Resumen de A Symphony of Noises: Revisiting Oskar Sala’s ‘Geräuschmontage’ for Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’ (1963)
The soundtrack of Alfred Hitchcock’s TheBirds (1963) is particularly remarkable notonly because of the absence of a conventionalorchestral underscore, but alsobecause the terrifying sounds of theaberrant birds were actually synthesized byOskar Sala using the Mixturtrautonium, anelectronic musical instrument of his owndevelopment. The examination of the film’s soundtrack hasshown that Sala’s organization and utilizationof bird sounds are akin to that of moreconventional, tonal sonic material inHollywood films. Firstly, the montage of birdsounds which accompanies the title sequencepossesses a formal structure whichresembles a classical Hollywood filmoverture and takes on several expositionalroles conventionally assigned to a film’sopening musical passage. Furthermore, thegull cries take on the function of a leitmotifwhile the stylized bird sounds performemotive functions usually ascribed to filmmusic. In addition to that, the hostile birdsare characterized by electronically synthesizedbird sounds –a representation whichcan be understood within the broadercontext of mankind’s ambivalence towardsmachines and technological progress ingeneral. The consideration of the musicalprovenance and materiality of these birdsounds affords us a moment of reflection onthe sound effect-music divide in film as wellas on the perceived aesthetic values ofsounds in the noise-music continuum.The research for this article was facilitated bythe funding provided by the Leibniz Associationwithin the project ‘Materiality of MusicalInstruments’ at the Deutsches Museum,Munich.
