think of the tenderness of Ser Loras shaving Renly Baratheon’s
chest, of the

muted sound of Tywin gutting a stag in his first appearance on
screen, of the
creak of Walder Frey’s wooden throne. In each case, sounds exit
the actions
they illustrate with an affective surplus that decants into the
characters they
involve. Sounds like these are doubly sticky. Just as Joffrey is
more ‘present’
thanks to his association with the sound of the bowstring ratchet
on his
crossbow (the device with which he secures his first kill), his
ghost adheres to
that sound when Tyrion drags the device down the hall (4:10) to
kill Tywin
with the weapon most redolent of the incest of his house during
a debate over
the meaning of paternity.
Other sounds are less sticky, lending themselves to a play that
makes Game
of Thrones a little like a composition for the extended
techniques of unusual
instruments. Note how the series works out sonic properties of
the human
head. We hear the head of Viserys sizzle and thump in molten
gold, the head
of Catelyn spill and drop, the heads of Polliver and Kurt being
skewered
slowly, the head of Prince Oberyn burst, the head of Styr
crunched under a
hammer, to say nothing of the dozens of beheadings – all sounds

built by Foley
artists using cow skulls and watermelons, couch cushions and
old surf boards,
mud, chicken bones and bamboo.9 Listen with headphones
wrapping round
your own skull or with earbuds lodged within it, and these
sounds acquire a
certain inherent black humour. Fire sound is another example.
The fire in
Bran’s bedchamber holds on like a persisting life, while the
fireplace at
Harrenhal never seems to keep anyone warm. The fires in Gilly
and Sam’s
camps struggle to breathe, while the pyres on Dragonstone spurt
in ecstasy.
In the cave of the Brotherhood without Banners, the fire hums
lightly in one
episode (3:5), then roars alive in the next (3:6) during Sandor’s
trial by combat.
The large braziers that wrap the pillars in the throne room at
King’s Landing
burn silently in dozens of scenes until the opening of
‘Blackwater’ when their
roar fills the suddenly vulnerable room. The wildfire with which
Tyrion burns
the Baratheon fleet in that episode is gorgeous, sounding like a
stampede when
taken from far off and like sizzling butter when taken from
nearby; the sound
of the dragon fire is just as compelling, water-like and bursting.
A ‘slipperiness’
also characterises many songs, especially ‘The Rains of
Castamere’. ‘Rains’ is
whistled by Tyrion playfully (2:1), sung by the Brotherhood
ironically (3:2),
and played in the underscore in triumph at the conclusion of

episodes (2:10).
It is played exuberantly at the Red Wedding (3:9), and also
appears briefly in
the underscore when Cersei admits her incest to Tywin,
mocking the house
whose glory it signifies (4:10). However closely it is attached to
the Lannister
story, its sheer promiscuity suggests significantly more
elasticity than do the
themes of Baratheon, Stark or any other house.
Perhaps by logical necessity, sticky and slippery sounds exist
among a third
class of sound scattered throughout Game of Thrones, phrases
emptied of
previously held energy, hashtag-ready platitudes such as ‘By the
old gods and
the new,’ ‘What is dead may never die’, and ‘A Lannister
always pays his debts’.
The prominence of these phrases belies the irregularity of their
settings.
‘Winter is coming’ is uttered only seven times in season 1 and
twice in season
2; ‘Valar Morghulis’ is said just nine times in all forty episodes.
Yet when any
single platitude is repeated it seems to amplify all the others, as
does the
tendency of speakers to use the phrases only out of habit. The
denizens of
Qarth never seem sincere when they call their city ‘the greatest
that ever was
or will be’, and the proliferation of that cynicism toward these
smooth,
impregnable phrases lends Game of Thrones a low ironic
vibration, which
affects any lofty element. In the most recent season, for

example, ‘justice’ is a
major narrative objective: Oberyn seeks it for his sister’s
murder (4:7); Tywin
promises to arrive at it in the trial of Tyrion (4:3); Jon swears to
bring it to
Mormont’s killers (4:4); Daenerys tries to answer ‘injustice
with justice’ in her
dealings with the slavers of Essos. But the term is empty from
the get-go.
Promotions for the programme season show Tyrion laughing at
the very idea,
‘If you want justice, you’ve come to the wrong place.’
The last scenes of ‘The Mountain and the Viper’ (4:8), are
reflexive about
many of these issues. Awaiting his trial by combat in the
dungeon, Tyrion
reminisces about his intellectually disabled cousin Orson and
his obsession
with crushing beetles, one after another, while sitting in a
garden. Tyrion’s
curiosity itself became compulsive, as he explains to Jaime
while turning a pill
bug over in his fingers, ‘The first thing I did was ask him.
“Orson, why are you
smashing all those beetles?” He gave me an answer “Smash the
beetles. Smash
’em. Kuuh, Kuuh, Kuuh.”’ Tyrion decided to observe him, sure
there was
something to it,

I would eat my lunch in the garden, chewing my mutton to the
music of
kuuh, kuuh, kuuh. And when I wasn’t watching him, I was
thinking
about him. Father droned on about the family legacy and I
thought
about Orson’s beetles. I read the histories of Targaryan
conquests, did
I hear dragon wings? No. I heard Kuuh kuuh kuuh. And I still
couldn’t
figure out why he was doing it.
Does Orson represent the capricious gods, the programme itself,
perhaps its
audience? An answer comes in the next scene, with its combat
between the
suave Prince Oberyn and the percussive Ser Gregor Clegane.
During the fight,
Oberyn repeats an accusation, ‘You raped my sister, you
murdered her, you
killed her children,’ attempting to make Ser Gregor admit an old
crime, to
make a phrase achieve justice in resonating – ‘I’m going to
make you confess
before you die,’ he vows. Oberyn repeats the phrase six times,
dancing his way
through it, each line punctuating a daring twirl or lunge,
underscoring the
rhythm of the line; like Orson, Oberyn is a kind of musician.
When the felled
Gregor reaches up to trap Oberyn, dashing his teeth across the
arena, he
repeats the accusation with a difference. ‘I killed her children.
Then I raped
her. Then I smashed her head in, like this.’ With this anti-
confession, Gregor

mocks the accusation, justice and the very mechanism that
secures force to
vow. It is one of many instances of an aesthetic of self-cynicism
in the series,
in which an event related sincerely is immediately doubled with
a mockery of
itself (think of Tyrion’s rousing speech to the defenders of
King’s Landing
recreated in Theon’s buffoonish speech to the ironborn at
Winterfell). In the
arena, Clegane crushes Oberyn like a beetle, substituting true
justice with le
son juste. As Tyrion – haunted more by the sound of Orson’s
beetles than by
Orson or the beetles – ought to know, it doesn’t ‘mean that it
means’, it means
that it sounds.
Topography and stratigraphy
Let us move through the surface sonic topographies of Westeros
with our ears
more attentive than our eyes. Beyond the haunted forests, with
its hints of
electric guitar, comes Craster’s Keep, filled with the sound of
rooting pigs and
childbirth. Mance Rayder’s camp is nearby, with its sounds of
children at play,
laughter and giants. At the Wall we arrive at a key sonorous
entity. Listen to it
sing in ‘The Climb’ (3:6) as it bears grunts, axes, fabrics in
wind, vague

creaking, snapping cords and cracking crevasses. The Wall is
depicted in a way
that synchronises visual and auditory distances. In the almost
identical
opening sequences in the very first episode (1:1) and the most
recent (4:10),
the camera follows a Brother of the Night’s Watch moving out
from the Wall’s
tunnel, then cuts to a long shot from an oblique angle in which
the wallscape
diminishes as if now recorded from the very distance that the
camera has just
traversed. This hybridises what James Lastra calls the normative
‘enunciative’
and the ‘perceptive’ levels of cinematic narration; although
there is no
character whose perception we can imaginatively share, we hear
within a
perceptual field that would fit such a person in an ‘objective’
earspace of the
storyworld.10 The Wall thus feels both near and distant, both
immersive and
remote. It is a geographic feature and a sonorous idea, calling to
itself both the
guttural trickle of Tyrion ‘pissing off the end of the world’ and
Gilly’s reverent
gasp of wonder, the ridiculous and the sublime.
Continuing south, Castle Black showcases off-screen metalwork
and
swordplay, while the forests and empty castles of the Gift
provide some of the
most reverberant interiors in all Westeros. You could draw a
line from these
forts and mills to the Great Sept in King’s Landing, and thereby
trace a grade

from wild echo to sacred quiet that is also a drift from exposure
to repose, from
lawlessness to control, from supernatural horrors to political
horrors.
Winterfell is quite different from the true North, featuring the
warm sounds
of young laughter, of tin cups and dozing dogs, of conversations
in the close
earthen crypts, of raucous feasts, of bedchambers strewn with
heaps of
muffling pelts, and the silent godswood. Footsteps in Winterfell
fall on wood
or earth, while they tend to fall on stone in King’s Landing, and
on pebbles at
Pentos. Game of Thrones Foley art keeps character footfalls
remarkably
consistent across surfaces and lands – wherever he goes, Sandor
traipses
through Westeros in firefighter’s boots, while Cersei wears a
bride’s shoes.11
The sound of animals is at the heart of Game of Thrones, with
animals
present in many scenes (almost no exterior scene in the first
season lacks a
horse), and animal sound contributing to supernatural creatures
– dragon
voices, for instance, are composed of an amalgam of dolphin,
tortoise, seal and
lion. Certain locations have special connections to these sounds.
The Dothraki
horde is closely associated with horses, Winterfell has sleeping
baby wolves,

Pentos often has cicadas, the Dreadfort has dogs and Harrenhal
has flies.
Birdsong links all these soundscapes in the first two seasons.
Northern scenes
foreground crows, eagles, owls and ravens in contrast to the
songbirds and city
flocks at King’s Landing. Qarth sounds similar, but with denser
and more
melodious birdsong, perhaps reflecting the soundscape of
Croatia’s Lokrum
Island where those scenes were shot. In season 2, King’s
Landing adds the
sound of gulls bleeding into all interiors, a relentless reminder
that the city is
a seaport, one about to be attacked. The sound of birdsong at
King’s Landing
has a strange resonance with its characters: we often hear of
Lord Varys’s ‘little
birds’ bringing information; Baelish takes the mockingbird as
his sigil; and
Lady Olenna spends her visit ensconced in a garden behind her
‘foolish flock
of hens’ (3:2). So much in this world depends on the possession
of Sansa Stark,
whom everyone calls ‘little bird’ and ‘little dove’. It is no
surprise that she will
eventually fly from the nest-city with Baelish to the Eyrie, with
the howling
Moon Door, a ravenous hole of sky. As R. Murray Schafer has
pointed out,
birds tend to make sounds for many of the same reasons humans
do –
pleasure, fear, territorial-defence, nesting, flight, flocking,
feeding.12

These sonic topographies are not always flat. Some urge
themselves upward
and toward our attention at key moments, jutting into the
principal action of
the drama, like changes in stratigraphy. Early scenes at
Winterfell, for
instance, feature a high degree of porousness between sonic
foreground and
background. In her first appearance on screen (1:1), Arya Stark
listens to
archery in the courtyard when she is supposed to be stitching
indoors, a sonic
gendering of space that she transgresses. Later, the sound of
exterior horses,
howls and murmurs carry to Bran’s chamber during his
convalescence,
suggesting he is hardly safe there. Acoustically speaking, the
House of Stark
is rickety; it will be sacked after the sound of a relentless
unseen horn player
from siege forces beyond its walls drives Theon mad (2:10). If
some characters
are undermined by soundscapes, others remove them. Consider
the Purple
Wedding sequence preceding Joffrey’s death (4:2), which
features three tiers
of sound: a hubbub of guests, an unseen guitarist, and the
foreground of
primary characters sniping at one another during the festivities.
As Joffrey
loses patience and takes over proceedings with his tawdry ‘War
of the Five
Kings’ farce, a solemn underscore rises, seeming to emanate
from Sansa’s face
and drowning out the floor show. Soon the diegetic score

reduces to mortified
silence. While the king pours wine on Tyrion’s head, we hear
insects and birds,
along with shifting and coughing among the guests. Joffrey
chokes the
soundscape before poison chokes him, a fitting death for the
young king, one
of whose earliest regal acts was to order a satirist’s tongue cut
out (1:10).
Game of Thrones also sexualises its soundscapes, blurring the
edge between
fore- and backgrounds by dint of libidinal energy. In season 1
we are often
listening to King Robert’s giggling orgies alongside Jamie
Lannister stationed
outside his bedchamber, or catching the theatrical moanscape of
Baelish’s
pleasure house. On arriving in the city, Shae leans off a balcony
of the Keep to
hear a cloudy din of commerce, love and work, likening it to
smell. ‘I love the
stink, I love the noise,’ she says. ‘Cities make me want to fuck’
(2:1). A key
moment takes place in ‘You Win or You Die’ (1:7). Early in the
episode, we see
Petyr Baelish with Ros and Armeca, tutoring the two prostitutes
in pleasing
customers. Baelish treats his new acquisitions as hacks: ‘Is that
what they
teach you up in the North? And you – wherever you’re from, do

you have any
idea how ridiculous you sound?’ As the women continue under
his direction,
he tells us something of his early life, focusing on his rejection
by Catelyn Stark.
I was her little confidant, her plaything. She could tell me
anything,
anything at all.
She told me about all the horses that she liked, the castle she
wanted
to live in and the man that she wanted to marry, a northerner
with a jaw
like an anvil.
The ‘sexposition’ scene, as Myles McNutt has felicitously
dubbed it, is easily
criticised – Emily Nussbaum has pointed out that in learning to
fake
lesbianism for Baelish, the women are also faking it for us, in
an ‘Uroboros of
titillation’.13 As a soundscape, however, it is Baelish who
‘sounds ridiculous’,
losing his upper position by becoming auditory background,
seeming very
much the pitiful confidant relishing the feigned flattery of Ros’s
interest in his
sob story, his voice struggling to keep up with the overdone
moaning, his head
cocked as if seeking attention and failing.
Women’s voices can indeed command sonic stratigraphy,
organising the
shape of the near and the far, the dominant and the supine.
Consider the

Blackwater sequence, which begins with two aural worlds about
to collide.
With Stannis, Ser Davos and their forces out on the waves, we
hear straining
wood, rope, footsteps on deck and vomiting soldiers. In King’s
Landing, we
hear chimes, poured wine, and a boozy rendition of the
Lannister song. These
environments penetrate one another when the ringing of the
great bell in the
Keep signals the arrival of the attacking fleet. ‘They want to
play music with
us, let’s play. Drums!’ cries Ser Davos. Thereafter, the two
initial sonic
topographies unite into a male-coded battle serving as
background audio for
female-coded scenes in the interior of the Red Keep, where
Cersei, Sansa and
the women wait. Drinking heavily, the queen speaks frankly
about the
reduction to sex objects facing women, for whom she has only
contempt. ‘I
should have been born a man,’ Cersei declares. ‘I’d rather face
a thousand
swords than be shut up inside with this flock of frightened
hens.’ In the Keep,
the battle sounds become louder and more detailed with each
segue over the
course of the episode, until we can nearly pick out individual
words from the
invading soldiers. Just as all seems lost, Cersei brings Tommen

to the throne
room to poison him before the enemy comes, telling him of a
cub whose
mother promises ‘all the beasts would bow to the lion’. Her
haphazard fable
becomes voice-over, usurping all other sonic materials as we
cut to the
battlefield as fresh Lannister forces arrive and Stannis flees.
Soon, the off-
screen cacophony bursts in to the throne room. The long-
dreaded union of the
sonic worlds has come, but as a happy irony, bringing the face
of Lord Tywin.
As a narrative matter, victory has come through Tywin’s
strategy and Tyrion’s
cunning. As a sonic matter, however, it is Cersei’s voice that
has faced the
thousand swords and summoned a lion.
Over, off, away
Cersei’s voice-over in ‘Blackwater’ is one of only four
sustained instances of
this technique in Game of Thrones, all of which begin as on-
screen speech,
then become ‘acousmatic’, a sound studies term popularised by
Pierre
Schaeffer referring to sound whose source is unseen.14 In the
first (1:10), Jeor
Mormont speaks over shots of men mustering for the Great
Ranging beyond
the Wall, speaking as the actions he proscribes are being carried
out. The same
is true of another instance that takes place in the North, Yara
Greyjoy’s speech
to her sailors on their way to rescue Theon (4:6). Lord Baelish’s

voice-over
monologue from the third season (3:6), by contrast, works more
like Cersei’s,
by moving in space rather than time. As an ascending musical
phrase plays,
Littlefinger’s philosophy – ‘Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder’
– is laid out over
a scene of Joffrey walking away from the body of Ros (‘Many
who try to climb
it fail and never get to try again. The Fall breaks them.’), then a
scene of Sansa
Stark weeping as she watches a ship sail away (‘And some are
given a chance
to climb but they refuse. They cling to the realm, or the gods, or
love.
Illusions.’), before we finally turn to Jon and Ygritte climbing
the Wall (‘Only
the ladder is real. The climb is all there is.’). Voice-over
consecrates each
character uttering it, but only for Cersei and Baelish is there a
corresponding
extension of consciousness across the landscape of the fiction, a
supernatural
feel that makes them godlike ‘acousmêtres’ in Michel Chion’s
sense.15
Voice-over may be rare, but off-screen sound is not. Game of
Thrones
amplifies the scale of its visual materials by featuring never-
seen hammerers
who make on-screen events seem vaguely busier, never-seen
skirmishers who
die off-screen for the sake of scaling up the battles, never-seen
horn-players
who signal danger and are no more, never-seen witnesses who
over-narrate

visual events – ‘They’re coming up the wall’ at Blackwater
(2:9), ‘He’s gone,
our king is gone’ at Joffrey’s death (4:2). Chion calls this type
of sound ‘son
hors-champ’, sound whose source is unseen but which we
imagine to emanate
from something contiguous with visual materials that we do
see.16 In a scene
80| CRITICAL QUARTERLY, VOL. 57, NO. 1
in ‘The Wolf and the Lion’ (1:5), for instance, Ned Stark comes
to King
Robert’s tent to convince him to forgo competing at a
tournament. We hear
horses somewhere outside of the tent running back and forth
along a jousting
pitch, action that is completely invisible yet still remains ‘in’
the scene as an
illustration of and pressure on Ned and Robert’s debate. A more
curious
example takes place during Daenerys’s visit to the House of the
Undying, with
its many illusions – the false throne, the living Khal Drogo, her
unborn child.
Daenerys and the audience are aware of the sound of dragons in
the
background, their supernatural calls standing for the ‘real’
outside from which
Daenerys has strayed into a land of dreams. Many of the most
dreadful
moments of violence are ‘shown’ only through sound. The
killing of Lady,
Sansa’s direwolf, happens just barely off-screen at the knife-

edge – literally –
of the shot’s border (1:2), as does the killing of King Robert’s
illegitimate
infant (2:1), and the bursting of Oberyn’s head, which only
splatters into the
frame (4:8). The sexual violence at Craster’s Keep (4:4) is
narrated by half-
volume voices of unseen women (‘Don’t, you’re hurting me’)
making it more
‘graphic’ rather than less so. If a voice-over consecrates, off-
screen acousmatic
sound disturbs, perhaps because it reminds us that, as Dolar has
argued, no
sound fully resolves all its contradictions, suggestions and
discrepancies just
because its source becomes visible, leaving us with a vague
sense of being
tricked.17
On the other hand, the failure of a sound to reveal its source can
be
sickening, particularly in a medium which has long been
characterised by what
Altman calls a ‘sound hermeneutic’, which assures us that
‘when we hear a
sound, we find its source on the screen, thus giving us a sense
of presence, of
resolution’.18 With that in mind, consider the episode (2:4)
when Arya, Hot Pie
and Gendry are first taken to Harrenhal. As the camera pans the
grimy face
of the prisoners at the cursed castle we hear an off-screen man
pleading,
‘Please, please. No, no!’ Then we hear something turn, a chain
rattle and a
series of screams, as the camera settles on the face of an old

woman. There is
another final scream that cuts off. A chain drops, along with
something heavy,
as the woman stares forward, numb. ‘He’s dead. He was my son.
My sister was
three days ago, my husband the day before that.’ Amazingly, the
‘scene’ has
occurred without visible illustration of any kind, as a
radiophonic supplement
to the televisual space. As the episodes proceed, we learn that
the tortures at
Harrenhal are inherently acousmatic, involving a rat hidden
somewhat off-
screen inside a bucket as it tears apart the bodies of the
accused, an acousmatic
sound that eats you alive.
Voice-over is about power while son hors-champ is about terror.
Increasingly, Game of Thrones has been employing a third
technique about
affect, deepening visual experience with wordless or near-
wordless scenes.
‘Walk of Punishment’ (3:3) begins with a comic scene of Lord
Edmure trying
to land an arrow to set a funeral barge alight, until he is pushed
to the side by
Brynden the Blackfish. The next scene is similarly wordless,
with Cersei and
Tyrion arriving at the Small Council to find their seats missing,
then dragging
their chairs up to their preferred location at the table. Both

scenes are
comedies of status. In ‘The Children’ (4:10), more recently,
verbophobic
technique is used for several scenes of loss. We see Jon burning
the body of
Ygritte north of the wall, in silence; Varys loading Tyrion on a
ship, then
joining him after hearing the sound to the bell of the Red Keep;
and Daenerys
chaining two of her dragons in a dungeon as a pantomime,
mournfully. The
voice can be at its most powerful, it seems, when in silence.
Ear traps
Early in ‘And Now His Watch is Ended’, Tyrion Lannister
enters the chambers
of Lord Varys for counsel on how to manage an ongoing plot to
kill him. Varys
references his own history, relating how as a boy he was sold to
a sorcerer who
drugged him, emasculated him and burned his ‘parts’ in an
opaque magic
ritual as the helpless child listened, ‘The flames turned blue and
I heard a voice
answer his call.’ Varys opens a large crate as he explains his
haunted
fascination with the voice that he heard that day: ‘Was it a god,
a demon? A
conjurer’s trick? I don’t know. But the sorcerer called and a
voice answered.’
From the anecdote, Varys relates the story of his rise from
street thief to
spymaster, advising his troubled friend to suffer Cersei’s
manoeuvres with
patience. Soon the box opens and the lessons of the two stories

entwine.
‘Influence grows like a weed. I tended mine patiently until its
tendrils reached
from the Red Keep all the way across to the far side of the
world where I
managed to wrap them around something very special.’ And
when the lid of
the crate is removed, the light finds the terrified face of the
sorcerer himself,
gagged and trapped. ‘Hello, my old friend,’ says Varys. ‘It’s
been a long time.’
The scene ends before we know if Varys is successful, if his
influence can truly
recover the voice or the lack behind its lack. One imagines that
this is
impossible, that there is only a deferral always beyond the reach
of the
spymaster’s tendrils, a lost organ now become Lacan’s objet
petit a.19
The core of the scene lies in a mounting awareness, mediated by
shots of
Tyrion’s face, that a talk between the two men is in fact a
performance for a
third listener (the sorcerer), whose stream of ongoing perception
bursts upon
the dramatic space. That sequence of events is especially
forceful because
despite the fact that Game of Thrones is a large and sprawling
fiction, it is
actually mostly comprised of two-person dialogues. Think of
the many quiet
conversations that take place between two plotters as they stare
at the empty
iron throne, of the key sequences of confrontation with Cersei –
her final

intimate talk with Robert (1:5), her verbal duels with Ned (1:7),
Lord Baelish
82| CRITICAL QUARTERLY, VOL. 57, NO. 1
(2:1) and Prince Oberyn (4:5), and their memorable lines (‘You
win or you die’,
‘Power is Power’, ‘Everywhere in the world they hurt little
girls’). Many of these
scenes involve the contemplation of a void, from Varys’s voice
of flame and
Robert’s memory of Lyanna Stark, to shots of the empty throne
and Cersei’s
lost daughter Myrcella. The prevalence of the dyadic form lends
a surprising
minimalism to the fiction.
Eavesdropping is the contingency whereby the omnipresence of
the dyad
makes sense as a dramatic structure because it disturbs the
economy of
information and affects that the dyadic form tacitly vouchsafes.
Just such a
disturbance triggers the whole narrative, when Bran Stark
climbs the tower
at Winterfell and overhears a private exchange in the upper
chamber,
stumbling upon what we can truly call Game of Thrones’s
‘primal scene’
between Jaime and Cersei, and being castrated by it. The threat
of third
presence is sometimes visible – Arya eavesdropping on Tywin’s
war councils
at Harrenhal, Olyvar seducing and spying on Loras Tyrell – but

it is more
often only hinted at, a textural feature. We are forever hearing
of whisperers,
seeing attentive servants and squires in lingering cutaways. ‘I
know the walls
have ears’ Lady Olenna remarks, ‘but apparently the shrubbery
does, too’ (3:4).
The remark comes in the same episode as Varys’s tale, as does a
relevant
moment in Astropol, where Daenerys is an eavesdropper hiding
in plain
sight, aware of the underhanded remarks of the slave-masters
speaking a
foreign tongue during her negotiations with them. The moment
when
Daenerys reveals that awareness comes dramatically, when her
dragons attack
the slave-masters and she remarks ‘Valyrian is my mother
tongue’, a statement
signed by dragon fire. Her rise to power involves a related
tactic. Whenever
she seems to speak to the masters in the cities of Essos,
cutaways show that
her vows are actually intended for nearby slaves, whom the
camera catches
hanging from upper galleries. In speaking her ‘mother tongue’,
Daenarys
becomes their ‘Mhysa’, snaring the ears of the slavers by
persuading the ears
of the enslaved.
Of course, ultimately the ‘third presence’ in this or any
broadcast is the
audience at home; the mysterious creatures beyond the wall of
the fiction are
we. Our experience can vary tremendously from one platform

and one context
to another, as Game of Thrones’s fires, columns of cavalry and
battle sequences
sound quite different in surround sound, on headphones or from
tablet
computers. However, we are also often audiopositioned within
spatio-
temporal contours by choices that do not vary significantly, as
when we hear
events as if from the ears of wolves or beside flying dragons.
This positioning
can both provide and restrict information. During the third
season, for
instance, as Bran learns about the powers of warging from Jojen
Reed, many
of their conversations happen just barely outside of earshot (3:2
and 3:7), in
scenes miked to focus on bickering between Meera Reed and
Osha, thereby
keeping Bran’s emerging role intentionally unclear to us, a
vague character
always occupying vague spaces.
A powerful moment of trapping the listener’s ear comes at the
end of
‘Oathkeeper’ (4:4), in which we watch a White Walker carry
one of Craster’s
sons out into the frozen lands, the remotest geographic reach in
Game of
Thrones. The sequence is musical, with steady wind and even
paces on the

Walker’s undead horse, a bridle rattling like wind chimes as we
cross a frozen
lake. Following the silent dyad on their otherworldly journey –
how long does
it take? – the camera also takes unusually high- and low-angle
shots from the
Walker and baby’s points of view, a tender visual strategy.
Soon they approach
a circular altar of ice as distant bells and vague machines enter
the highly
abstract underscore. The child is touched and transformed into
something else
by the finger of a mysterious ‘Night King’. Three times in this
brief ceremony
the camera and the audio leave the airspace entirely, and we
watch and listen
from a foot below the baby, impossibly inside the ice of the
altar itself, as
helpless as Varys’s sorcerer-in-the-box, while the baby’s eyes
turn blue and
crystallise in our ears. Whether singing into ice or speaking
from fire, it seems,
Game of Thrones has us right where it wants us, just beyond the
edge of sonic
experience.
Notes
1 ‘The Watchers on the Wall’, Game of Thrones, prod. David
Benioff and D.B. Weiss, dir.
Neil Marshall, prod. HBO (8 June 2014). All episodes of Game
of Thrones henceforth
cited as (season:episode).
2 See my discussion of audioposition in Neil Verma, Theater of
the Mind: Imagination,

Aesthetics and American Radio Drama (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2012),
33–56.
3 Rick Altman, ‘The Material Heterogeneity of Recorded
Sound’, in Sound Theory, Sound
Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 22.
4 See Mladen Dolar, ‘The Burrow of Sound’, Differences, 22:2
(2011), 112–39.
5 Rick Altman, ‘Afterword: A Baker’s Dozen of New Terms for
Sound Analysis’, in Altman,
Sound Theory, Sound Practice (New York: Routledge, 1992),
251–2.
6 See John Lanchester, ‘When Did You Get Hooked?’, London
Review of Books, 35:7 (April
2013), 20–22.
7 See Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural
Form (Hanover NH:
Wesleyan, 1992), 72–112, and Carolyn Birdsall and Anthony
Enns, ‘Rethinking Theories of
Television Sound’, Journal of Sonic Studies, 3:1 (October
2012).
8 Michele Hilmes, ‘Television Sound: Why the Silence?’,
Music, Sound, and the Moving
Image, 2:2 (October 2008), 159.
9 Katie Calautti, ‘Game of Thrones: The Secrets Behind All the
Stabbings, Screams, and Sex
Scenes’, Vanity Fair (12 June 2014);
http://www.vanityfair.com/vf-hollywood/game-of
-thrones-sound-effects (accessed 25 June 2014).

10 See James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American
Cinema: Perception,
Representation, Modernity (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2000). 141–2.
http://www.vanityfair.com/vf-hollywood/game-of-thrones-
sound-effects
http://www.vanityfair.com/vf-hollywood/game-of-thrones-
sound-effects
11 See Calautti, ‘Game of Thrones’.
12 R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment
and the Tuning of the World
(Rochester VT: Destiny Books, 1992), 33.
13 See Emily Nussbaum, ‘The Aristocrats: The Graphic Arts of
“Game of Thrones”’, New
Yorker (7 May 2012);
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/05/07/the-aristocrats
(accessed 10 June 2014).
14 See Pierre Schaeffer, ‘Acousmatics’, in Audio Culture:
Readings in Modern Music, ed.
Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum,
2004.), 76–81.
15 See Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia
Gorbman (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1999), 15–30.
16 Michel Chion, Film, A Sound Art, trans. Claudia Gorbman

(New York: Columbia
Universtity Press, 2009), 249.
17 Dolar, ‘The Burrow of Sound’, 131.
18 Rick Altman, ‘Television/Sound’, in Studies in
Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass
Culture, ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1986), 46–7.
19 See Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge
MA: MIT Press, 2006), 34–57.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/05/07/the-aristocrats
MUSC 2016 / FILM 2016
Film Score Composers:
Alexander Nevsky (Sergei Eisenstein, 1938): Sergei Prokofiev
• Russian classical composer of ballet, opera, orchestra, cantata
The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957): Eric Nordgren
• Swedish composer trained as classical musician; wrote scores
for 60+ Swedish films
Saladin (Youssef Chahine, 1963): Angelo Francesco Lavagnino
• Italian film composer
Robin Hood (Wolfgang Reitherman, 1973): Roger Miller and

George Bruns
• Roger Miller: American country music star
• George Bruns: American jazz and swing band performer, and
film composer for a dozen
films
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Terry Gilliam and Terry
Jones, 1975): Neil Innes
• British satirist, "pop" musician, and composer, collaborated
frequently with Monty Python
troupe (appears in the film as well)
• film made about him: The Seventh Python (Burt Kearns, 2008)
1. God Choir (Neil Innes)
2. Fanfare (Neil Innes)
3. Camelot Song (Graham Chapman, John Cleese & Neil Innes)
4. Sunrise Music (Neil Innes)
5. Sir Robin's Song (Eric Idle & Neil Innes)
6. Knights Of Ni (Neil Innes)
7. Monks Chant (Neil Innes)
The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner, 1987): Mark Knopfler
• Scottish singer-songwriter, rock guitarist (in Dire Straits), 146
soundtrack credits!!
The Canterbury Tales (Jonathan Myerson, 1998): Ben Park
• British composer who has worked on film, television, dance
and theatre
• trained as classical and jazz musician, and also performed as

member of a funk band and a
saxophone quartet: known as versatile composer
Vision aus dem Leben der Hildegard von Bingen (Margarethe
von Trotta, 2009): Christian Heyne
and Hildegard of Bingen
• Christian Heyne: German sound designer and composer
• Hildegard of Bingen: 12th-century nun, composer, and writer
Game of Thrones (2011), Season 1, episode 1 ("Winter is
Coming"): Ramin Djawadi
• German film and television score composer (studied music in
USA); 61 soundtrack credits

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