Sound & Music

Diegetic sound comes from inside the story world — dialogue, footsteps, a radio the characters can hear — while non-diegetic sound, like the score or a narrator, exists only for the audience.

Dolby Atmos is an object-based surround format: instead of fixed channels, sounds are placed as objects in 3D space, including overhead, and rendered to whatever speaker layout the room has.

Dubbing replaces a film's original dialogue with a new recording — usually a translation performed by voice actors and fitted to the lip movements on screen.

A lavalier is a tiny clip-on or hidden microphone worn by the actor, usually wireless, that records dialogue close to the mouth when a boom can't get in.

Foley is the performance of everyday sounds in sync with picture — footsteps, cloth, props, punches — recorded in a studio by Foley artists after the shoot.

Lip sync is the match between mouth movements on screen and the voice we hear — essential in dubbing, ADR, music performance and AI-generated talking characters.

ADR (automated dialogue replacement, once called looping) is re-recording an actor's lines in a studio after the shoot, in sync with picture, to fix noise, change a line or improve a performance.

Sound mixing is the final balance of all tracks — dialogue, effects, Foley, music — for level, space and emotion on a mixing stage; sound editing, by contrast, builds and cuts those tracks.

A film score is original music written by a composer for a specific film, timed to picture to shape emotion, pace and theme; it differs from a soundtrack of pre-existing songs.

A soundtrack is the music of a film — most often the songs, licensed or original, released as an album; technically the word also means the whole audio track on film.

Voice-over is speech heard over the picture from someone not speaking on screen at that moment — a narrator, a character's inner thoughts, a documentary commentary.

Asynchronous sound doesn't match what we see at that moment — a sound from another place or time, or deliberately out of step with the image — used for contrast, irony or subjectivity; accidental drift out of sync is simply an error.

Location sound is everything recorded on set during the shoot — dialogue, ambience, room tone, wild lines — by the production sound mixer and boom operator, in sync with picture.

A polar pattern shows how sensitive a microphone is from each direction — omni, cardioid, supercardioid, shotgun — and decides how much of the room you record along with the voice.

Room tone is a recording of a location's 'silence' — its hum, air and acoustics — captured on set so editors can fill gaps and smooth cuts in dialogue.

A sound bridge carries sound across a cut — the next scene's audio starts early or the last scene's lingers — tying two shots together and pulling the viewer forward.

Mickey mousing is scoring that hits on-screen action note for note — every step, fall or blink gets a musical accent — typical of classic cartoons and used in live action for comedy or pastiche.

The Shepard tone is an auditory illusion of layered tones an octave apart that seems to rise (or fall) forever, used in scores to build unrelenting tension.

A leitmotif is a short musical theme tied to a character, place or idea that returns — often varied — every time that element appears or is evoked.

A film composer writes the original score for a film — themes, cues and orchestration timed to picture — working from spotting sessions with the director and editor.