Walter Murch’s revolutionary sound design technique worldizing aesthetically defines George Lucas’s 1973 film American Graffiti. Worldizing tries to emulate how a sound would be heard in the particular location of each scene. In this episode of Film Formally, Devan and Will discuss the technique and how Murch uses it to emphasize the narrative needs of American Graffiti.
Walter Murch is a famous editor and sound designer who worked on movies like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, and The Godfather, and the re-release of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil.
In this episode, we discuss:
A brief history of sound recording techniques from radio to sound films.
What exactly is worldizing, and how Walter Murch recorded sounds.
Wet mixes versus dry mixes, and how each can help direct the audiences’ attention.
How Murch’s poetic sound designs and recording techniques express the themes of American Graffiti.
Comparing the sound designs of other George Lucas films, such as THX and Star Wars.
Orson Welles’s use of worldizing in the 1958 film Touch of Evil, and the surrounding controversies around the opening scene’s new sound design by Walter Murch in the 1998 re-release.
And how contemporary sound designers “worldize” through digital means.
Additional resources:
You can learn more about worldizing through these two interviews with Walter Murch.
In this video, Murch describes the principles of localizing a sound to a given space, the obsoletion of worldizing by digital tools, and goes in-depth into the process of worldizing and some of its more specific technical aspects.
And in this video, Murch describes worldizing, and gives credit for its conception to Orson Welles.
Episode Transcript:
Will Ross: Hey, I'm Will Ross
Devan Scott: And I'm Devan Scott.
Will Ross: We're friends and independent filmmakers. I am an editor in sound designer. Devan is a cinematographer and colorist.
Devan Scott: On today's episode we're going to talk about how the famed editor and sound designer Walter Murch, who did movies like "Apocalypse Now," "The Godfather," and the re-release of "Touch of Evil," created a revolutionary sound design technique and the way it was used in George Lucas's "American Graffiti."
Will Ross: Welcome to Film Formally. So today, you specifically, but I'm also happy to talk. So today we're going to talk about Walter Murch's use of worldizing, particularly in the flagship for the technique, "American Graffiti." This is one that you were really excited about. I'm excited...
Devan Scott: Because I like echo.
Will Ross: Yeah. And it's -
Devan Scott: I stood far from the mic so that it echoed. That's worldizing.
Will Ross: That's worldizing. It's not what worldizing is. That's not even close. Worldizing for those of you don't know is so famous of a technique it's practically proprietary to one Walter Murch. He's famous as an editor. Most notably, he worked on a lot of films with Francis Ford Coppola, including "Apocalypse Now," "Godfather Two." He also did work with George Lucas, including sound design work on "THX" and on "American Graffiti." In the late 60s, Walter Murch developed this technique called worldizing. And the idea of worldizing is to try to make the sound that you hear in the film sound the same way it would in the space that you're looking at. Now a lot of sound that is put into movies is recorded in a studio and then dubbed in after the fact. So worldizing is a way to make it sound more accurate to the space.
Devan Scott: It makes it sound diegetic to me, coming from the world of the film. They would essentially record the entire soundtrack from a couple of different mic perspectives. And then they would have, I believe, three or so versions, from different perspectives to try and mix the wet mix and a really wet mix, and then mix between those three.
Will Ross: Yeah, so rewinding on this, I think a good way to introduce it is even going back into the 1930s when you had radio as the dominant, ongoing transmissive mode of storytelling, with sound. In movies, at that time, micing, or setting up microphones was still so technically hamstrung that there was really not all that much you could do to change up the nature of the synchronized sound. But in radio, given that everything is dependent on the microphones and recording space, and you're not tethered by the camera, or what the image is showing or having to be synchronized to it, you could do anything. So people would put the mic on the other side of the recording studio, brushed stuff up against the mic, but people would use an echo chamber where they have a room that is specifically set up to catch a lot of reverberations and echoes of the sound. And they would play back a clean, they recorded sound in that chamber. And the result of playing that in that echo chamber is that it would be really echoey and have a lot of reverb. And so you could then use that in your radio show to make it seem like, "oh, they're in a big church, they're in a cave, they're in whatever," right? And this echo chamber technique winds up getting used in movies quite a bit. One good example is if you ever watched "Citizen Kane," the Thatcher library scene where the reporter goes to this big library to read some unpublished parts of a memoir from one of the characters is just full of reverberation. It sounds like they're in a massive space, which gets across the idea not only of the personal wealth, and stature of the character, but of the fact that he's left nothing behind right? His life is ultimately empty. And that almost certainly was not how the sound was recorded within that actual space. That was probably, even the dialogue was probably recorded after the fact. And then dubbed in because that was filmed on a set probably in the studio, they probably actually had fairly clean sound conditions. It's not just how echoey something sounds that gives you a sense of what's called sound perspective. It's also how loud the sound is the pitch of the sound and other modulations that occur when a sound is farther away or in a certain space. So there's a lot of different techniques that people in sound mixing use. The most common way to make something sound farther away in a movie, and this is what I tend to use, is just leveling it down. Just making it quieter. The advantage to that is that if you have someone speaking from far away, and you just level them down without giving them any echoy-ness or reverberation on their voice is that their voice is still quite clear while still communicating intuitively to the audience, "oh, this guy's farther away because we hear him less." It matches. In the case of Walter Murch, the problem with adopting that technique is that it's pretty limited in the kinds of spaces it can suggest. An echo chamber is just that it's a chamber. It's sort of a big empty space, you can playback sounds in it, and it will give you a reverberant version of that that sounds big and empty and hollow. It's not actually that good at capturing all the different little characteristics of a sound within a space. So let's say you're in a church and you shout, it's going to sound different than if you're in a parking garage and you shout. In a parking garage, you have all these cars and air ducts and metallic surfaces for the sound to bounce off of. And that'll give it a certain effect, and a metallic twing and the echoes will be bouncing around at different rates. The sound will decay in different ways. So because of that, Walter Murch develops this technique where he will record the sound cleanly. Get a nice, just good recording often of the studio recording of a sound, then he'll take that sound out into an environment that either is the same environment or as a very similar environment to the one that will be shown on screen in the film, then he will playback that recorded sound that cleanly recorded sound and at the same time on another device, record that sound on a microphone. The result of that is that he gets a recording that matches the space that matches how that sound will actually behave within a given space. The final advantage to worldizing is that you have what's called the dry recording, that's the one that they originally brought into the space, and the wet recording, that's the one that they got with all the reverberations and sound characteristics of the room. And you can bring those back into your mixing space, and you can decide how loud you want them to be relative to each other. Because if you just have the wet recording going, then often it just sounds very, very muddy and indistinct. And it doesn't really pop in the way you might want in a film, or it might not be clear enough. And so you'll balance the wet mix and the dry mix against each other until you find the desired effect. And that's the gist of worldizing as a technique. That's just what it is, how it works. The question of how it's used is when it gets really interesting. It's an ingenious enough effect as it stands just as a technique. But as far as its artistic application, especially in "American Graffiti," it gets pretty wild. You need to say something I've been talking for like five minutes straight.
Devan Scott: How about we hear a comparison? Let's listen to a dry track from "American Graffiti"
American Graffiti Soundtrack: Sample of the original recording of "Barbara Ann" by The Regents plays.
Devan Scott: Let's listen to that same number as heard in "American Graffiti."
American Graffiti Soundtrack: Sequence with "Barbara Ann" from "American Graffiti" plays.
Devan Scott: So that bit of "Barbara Ann" occurs when Kurt played by Richard Dreyfuss is running down the street and cars, all of which are tuned into the same radio station, move in and out of frame. And following those cars is the sound perspective of each of these individual radios playing the same song which gets this kind of whirlwind of audio. So I think the genesis for this idea came from Lucas's original. He wanted to reverse the usual relationship between music and diegetic sound in film. He wanted in lieu of a non-diegetic score for there to be digesting music at all times playing. The film is essentially this non stop cavalcade of pop music as heard through various audio instruments, as played by the town's one DJ, it seems Wolfman Jack. Creating that soundscape almost feels like the whole point behind the film. And then everything else is kind of built on top of that.
Will Ross: On a purely literal level, you would, you could stand on a sidewalk and have five cars drive by, and they would not only all be listening to the same song, but because it's a radio broadcast and it's contiguous, everyone is listening to the same part of the song at the same time. So that sense of the communal effect of radio in these open window, often open top cars driving around the streets for young people, is a really, really important idea in "American Graffiti." It's really thematically important in the sense that these kids are, for their childhood, all sort of in a way living to the same song, living to the same rhythm and lifestyle. And at the end of the movie, there's a pivotal moment when a car playing a song explodes and the song just abruptly cuts off. And that's, I think, a signal that pretty soon all these kids are going to be going off and listening to their own songs, living their own distinct lives and coming to extremely different ends.
Devan Scott: The film's kind of worldizing doesn't just follow, you know, physical, prosaic rules too. A lot of the times it feels like the decision is made as to how quote-unquote wet the mix should be. Those decisions often feel more driven by the emotional needs of the scene than how a situation would actually sound, you know, in that moment. I think especially of the intro to "Only You" by The Platters that plays right before Kurt makes his phone call late in the film. And as the camera cranes down towards this car, we start with the music kind of filling our speaker. And as we move in closer to the car, the music becomes more and more diegetic sounding. This is kind of the opposite of what cameras doing, right? The cameras moving closer to the car, we should be getting closer to the source of the music, instead we're not, we're actually moving away from it. It's a scene transition. But it also is kind of leveraging the film's language of reverb to create an emotional state that feels more, I guess poetic is a good way to put it, then just purely descriptive of where the camera is where the character is.
Will Ross: Yeah, it's immediately after the explosion that cuts off "Green Onions," and so the effect is that now that that explosion has cut off that shared communal music, as we move in closer to the character, we're moving farther away from that music he's listening to. The music is sort of passing out. It's a very sort of subtle, implicated dramatic effect, but it's really good. Another thing going on here is Walter Murch talks quite a lot about worldizing, and how he mixes the wet and the dry version of the sounds as a matter of focus, and I mean that literally as in depth of field focus, like the way that a camera will throw part of the image out of focus, while the other part is in focus. So, he thinks of a wetter mix as throwing the audio mix out of focus, and a dry mix as throwing it into focus. And that makes a lot of intuitive sense, because it's more indistinct if it's out of focus, and if it's out, and if it's out of focus than the stuff that's in focus, ie the stuff that's dry or unclear in the mix is much easier to hear and much easier to focus on. One of the best scenes in the film, I think, maybe the best scene of George Lucas's career is the "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" dance sequence, when two characters move out onto the dance floor at a big school dance and "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" starts playing it's quite clear. It's fairly crisp sounding. It's a relatively dry mix. And once they get onto the dance floor, Walter Murch just mixes it full on wet. They're out there dancing to this song, but it is so indistinct that there's barely even a perceptible rhythm to it.
American Graffiti Soundtrack: "You didn't. I ask you out." "What do you mean, you asked me out?" With "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" playing in background.
Will Ross: And the music becomes so muddy that it takes on this kind of ominous portent. And as they're dancing it, they're having this really harrowing discussion and you can see their relationship breaking up right in front of you. So the music is being thrown out of focus and these characters and their traumas being cast into really sharp relief. And I think that's a really great example of the film, throwing in this clear divide between the culture that these kids reveling and escape to, which is predominantly a musical culture, and that is an escape hatch for them to some extent and that ultimately, the music is not a part of them it is a thing separate from them that they're trying and often failing to get closer to as a means to make sense of their lives.
Devan Scott: I think that scene is a great example of the film's complex relationship between its camera direction, and its sound perspective. As a cinematographer, I always see the position of the camera as: "where do you want the audience to be." If the cameras 1000 yards away on a telephoto lens, but even if it's a close up, the audience will know that they're observing something from far away, the audience can do that math in their head, even subconsciously. I think Lucas uses that to great effect here. Where the scene goes from a medium distance, you know, the camera feels 12 to 15 feet away, tracking shot. Then at one point it cuts to a point of view shot from the audience's perspective of the two characters dancing. It's on a long lens. We see two characters in the foreground, muddying our frame. And I think most importantly, the sound perspective on the actual characters changes. We see them talking, but we don't hear them. We are seeing how this conversation actually looks to everyone around them, which is that it's kind of innocuous. And then we abruptly cut to a handheld close up on a wide angle lens with the camera very close to these two characters. And they're whispering now and we can hear them whispering. So we have camera perspective, following our diegetic sound perspective, but our music perspective, unifying all that. And on top of all the other things you said, and that gap between the two that kind of widens and closes throughout that scene, I think is almost this mortar. It ties all the other elements, the perspective shifts, together into a coherent whole. And allows Lucas the camera director to do some pretty jarring stuff without actually being jarring.
Will Ross: It's a lacerating scene.
Devan Scott: I feel like people who think that "Star Wars" the first film was a fluke of some sort, and I have not paid enough attention to "American Graffiti."
Will Ross: I think the divide, even though "American Graffiti" was a much more conscious attempt to make a popular film then "THX" was, and "Star Wars" was really not that crazy coming after "American Graffiti." I think the stylistic to jump from "American Graffiti" to "Star Wars" is easily the biggest jump in his career. The sound design really reflects that in "Star Wars." It's obviously a different sound designer Ben Burtt. And Star Wars also has one of the greatest sound designs of all time, but it's a completely different toolset. Yes, invented sounds very, very dry mix, at least in terms of foley and sound effects and totally different use of music.
Devan Scott: Well, I think it shows that the auteur kind of behind the sound design of "Star Wars" was basically someone who was hands on with the foley sound designer. And Walter Murch, who I would say it's pretty clearly the auteur behind at least the implementation of the sound of "American Graffiti" is a re-recording mixer. He approaches it from a different kind of set of presumptions about what his places in the film. It's also worth noting that Walter Murch was not the first person to arrive independently at this concept of they would later call worldizing. Someone beat him to it.
Will Ross: Yeah, as Walter Murch personally discovered, while he was doing the 1998 reconstruction of "Touch of Evil," Orson Welles actually had come up with more or less the same concept a couple of decades before, or at least one decade before Walter Murch did. Orson Welles had devised this means of recording music for "Touch of Evil" that would make it sound like it was played over these cheap street speakers because "Touch of Evil" has all these scenes where music is being played just from these speakers in houses or in the streets, and Welles didn't want them to just sound like they were clean recordings. But he also didn't want them to sound like well polished echo chamber sounds either. He came up with this process to just take the recorded sound out into the back alley behind the sound studio, and as he put it louse up the sound and then he recommended recording it again on just a crappy speaker to even further degrade the quality of the sound. The difference between that and Murch's approach to worldizing is that you would only have access to mix one track, because Welles, at the time, did not have the technology to be able to mix between the wet track and the dry track of the re-recorded sound, but it is the exact same principle at work. And I think besides being a pretty fun example of how you should never presume that you're the first person to come up with a technique, or that you know the first time a technique was done in film or in an art form. Besides all that, I think it's a really good example of the question of intent. If you've seen more than one version of "Touch of Evil," you probably know that the famous opening shot has music over it in the original version of the film and in the preview cut of the film. And in the 1998 reconstruction that Walter Murch cut, and sound mixed to try to approximate Welles's intentions, the opening shot does not have Franz Waxman's score over it, but is a bunch of diegetic sounds. So the cars the sounds of people walking by the music playing over the loudspeakers, and it's actually a criticism of the scenes sometimes that it sounds too modern for a film that was made in the 50s of "Touch of Evils" budget. It just does not sound like something that could have or would have been done. I personally have not seen the documentation to be sure exactly what it would have sounded like or would be possible. I think, on one hand, it's certainly true that the mix is very sophisticated in that sequence. It's pretty technically advanced, it's probably not something that Welles, even if he had the bleeding edge technology to do it at the time, I doubt he would have had the time or budget in order to accomplish it. So you get into these tricky questions because of that of these sort of two different men who had this very, very distinct idea and how you reconcile completing one of their incomplete works when you're using advanced technology to achieve the desires of someone who only had limited means at the time. I just think that's interesting. We might we might end up cutting all this, but I just think it's interesting. While we're talking about the difference in means and technology over time, I think it's worth noting that today, for the last couple of decades, worldizing, as a technique is pretty much obsolete. It is very rarely done deliberately, especially in an industry professional setting.
Devan Scott: I think depends on maybe how you look at what constitutes the technique, right? The means, for example, you know, recording in George Lucas's backyard with loudspeakers bouncing off the walls, those are pretty much obsolete. We do it, as Lucas would say, with computers now. But the lessons learned from developing those techniques the idea that you should essentially shave off the sharp edges of sounds. We basically now just modeled those worldizing techniques and I'd say we have a digital worldizing now.
Will Ross: Yeah, no, that's exactly what I mean. And even Murch no longer uses analog worldizing techniques. He does it entirely through those digital tools. It can be pretty difficult you know, to worldizing something and capture the exact same effect of certain spaces but there is a point at which you move from the subliminal to the unnoticeable
Devan Scott: Do you think that's the next thing that they're gonna, you know, kind of old school people will latch on to? The whole like, "film is more authentic." So now it's "no no worldizing in the real world it's more authentic than digital."
Will Ross: No. Nobody cares about sound. (Laughs at self).
Devan Scott: Can you imagine if there was like a Christopher Nolan of worldizing? "I'm gonna do everything on a Nagra recorder."
Will Ross: That's what I mean. The microphone, the boom mic is not as famous as the camera. And so because of that, people are much quicker to overinflate visual techniques and, to misinterpret the tools and their effects than they are with sound. Anyone listening to this, even if you're already impressed by "American Graffiti" should go back and really listen to it. And listen to how that perspective changes even moment to moment, and how that affects the film.
Devan Scott: I think it's worth noting too, that I've, as far as I know, I can't think of any films that have used this technique in such a multifaceted way and so extensively. I mean, "Apocalypse Now" has the single most famous example of worldizing the "Ride of the Valkyries" scene. Murch has used this technique before and since "American Graffiti," it's worth noting that the first time we use this technique was actually in the wedding scene that opens "The Godfather." It's worth noting, too, that the version of "American Graffiti" that you're hearing here and you're almost certainly to see in the wild is not in this version, they later kind of juiced up the sound mix. In the mid to late 70s the film was re-released. Murch kind of use it as a dry run this re-release to create new stereo mix to prepare for the multitrack 5.1 mixing that he'd be asked to do in "Apocalypse Now." So the version you're seeing is actually not the original mono mix that people saw in theaters. It is a significantly almost certainly I think, improved version because Murch I think greatly improved as a technical mixer in those years. You can compare this to you know, the scene that opens "The Godfather" to see what he was actually up to in the early 70s.
Will Ross: I would kill to hear -- I would just love to hear the original mix of Graffiti. I've never heard it.
Devan Scott: If anyone has an original print of "American Graffiti" with the first mono mix. Please let us know.
Will Ross: Get the optical track to us, please.
Devan Scott: That was good. Any any final notes? We should wrap up on?
Will Ross: Yes. We'll be doing a live show this Sunday, in Beverly Hills.
Devan Scott: That's not true or legal.
Will Ross: Yeah, American Graffiti, I mean there's a reason why when people talk about worldizing it is virtually always, not only the first reference, but the primary point of discussion. It is that singular of a sound design that movie. And it's really, really worth really closely listening to.
Devan Scott: I for the life of me, I've not been able to encounter any films that I think meaningfully build on this. Maybe "Mad Max: Fury Road," because there was a flame thrower guitar.
Will Ross: What are you talking about? We're keeping all this.
Devan Scott: See ya!
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