It is in the fusion of sound and image that our perception, comprehension and experience of sound film are centered. Silence The experimental composer John Gage once sought to experience total silence. The scientific and philosohical notion then proposed was that if someone capable of hearing exists in a space for a duration of time, then sound will be experienced. A further correlation can be made with film in that sound is virtually always 'happening' in film - even though we may not be conscious of its occurence. Just as the volume of a sound is determined by our proximity to its source, the loudness or softness of a sound in a film will generally correspond to the pertinent narrative voice and position in terms of, respectively, 'nearness' and 'farness'.
All sounds occur in space.
The amount and type of reverberation that accompanies a sound, giving it its particular accoustic character, are determined by the characteristics of the space in which it is occuring. In films which feature a comparatively sophisticated sound design, the spatial effect of a sound will match the visual space depicted. These properties of sound and how it occurs within a realistic spatio-temporal acoustic reality form the basis of objective states within the film's fiction. Visual rhythm - how forms and shapes are placed within the picture frame 2. Cinematic rhythm' is thus determined essentially by the relationships between the editing of the images and the editing of the sounds.