Tuesday 21 July 2020

Sound Effects

"Inconstant Star," Chapter II."

Film music changes pace appropriately although a more realistic kind of screen drama deploys hand-held cameras and improvised dialogue without musical accompaniment.

Sound effects are impossible in prose fiction although Poul Anderson often gets the wind or the weather to punctuate dialogue or inner reflections. See Hunnish Midnight.

Anderson does arrange musical accompaniment in his second Man-Kzin Wars story. When Tyra Norbo tells Robert Saxtorph that her father and his kzinti companion departed never to be seen again thirty years ago:

"By sheer coincidence, the musician changed to a different tune... The army song of mourning.'" (p. 190)

Saxtorph responds with shock as the readers, or a cinema audience, should.

Earlier, again probably at an appropriate moment, the man playing the "musicomp" had set it "...to violin mode with orchestral backing..." (p. 184)

The musicomp joins the "omnisonor" and the "omniplayer" as a future musical instrument.

3 comments:

S.M. Stirling said...

IIRC, I invented the "musicomp"... 8-).

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

I will have to read the whole of MAN-KZIN WARS.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And in "Territory," Anderson began that story with a short musical score!

Ad astra! Sean