One more item, lightly edited, from the February 7, 2022, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound (tinyletter.com/disquiet).
As always, if you find sonic news of interest, please share it with me, and (except with the most widespread of news items) I’ll credit you should I mention it here.
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I truly, personally, don’t give a hoot about spoilers — quite fittingly, at age 11 I saw the original Star Wars movie (later A New Hope) months after it came out, and I knew the entire story by heart, thanks to chatting with friends who had seen it, by the time I finally sat down and faced the screen, popcorn in hand, after being interviewed in the theater parking lot for a local radio station about the concept of people standing in long lines — but I will mention that there is a spoiler in This Week in Sound this week. It’s about the penultimate episode of the first (and only?) season The Book of Boba Fett, the TV series. I put it at the very end of this week’s issue of the newsletter, so you had to scroll past everything else if you wanted to read it, and it appears at the bottom of this post, after a (manga-style) vertical ellipsis. This item has nothing to do directly with the title of this week’s issue, “Aliens without Vocal Cords” (the title relates to a Becky Chambers novel I’m reading). I do find the spoiler situation somewhat ironic: we called these popular films “blockbusters,” and now we watch them at our convenience in the privacy of our homes. Star Wars was as indebted, even in the first movie, to the concept of serials as it was to Japanese cinema. Anyhow, yeah, spoiler down below. Way down below.
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▰ Why Luke Skywalker sounded that way in The Book of Boba Fett: “the vocal performance used program called Respeecher, collating archival material and recordings of Hamill’s performances as a young man and creating a soundbank to stitch new material together.” Awkward as the effect is at times, in combination with the improving deep fake visuals, it seems like within a decade we’ll have eternal actors at the full discretion of neural-network-commanding directors. At which point there will be a huge revival of Dogme 95, the vow of realistic filmmaking proposed in a 1995 manifesto by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg.
gizmodo.com