Spellbound by Sound: What We Learn from Alfred Hitchcock’s
Notes on Sound
Michael Slowik
Hitchcock Annual, Volume 25, 2021, pp. 1-30 (Article)
Published by Hitchcock Annual
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/hit.2021.0000
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/860070
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MICHAEL SLOWIK
__________________________
Spellbound by Sound: What We Learn
from Alfred Hitchcock’s Notes on Sound
When can we say that a Hollywood director is the
author or “auteur” of sound techniques found in his or her
films? And if a director should be considered a “sound
auteur,” which techniques might fairly be considered part
of his or her “personal style?” Though authorship has long
been a major focus in film scholarship and criticism, such
questions remain difficult to answer, and for good reason.
The earliest auteur critics in the 1950s and 1960s defined an
auteur’s style in terms of what a director could reasonably
affect on the set: visual elements like shot composition,
staging, lighting, and, by extension, a larger “worldview” or
“interior meaning.” 1 Sound, a domain often shaped
extensively during postproduction, was generally avoided
in defining the realm of the auteur. Even today, while
important exceptions exist, historians often struggle to
make definitive statements on the extent to which particular
directors molded their soundtracks.2
The films of Alfred Hitchcock, however, give historians
an unusual opportunity to trace a director’s contribution to
the soundtrack in detail for three main reasons. First,
Hitchcock had the distinction and good fortune through
much of his career of serving as a producer-director, which
often gave him considerable control over the postproduction
process. Hitchcock had already gained a reputation as a
prominent British producer-director when David O.
Selznick hired him in 1939, and outside of a few films for
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MICHAEL SLOWIK
Selznick, Hitchcock often held a producer role and thus
could better supervise sound in his U.S. films too.3 Second,
Hitchcock prided himself on closely monitoring every aspect
of filmmaking, including sound. Third, and most important,
Hitchcock provided extraordinarily detailed “notes on
sound”—sometimes referred to as “dubbing notes”—for
many of the films he directed. Hitchcock’s dubbing notes are
no secret: he mentioned making a “sound script” for each
film in his famous interview with François Truffaut and
historians have quoted passages from them.4 Yet to date, no
one has provided any comprehensive analysis of these notes
to determine what they might reveal about Hitchcock’s style
or degree of control with regard to sound: what recurring
concerns or techniques might be uncovered, and what such
recurrences reveal about Hitchcock’s broader attitude
toward sound.
This essay is devoted to a systematic analysis of the
notes Hitchcock gave to his sound department for ten of his
final eleven films, beginning with The Man Who Knew Too
Much (1956) and then spanning from Vertigo (1958) through
Family Plot (1976). I have chosen these films partly to
maintain a manageable scope, but mainly because the
Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences contains extant, and often quite
extensive, sound notes.5 Admittedly, such an approach
prioritizes a period when Hitchcock was at his height as a
powerful producer-director, and the concerns also may not
be entirely reflective of Hitchcock’s sonic interests as a
younger filmmaker. Yet their value is considerable because,
taken in conjunction with the finished films, they
illuminate the often-hidden ways in which Hitchcock
molded the sonic landscapes of his films. Many of the
choices Hitchcock made are nearly impossible to detect
without these notes, yet they have ramifications for topics
that scholars generally discuss solely in terms of
Hitchcock’s visual or narrative approaches. Sound is an
often-unheralded yet carefully wielded tool in Hitchcock’s
cinematic arsenal. As we will see, Hitchcock fixated on
HITCHCOCK’S NOTES ON SOUND
3
sound’s ability to help construct believable locations,
articulate relationships between private and public spaces,
and subjectively align viewers with characters in subtle
ways. Much of what Hitchcock called for in his notes fell
within the wide range of tasks that sound departments
often performed. Yet by identifying those areas that
Hitchcock regularly singled out, we can grasp with greater
precision Hitchcock’s level of control over sound, his
attention to detail, and the ways in which he
conceptualized and manipulated his soundscapes.
It is important to note that while Hitchcock’s notes offer
clear evidence of his approach to sound, they do not
encompass the totality of his soundtracks. Hitchcock dictated
these notes to the sound department in the postproduction
phase, meaning that he restricted his comments to
dimensions of sound handled by that department at that
point in the filmmaking process. Typically, during the
production phase, sound technicians focused on obtaining a
clean dialogue recording, with the recording of some “wild”
sounds for background noise generally a secondary concern.6
In postproduction, the sound department’s job was to fill out
the diegetic soundscape by adding sound effects and
background noise, adjusting volume levels, and recording
dialogue that either proved to be poor quality when recorded
during production or needed to be added during
postproduction. These were thus the topics of Hitchcock’s
notes. The score was handled separately by the music
department, and while Hitchcock generally offered detailed
preliminary instructions to his composers, he would then—
as Jack Sullivan has noted in his exhaustive work on the
subject—typically get out of their way. Such was not the case
with Hitchcock’s sound-department notes, which were often
written over several stages of postproduction. The timing of
each set of notes, too, had an impact on what Hitchcock
addressed. Hitchcock dictated some of his notes before the
sound department went to work, but others were generated
after reviewing an early cut of the sound department’s work,
meaning that in the latter instance, Hitchcock was focused
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MICHAEL SLOWIK
not on articulating his broad sonic plan, but on smaller-scale
elements that still did not please him. Also, since Hitchcock
was in essence dictating instructions, he did not always
reveal his reasoning in detail, which forces us to make
educated guesses about it at times.
Still, while Hitchcock’s notes on sound do not pertain to
every element of the soundscape, they do address the aspects
of sound that he controlled the most closely, and often in
considerable detail. His most recurrent concerns can be
divided into three interrelated categories that interested him
visually and narratively as well: location, character and space,
and sonic subjectivity.
Location
Hitchcock has long been thought of as a director who tied
his narratives vividly to specific locations. Many of his most
striking visuals are ones that involve well-known attractions:
the Holland windmills in Foreign Correspondent (1940), the
Statue of Liberty in Saboteur (1942), the framing of psychotic
murderer Bruno (Robert Walker) against the Lincoln
Memorial in Strangers on a Train (1951), or the Mount
Rushmore finale in North by Northwest (1959). As location
shooting became more common in the 1950s and 1960s,
Hitchcock’s efforts to tie his films to particular locations
continued, with To Catch a Thief (1955) linked indelibly to the
sights of Southern France, Vertigo tied closely to various sights
around San Francisco, and Bodega Bay serving as a key visual
backdrop for The Birds (1963).
What Hitchcock’s notes reveal, however, is something that
has received virtually no attention: Hitchcock also paid close
attention to sound as a crucial way to persuade his audiences
that the narrative events in his films were grounded in these
locations. In particular, Hitchcock’s notes repeatedly
expressed concern for two aspects of what could be called
sonic realism: that background sound be correct in terms of
the type of sound heard, and that background sound be
recorded in the same location as the setting for the scene.
HITCHCOCK’S NOTES ON SOUND
5
That a director would generally want accurate sound is
not surprising, but Hitchcock’s desire for locational
authenticity was especially insistent. Hitchcock made far
too many requests of this nature to be fully cited here, but a
few choice examples help illustrate the extent to which
Hitchcock dove into the minutiae of locational sounds. In
his notes on sound for a scene at La Guardia Airport in
Topaz, released in 1969 but set in 1962, Hitchcock not only
stipulated that the sound of planes taking off and landing
be heard, but further instructed the sound department to
adjust the soundtrack after “investigat[ing] whether any
prop planes were being used during this particular period”
(3). Similarly, for a shot from Frenzy (1972) in which Blaney
(Jon Finch) and Babs (Anna Massey) go up the elevator at
the Coburg Hotel in London, Hitchcock commented,
“someone should go to the Coburg and check up on what
kind of noise the elevator makes when the sliding doors
open and shut” (“Dubbing Notes,” 3). The following
morning, when Blaney and Babs sit on a London park
bench, Hitchcock stated, “we could have a few birds’
sounds, but they will have to be pretty accurate so that they
are London Sparrows” (“Final Dubbing Notes,” 6). In
Marnie (1964), Hitchcock made sure to stipulate that when
Marnie (Tippi Hedren) and Mark (Sean Connery) go to a
racetrack in Atlantic City, the sound department use “the
correct sounds of Atlantic City, the correct race announcer
[and] the correct fan fare [sic] at the right time when the
horses are entering the track” (3).
Footsteps were a frequent subject in his notes. The
prominent footstep noises in key scenes from The Man Who
Knew Too Much and Torn Curtain (1966) received attention
in Hitchcock’s notes, but he focused more often on the
locational accuracy of less noticeable footstep sounds. In
Vertigo, to simulate the sound of extras walking outside the
Argosy bookshop—an actual San Francisco location but
one that was re-created in the studio—Hitchcock
demanded that the footstep sounds be loud due to the
presence of a cobblestone sidewalk outside the store
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MICHAEL SLOWIK
([“Dubbing Notes,”] reel #4).7 Near the end of North by
Northwest, when Vandamm (James Mason), Eve (Eva Marie
Saint), and Leonard (Martin Landau) walk toward the
plane parked outside of Vandamm’s mansion, Hitchcock
insisted that the footstep sounds be of people “walking
upon light gravel not crunchy gravel” (“Dubbing Notes,”
12). In many other instances, Hitchcock was quick to
specify whether footsteps should sound like someone
walking on stone or wood.
Hitchcock’s notes also contain numerous instructions
insisting that sound technicians use tracks recorded in the
precise location where the scene is set. For instance, in The
Man Who Knew Too Much, when the McKennas return to
London without their son, Hitchcock called for “some tugboat
sounds on the Thames [near the Savoy suite where the
McKennas are staying]” before stipulating, “Make sure these
tracks are from London because the horn noises are quite
different from those in America” (Auiler, 500). In Vertigo,
Hitchcock suggested that a track be made at Elizabeth Arden’s
Salon as background noise when Judy (Kim Novak) is
transforming into the image of Madeleine ([“Dubbing
Notes,”] reel #13). In North by Northwest, Hitchcock stipulated
that for the noise and public announcements heard in both
Grand Central Station in New York City and the LaSalle
Station in Chicago, the tracks recorded in those precise spaces
be used. For the LaSalle Station announcements, Hitchcock
even cautioned that they needed to be “correct for the time of
day” (“Dubbing Notes,” 5, 7).
Torn Curtain, which takes place in multiple European
countries, offers a good example of how Hitchcock’s
consistent interest in sonic accuracy—whether in terms of
sound type or on-location recording—could play out
across an entire film. When Michael (Paul Newman)
receives a telephone call in his Copenhagen hotel room,
Hitchcock instructed the sound department to “verify the
nature of the ring from Copenhagen” (2). When Michael
and Sarah (Julie Andrews) dine at the Tivoli Gardens in
Copenhagen, Hitchcock suggested that technicians use
HITCHCOCK’S NOTES ON SOUND
7
“the cheesy sound of a distant orchestra because there
are many restaurants in this garden” (2). Hitchcock later
indicated that the sound of a “four engine Russian
plane” be heard as Michael and Sarah fly to East Berlin
(3). At the University of Leipzig in East Berlin, Hitchcock
stated that the phone there should ring “in the correct
Leipzig manner ” (7). The announcements at the East
Berlin airport were of particular concern to Hitchcock, as
he was apparently unaware of the sonic quality of this
location. Thus, in a request that seems more in line with
one of his thriller plots, he suggested to the sound
department to “Check with [unit production manager]
Jack Corrick if there is such a thing as an announcer ’s
voice at this airport, because if there is he ought to get
somebody to go into it with a secret receiver in his
pocket and a wristwatch microphone so that we get the
authentic voice of an announcer ” (4). Such an instruction
resonates with the hidden-camera footage Hitchcock
used to help render the United Nations sequence in
North by Northwest more authentic.
Why such extensive interest in locational sonic realism?
Hitchcock was surely concerned, in part, about avoiding
gaffes. One of the clearer examples of this concern can be
found in Vertigo’s first scene with Gavin Elster (Tom
Helmore), which takes place in an office featuring a large
window that affords a clear view of a shipyard. Here,
Hitchcock cautioned the department against using the sound
of steamers since they “only go out in fog” (“Dubbing
Notes,” 3). Hitchcock’s larger interest, however, appears to
have been to use sound as a central tool for placing audiences
more firmly and convincingly within a location. Such a focus
is especially prominent in notes pertaining to scenes that
were shot on location yet relied on background sound
inserted in postproduction. The Fort Point sequence in
Vertigo, for instance, was shot partly on location, but the
sound of waves needed to be inserted later. In
postproduction, Hitchcock called for a minimum of water
noises, explaining, “actually, when we were down there, we
8
MICHAEL SLOWIK
never really heard a great deal of water noise—perhaps the
breaking of waves over the rocks, and I think this could be
kept to a minimum” ([“Dubbing Notes,”] reel #5).
Hitchcock’s interest in using sound to construct a believable
location also becomes clear when he dictated sonic
instructions for moments when images provide only a partial
sense of the space. In Marnie, for instance, when Marnie
drops the money stolen from Strutt’s in a locker at
Pennsylvania station, Hitchcock pointed out that “Because
this sequence is shot entirely down onto the ground, we
should rely entirely upon sound for our atmosphere of the
railroad terminal” (1). In the finished film, Bernard
Hermann’s music even cuts out suddenly during this
moment to allow the sounds of the terminal to be heard.
Characteristically, Hitchcock then suggested relying “upon
some actual tracks made in these terminals.”
Beyond merely convincing audiences that a scene is
truly occurring in the space depicted, Hitchcock’s notes also
reveal a particular concern with using sound to mark a
scene’s proximity to an urban center, an interest that
Hitchcock displays in all ten films that I am considering. For
instance, though Vertigo would ultimately prove to be
among the most music-heavy soundtracks of Hitchcock’s
career, Hitchcock’s early notes on sound for this film
continually focused on lowering or raising background
sound to match the setting’s proximity to downtown San
Francisco. When Scottie (James Stewart) first trails
Madeleine, Hitchcock calls for the traffic sounds to be
“increased as we arrive in the center of the city at Grant
Avenue” (“Dubbing Notes,” 5). As Scottie pulls up at the
Mission Dolores, Hitchcock—correctly reflecting upon
where the actual mission is located—calls for the traffic
sounds to be “less than they were on Market Street”
(“Dubbing Notes,” 7) “because we are in a residential area”
([“Dubbing Notes,”] reel #3). For the exterior of the Art
Gallery, Hitchcock demanded “just a few distant traffic
noises to indicate that we have left the city entirely”
(“Dubbing Notes,” 9).
HITCHCOCK’S NOTES ON SOUND
9
Hitchcock’s interest, then, was in using sound to more
firmly place a viewer in a particular environment, and then
situating the viewer with respect to that location’s urban
center. Hitchcock was keenly aware of the sounds of the
spaces he occupied and regularly strove to remain sonically
faithful to actual locations. As I will demonstrate in the
following section, this concern, though useful for
storytelling purposes in general, was especially important
for the narratives of concealment that Hitchcock most
enjoyed telling.
Character and Space
Of the many accolades that have been heaped upon
Hitchcock, one of the most frequent is for his complex
exploration of how private thoughts or actions relate to public
environments. In many Hitchcock films, the private can be
distinct from public life, yet closely tied to it. Robin Wood, for
instance, once argued that the “essence of Hitchcock” was his
exploration of the fact that the exterior presentation of
“ordered life depends on the rigorous and unnatural
suppression of a powerfully seductive underworld of
desire.”8 Many other scholars have centered analyses around
Hitchcock’s public/private dynamic. For instance, Thomas
Schatz points to the famous crane shot from Notorious (1946),
which begins as an extreme high-angle long shot at a party
where Alicia (Ingrid Bergman) plans to give a wine-cellar key
to Devlin (Cary Grant) in an effort to expose a spy ring. The
camera cranes closer and closer to Alicia before resting on a
close up of Alicia’s hand nervously clutching the key behind
her back. “By the time Hitchcock takes us to the key in Alicia’s
hand,” Schatz points out, “it is a highly charged object, and
the dynamics of the shot itself—traversing in a single take
from an omniscient establishing shot to a tight close-up that
gives the viewer a privileged piece of narrative information—
reveals Hitchcock’s capacity to shift our attention from the
obvious and observable to the highly personal.” This shot,
Schatz argues, serves as “an excellent example of Hitchcock’s
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MICHAEL SLOWIK
ability to integrate cinematic spectacle with the psychological,
to push beneath the surface of events and behind the outward
masks worn by his characters.”9
What, if anything, did Hitchcock see as sound’s role
alongside visual devices in exploring the eruption of the
private in the public sphere? Quite a lot, as it turns out.
Hitchcock’s notes reveal a regular and systematic effort
to use sound to further articulate the relationships
between these two spheres. In other words, having first
labored to situate the viewer in a convincing sonic location,
Hitchcock then often used sounds to articulate a division—
and sometimes a dangerous relationship—between public
and private space.
Much as the Notorious crane shot emphasizes the
question of whether Alicia’s covert action will be seen by
others, much of Hitchcock’s exploration of public versus
private sound stemmed from the question of whether
characters are heard or overheard by others. Hitchcock’s notes
often centered on three basic scenarios of sonic concealment:
characters not wanting to be heard, characters wanting to be
heard, and the broader public hearing something that
would otherwise be private. When any of these scenarios
occurred in his films, Hitchcock almost invariably zeroed in
on sound by instructing his technicians to lower, raise, or
otherwise manipulate the audio, sometimes via multiple
rounds of instructions.
For the first category—characters who do not want to be
overheard—Hitchcock sometimes focused simply on
situations where narrative plausibility would be ruined if the
soundtrack suggested that a character might be heard by
others. Though this concern with narrative coherence is
pragmatic rather than expressive, tracing its recurrence in
Hitchcock’s notes helps illuminate just how strongly the
dynamics of public versus private sound fuel some of his
films, and how closely he attended to sound’s role. North by
Northwest, for instance, is seldom discussed as a sound-driven
narrative, but the danger of sounds heard or not heard is
regularly vital to the story. Thornhill’s troubles are set in
HITCHCOCK’S NOTES ON SOUND
11
motion because his conversation is not heard by Vandamm’s
two henchmen. Observing Thornhill (Cary Grant)
coincidentally raise his hand when the name “George
Kaplan” is called by a pageboy, the henchmen cannot hear
what Thornhill says, which is that he wished to send his
mother a telegram. Aware of the narrative necessity that the
men not overhear Thornhill, Hitchcock wrote, “When
Thornhill calls the boy to him, we should be very careful not
to have his dialogue so loud that we feel the two men outside
in the lobby could hear it. . . . The main thing is to create the
conversation between the pageboy and Thornhill in such a
way that we do not feel every word has been overheard by the
two men outside” (“Dubbing Notes,” 1).
When an additional misunderstanding leaves Thornhill
wanted for murder, numerous scenes ensue in which
Thornhill’s (and later Eve’s) survival and freedom depend
upon not being heard by others, and Hitchcock paid careful
attention to sound levels during these moments. When
Thornhill eats in a dining car with Eve on a train bound for
Chicago, Hitchcock indicated, “Be very careful when
Thornhill talks about hiding on the train and avoiding the
conductor that the background sounds do not fall too low.
We do not want to get the impression that such lines will be
heard by other people” (“Dubbing Notes,” 6). Later, when
Thornhill hides in Eve’s closed upper berth to avoid the
police, Hitchcock stated during two different phases of
postproduction that “Thornhill’s voice in the berth should
be more muffled” (“Dubbing Notes,” 6) because otherwise
“The Police would have heard him” (“Dubbing Notes After
Screening Dubbed Version,” 2). When Eve and Thornhill
depart the train at the LaSalle Station in Chicago (with
Thornhill dressed as a porter), Hitchcock wrote, “Eve’s
opening lines on [the] La Salle Street platform are too loud:
the Police would hear her. Either take her voice down or put
a noise over her lines” (“Dubbing Notes After Screening
Dubbed Version,” 2). The sound department apparently
opted for the former, as Eve’s voice in the finished film is
very quiet. Finally, near the climax, when Thornhill spies on
12
MICHAEL SLOWIK
Vandamm and his henchmen and learns that they plan to
kill Eve, Hitchcock stipulated that Thornhill’s footstep
sounds as he climbs around the house and onto a balcony—
as well as a line to Eve (“Whatever you do—don’t get on
that plane”)—be lowered so that he could not be overheard
(“Dubbing Notes,” 11).
Hitchcock’s concern, as North by Northwest indicates, was
first and foremost that sound levels match narrative
demands—that is, that sounds are quiet enough to persuade
the viewer that other characters cannot hear them. If this
concern was satisfied, however, or if characters being
overheard was not a particular danger in the first place,
Hitchcock would often—if possible—adjust volume levels in
an expressive manner to drive home the public/private split
that so frequently informed his work. Often, as with the crane
shot from Notorious, public exposure was at stake during
these moments.
Early sections of Psycho (1960), for instance, center on
Marion’s private guilt. Marion (Janet Leigh) begins the
movie having just had nonmarital sex in a seedy Phoenix
hotel room. She then steals $40,000 of her employer’s money
and begins driving to Fairvale. Hitchcock’s notes on sound
reveal that he manipulated sound levels in postproduction
not for purposes of realism but to express the looming
presence of a public world that can expose and humiliate
Marion. As is well known, Psycho opens with camera
movements that travel toward the window of a hotel room
and then pass underneath nearly closed venetian blinds to
reveal Marion and her lover, Sam (John Gavin). Following a
conversation, Sam opens the blinds, and at this point,
Hitchcock stipulated in a “special note,” “There should be a
marked increase in the volume of traffic” (“Mr. Hitchcock’s
Dubbing Notes,” 1). Such an instruction makes little
“realistic” sense, as venetian blinds are not much of a sound
muffler. Instead, this volume adjustment emphasizes two
key ideas: 1) Marion and Sam had sex in a private space, and
2) there is an exterior world that they feel ashamed of
and must hide from (and which inevitably infiltrates their
HITCHCOCK’S NOTES ON SOUND
13
lives, as both private and public worlds are dangerous in
Psycho). Since Marion and Sam are unlikely to be overheard
in a closed hotel room, Hitchcock was free to manipulate
volume levels to more forcefully express the thematic
problem of the looming public eye.
Having set up a public/private divide and marked private
space as a locus of guilt and secrets, Hitchcock then made
further sonic adjustments to subsequent scenes to express the
danger of public exposure. After Marion steals the money and
begins driving, Hitchcock dictated, “When we reach the night
sequence [of Marion driving], exaggerate passing car noises
when headlights show in her eyes. Make sure that the passing
car noises are fairly loud” (“Mr. Hitchcock’s Dubbing Notes,”
2). Later, when Marion swaps cars at the dealership in
Bakersfield, Hitchcock demanded an increase in traffic noise
(“‘Psycho’ Dubbing Notes,” 2). Though realism likely played
a role in the Bakersfield scene (the road by the car dealership
is fairly busy), the elevated noise also expresses the everpresent public world that surrounds Marion and threatens to
expose her. The potential for one’s ordered life to descend into
chaos of our own psychological making, a key feature of
Hitchcock’s work that Wood and others have discussed, is
sonically expressed through elevated traffic noise throughout
Marion’s journey.10
Hitchcock similarly increased background noise to
heighten the specter of public exposure during Michael
and Sarah’s escape from East Germany in Torn Curtain,
even though such adjustments made little spatial sense.
When Michael, Sarah, and the Countess Kuchinska (Lila
Kedrova) go inside the post office to look for a contact who
will help Michael and Sarah escape, a hotel doorman
recognizes the fugitives and leaves to get the police. Once
this occurs, Hitchcock wrote, “we naturally bring up
traffic noises” (9). In truth, there is nothing “natural”
about this request. The camera stays entirely within the
interior of the post office, leaving no visual justification for
this increased noise. Expressively, however, louder
background sound enhances our sense that the public
14
MICHAEL SLOWIK
world of East Germany and its surveillance machine are
closing in on the protagonists.
In North by Northwest, Psycho, and Torn Curtain, Hitchcock
manipulated sound levels to reflect characters’ efforts to keep
their actions and plans hidden from the public sphere. What
about the inverse: when imperiled characters desperately
want their predicament to become public? These situations,
too, were of great interest to Hitchcock. A clear, and wellknown, example of a scene depending upon a character not
being heard who wishes to be comes late in The Birds, when
Melanie (Tippi Hedren) is attacked in an attic while the
Brenner family sleeps below. Here, Hitchcock was quite
concerned that the family fail to initially hear the attack,
writing that “It is very essential in this final attack by the birds
in the attic that we give the sound a quality that gives [us]
volume but is not of such a serious quality as to cause the
people downstairs to be awakened by it. In addition, the thud
of the birds against the girl’s body should also have an impact
but I repeat a soft one” (Auiler, 522).
As with the first category, Hitchcock’s priority was
often to make sure that the soundtrack convinced the
audience that a sound would not be overheard when
important to the narrative, as is the case in The Birds
example. And again, if this was achieved—or if it was a
non-issue within the narrative—Hitchcock frequently
looked for opportunities to expressively adjust the sound
to remind viewers of the dynamics between private actions
and the public sphere. One can see this particular approach
to sound played out in Hitchcock’s notes for Frenzy, which
contain a revealing reversal in his instructions to the sound
department. Frenzy centers on the rape and strangulation of
two women—Blaney’s ex-wife, Brenda (Barbara LeighHunt), and his current girlfriend, Babs—by a man who
manages to remain undetected within the urban space of
London. For the rape and murder of Brenda, which is
shown in excruciating detail, Hitchcock changed his mind
about the sonic treatment of the scene in the office where
she is raped and killed. An earlier scene in the film
HITCHCOCK’S NOTES ON SOUND
15
introduces us to that office, and her rape/murder is the
second scene located in that space. In his October 14, 1971
dubbing notes, Hitchcock wanted traffic noises in the first
scene brought down “to the minimum” because “it will be
more dramatic” (presumably because the scene features
tense exchanges between Brenda and Blaney). For the rape
scene, Hitchcock then indicated, “we should take a little
license and hear a shade more . . . traffic with more horns,
etc. to contrast with the feeling of BRENDA being trapped,
with the world going on outside just the same—and yet she
is in this helpless position” (“Dubbing Notes,” 2). Thus,
though the narrative depends upon Brenda not being
heard, Hitchcock initially altered the volume of traffic
noise for expressive reasons: drama (scene one) and the
reminder of nearby public space (scene two).
By late November, however, Hitchcock had changed his
mind and ordered what occurs in the finished film. Brenda’s
first office scene was still to have virtually no background
sound, but for a different reason. “Once INSIDE with
BRENDA,” Hitchcock explained, “it might be a good idea to
cut all traffic sounds OUT, so that we get a sense of isolation.
Just a horn or two coming from Oxford Street” (“Final
Dubbing Notes,” 2). The rape/murder scene, however,
“should be played without any external sounds because we
still want to preserve the remoteness of this office so that
we reassure the audience that any loud voices heard in this
sequence, or even Brenda’s scream, could not be heard
outside” (“Final Dubbing Notes,” 3). Thus, while Hitchcock
welcomed the opportunity to coordinate background noise
with dramatic or thematic ideas, his first priority was to
make sure that sound levels persuaded viewers that plot
events (such as an undetected rape and murder) would have
gone unnoticed.
Hitchcock was always on the hunt for expressive sound
opportunities. For the subsequent rape and murder of Babs,
he found a way to enhance story plausibility and express the
split between public and private space that enables the true
killer, Rusk (Barry Foster), to commit his heinous crimes.
16
MICHAEL SLOWIK
Rather than follow Babs and Rusk into Rusk’s apartment and
witness another horrific scene, Hitchcock instead arranged to
have the camera pan away from the door, move down the
stairs in a crane movement, and then dolly backward into
the busy London street. Though striking in and of itself, this
unmotivated camera movement was also, according to
Hitchcock’s notes, executed to permit sound carry the bulk of
the impact. “NOW WE START THE PAN DOWN OF THE
CAMERA IN SILENCE,” Hitchcock stated in his final
dubbing notes:
We go down the stairs—no sound of any kind. Now,
as we go under the fan light, slowly bring up the
traffic noise—it’ll get louder and louder—and
louder—and build it up along the corridor, pass [sic]
the hall stand—traffic getting even more loud [sic]—
and as we go through the door, bring it up with a
ROAR—and now EXAGGERATE all the traffic noise
as we pull back to show the façade of the building—
and make it almost a ROAR OF TRAFFIC—louder
than it would normally be. (“Final Dubbing Notes, 7)
As Hitchcock would later explain in an interview, “I
brought the sound up three times its volume, so that the
audience subconsciously would say, ‘Well, if the girl screams,
it’s never going to be heard.’”11 The camera move thus allowed
Hitchcock to achieve two effects that he could not
simultaneously convey during the prior murder. By shifting
the camera away from Babs’s murder and onto the street,
Hitchcock could convince the audience that the crime would
not be overheard and draw attention to the split between the
sordid private world and the public sphere. The expressive
dimensions of sound here are especially striking, with the
loud revving noises of the traffic arguably announcing
the triumph of the chaos world.
Examining Hitchcock’s carefully configured divisions
between public and private sound helps us see why, as
demonstrated in the previous section, Hitchcock was so
HITCHCOCK’S NOTES ON SOUND
17
preoccupied with using his soundtrack to situate a scene with
respect to crowded urban space in particular. By continuously
maintaining our awareness of our proximity to an urban
center, Hitchcock could use background sound as an everpresent tool to remind audiences of characters’ relationships
to public life. Then, as needed, Hitchcock could seize upon
this urban background sound by expressively adjusting it in
subtle yet meaningful ways.
If Hitchcock regularly attended to sound during scenes
when characters’ behaviors or actions go unnoticed publicly,
how did he adjust sound when the public does notice
something that was previously private? In many cases,
Hitchcock used slow crescendos, where the volume level of
crowd noise, in particular, gradually increases. For instance,
in The Man Who Knew Too Much, the stabbing of Bernard
(Daniel Gélin) in a quiet, deserted alley becomes public when
Bernard staggers into the marketplace, and Hitchcock
instructed the sound department to bring the marketplace
sounds up (Auiler, 498). Similarly, in North by Northwest, when
Thornhill appears to have stabbed Lester Townsend (Philip
Ober) inside a crowded United Nations building, Hitchcock
called for a crescendo that “build[s] up to a climax as
Thornhill exits” (5).
Hitchcock also periodically requested the inverse—a
decrescendo—for situations when a group instead quiets
down when something becomes public. In Frenzy, for
instance, when Blaney loses his temper with Brenda at a
restaurant and raises his voice, Hitchcock wrote precise
instructions for a gradual decrescendo:
When [Blaney’s] VOICE GOES UP, there should be
some reduction in the b.g. [background] sound, BUT
not all at once—perhaps, half the people—but the
distant people should still continue to talk loudly. The
moment he breaks the glass, there should be a little
more silence and only one or two odd voices because
there are people still talking in the distance. In other
words, we don’t want just dead silence from everyone
18
MICHAEL SLOWIK
because those in the distance have no way of knowing
what’s going on in the f.g. [foreground] – so this has to
be skillfully and carefully done. AS THEY DEPART,
just an odd voice or two in the distance with a general
hush over the f.g. (“Final Dubbing Notes,” 3)
Whether a crescendo or decrescendo, this basic sound device
was consistently harnessed by Hitchcock to the broader
public/private dynamic that drove many of his films.
Hitchcock’s dubbing notes reveal that, at their most
elaborate, crescendos and decrescendos could be used to
achieve two effects: to draw contrasts between opposed
groups, and to reflect a growing collective awareness. This
technique is most evident in The Birds, beginning with the
schoolyard attack and ending with a concluding scene inside
the Tides Restaurant. Sonically, this section of the film marks
a tipping point when the birds as an angry mass increasingly
dominate the soundtrack, and Hitchcock’s notes stipulated
that a rise and fall pattern should occur. For instance, when
the birds attack the fleeing school children, Hitchcock
dictated that the audience should hear “for the first time . . .
the distant massing electronic sounds of growing anger as
[the birds] descend upon the children” (Auiler, 520). This
rising sound then contrasts with the scene inside the Tides
Restaurant that follows, in which the background sounds of
restaurant patrons slowly diminish as Melanie tells her story
of the bird attacks, a decrescendo that Hitchcock called for in
his notes (Auiler, 520). Here, non-Bodega Bay residents are
present in this scene—including a businessman and a family
heading to San Francisco—which expands the sense of
danger beyond the confines of this small town. Then, just
after this conversation scene, Hitchcock—in one of the most
commented-upon shots in the film—provides an overhead,
“birds-eye” shot of Bodega Bay, with more and more
seagulls flying into the frame. This shot is sometimes read in
terms of audience alignment, with Hitchcock encouraging
viewers to become the birds. Sonically, however, Hitchcock
wanted this moment to serve as a way to once again convey
HITCHCOCK’S NOTES ON SOUND
19
the idea of the birds’ rising sound and collective anger. As he
indicated in his notes, “Before the mass of gulls appear [sic]
in this high shot we should begin to hear them o.s.
[offscreen], faint but the volume growing. It should start to
mount as we see the gulls appear in the f.g. of our high shot
and then increase as their numbers increase. The volume
should increase until our screen is covered with descending
gulls” (Auiler, 521).
This famous shot, then, needs to be at least partly
understood as a way to convey a contrast between the
crescendo of the birds and the decrescendo of human
conversation. As the birds gather en masse in their own
space (the sky), their growing sounds mark them as fully
capable of overpowering the voices of their increasingly
cowed human adversaries. Not surprisingly, the sequence
culminates in the shocked silence of the guests inside the
Tides Restaurant following a gas-station explosion catalyzed
by another bird attack. Throughout these pivotal scenes in
The Birds, Hitchcock has carefully manipulated sound
to invert the relationship between human and bird, and to
make public a “plot” by the birds that had previously been
more of a secret.12
Sound and Subjectivity
In addition to his explorations of guilt, fear, and exposure
in the public arena, Hitchcock has also long been renowned
for his intense interest in taking audiences on a visually
subjective journey with one or more characters. As Tom
Gunning explains, “Hitchcock will build most scenes out of a
character’s (or sometimes characters’) point of view,
sculpting the space with the viewpoint of the character.” The
audience, Gunning continues, thus often “see[s] what [the
characters] see” and interprets space along with those
privileged characters.13
Do Hitchcock’s notes similarly show an interest in
altering sound to align with character perceptions? Did
Hitchcock, in other words, regularly aim for sonic
20
MICHAEL SLOWIK
subjectivity? The answer depends upon one’s definition of
the term. In their canonical textbook, for instance, David
Bordwell and Kristin Thompson focus on subjective sound
primarily in terms of two categories: the overt withholding or
manipulation of sound, and the use of voiceover to express a
character’s inner thoughts.14 If sonic subjectivity is
understood only in terms of such salient audio
manipulations, then Hitchcock’s notes express little interest
in this dimension of sound, which is reserved mainly for
moments in his early British sound films. In Blackmail (1929),
for instance, the repeated word “knife” at increasing volume
levels reflects how Alice (Anny Ondra) hears it. Such
instances are brief and infrequent, however, even in his
British films. If, on the other hand, we understand sonic
subjectivity as a more subtle process in which sound is made
to match the perspective of a character in a nearly
imperceptible manner, then Hitchcock loaded his movies
with sonic subjectivity. Without question, the dubbing notes
reveal that Hitchcock’s much-commented-upon interest in
controlling and exploring point of view extended to his use
of sound as well as image. Hitchcock’s focus on sonic
subjectivity was extensive enough that the audio-visual term
“point of perception” is probably a better descriptor of his
concerns than “point of view.”
Consider The Birds, which features a narrative that is
largely focalized around Melanie. Hitchcock, in his
postproduction notes, repeatedly instructed the sound
department to alter sounds to better match how Melanie
would hear them. After Melanie drops off the lovebirds at the
Brenner home and starts the outboard motor on her boat, for
instance, Hitchcock dictated, “Here the sound of her own
outboard motor drowns out any other sound, such as [Mitch
Brenner’s car] racing around the bay,” a reflection of what
Melanie would hear at this moment (Auiler, 518). Elsewhere
in The Birds, Hitchcock was even more explicit about his
desire for point-of-audition sound.15 When Melanie and
Mitch (Rod Taylor) converse on the dunes just prior to a bird
attack, Hitchcock indicated that the sound department
HITCHCOCK’S NOTES ON SOUND
21
should provide the sound of the children’s party below from
the “natural perspective” of sound “on top of the dunes”
(Auiler, 519). The morning after the attack at the party, when
Melanie wakes up in the Brenner home and hears talking
outside, Hitchcock stated that “the voices here should be
brought into line in relation to the location of the various
people as heard by Melanie from her room” (Auiler, 519).
And when, near the end of the film, the flutter of wings
causes Melanie to venture toward the attic, Hitchcock was
explicit that the sound should become louder as Melanie
ascends the stairs (Auiler, 522).
In all these examples from The Birds, Hitchcock adjusted
sounds emitted in the external world to match how a
character that we are narratively aligned with would hear
them. Other examples in Hitchcock’s notes display his
interest in adjusting external sound in this manner. For
instance, early sections of Torn Curtain often visually link the
audience with Sarah: we watch along with her and assume,
as she does, that Michael has joined the Communists.
Hitchcock uses sound to likewise suggest an alignment.
When the airplane carrying Michael and Sarah arrives in East
Berlin, Sarah stands at the top of the airplane stairs while a
speech occurs below on the tarmac. For this moment,
Hitchcock wrote, “the speeches heard by Sarah are at present
too loud and should be reduced to approximate to her
hearing at the distance indicated in the scene” (3).
Similarly, Vertigo’s dubbing notes reveal a determination
to use sound to link the audience with the man that we are
also visually and narratively tied to: Scottie. Early in the film,
when Scottie follows Madeleine in his car, Hitchcock
demanded primarily the sounds one would hear from inside
Scottie’s car ([“Dubbing Notes,”] reel #2). In the first bell
tower sequence, Hitchcock was again concerned that sound
effects match Scottie’s perspective. “If possible,” Hitchcock
dictated, “we should gauge the volume of sound on the steps
of the tower in relation to the imagined distance between
Scottie and Madeleine. For example, when Scottie dashes
upstairs we can hear Madeleine running, but her sounds
22
MICHAEL SLOWIK
should be farther away but should increase in volume as
Scottie draws nearer and nearer to her” ([“Dubbing Notes,”]
reel #9). Ultimately, the prominent presence of Hermann’s
score would dilute these effects to a degree, but the finished
film still orients external diegetic sound around Scottie’s
point of audition.
Elsewhere, Hitchcock enabled audiences to better hear
from a character’s position by demanding adjustments not to
volume level, but to the sound’s bass wavelength. Since
closely miked voices often contain ample bass, the reduction
of this element can help signal that a sound is being emitted
from farther away. In Psycho, Marion hears Norman’s
(Anthony Perkins) first conversation with his “mother” from
a considerable distance from inside the Bates Motel. Here,
Hitchcock stated, “The voice of the mother should be without
any base [sic] so that we get a sense of distance and yet clear
enough for us to understand the words.”16
Many of Hitchcock’s choices involved adjusting sound to
match the spatial position of a particular character. Yet despite
his penchant for hyper-realistic sound, Hitchcock’s notes also
reveal a concern with having audiences hear internally with
his central characters. In these instances, sound is subjective
not because it matches a character’s location in space, but
because it is altered to reflect a character’s psychological state.
Of the ten films covered in this essay, Psycho features the most
pronounced instances of such sound. Voices warped by an
echo chamber play inside Marion’s head as she drives toward
Los Angeles with stolen money, and the voice of Norman’s
mother is heard inside Norman’s head at the end of the film.
Such attention-grabbing instances of internal sound are not
especially common in Hitchcock’s work, however. Instead,
Hitchcock’s notes reveal that he regularly aimed for subtlety
where psychological sound was concerned.
In his notes, Hitchcock most frequently adjusted for
internal sound by lowering or raising background noise.
An especially clear example of the former can be found in
the airplane scene in Torn Curtain, which focuses on
Sarah’s efforts to interpret the behavior of her fiancé,
HITCHCOCK’S NOTES ON SOUND
23
Michael, who appears to have defected to the
Communists. Michael, realizing that Sarah has followed
him and is traveling on the same airplane bound for East
Germany, walks to her seat and angrily tells her to stay
away from him. In an ensuing close up, Sarah sadly bows
her head and her image goes out of focus, as if somehow
stained by her tears. Such an image, though not an optical
point-of-view shot, is plainly intended to portray Sarah’s
mental state. More subtle, yet also vital, is the soundtrack
adjustment that occurs at this moment. “When we finally
end on the Closeup of Sarah with tears in her eyes,”
Hitchcock stated, “I would like the airplane sound taken
down simultaneously . . . when the scene goes fuzzy. It
should not come out altogether but I would like to lose any
consciousness we have of the sound” (3). Such an
adjustment leaves us with the impression that we are
hearing in the way that Sarah psychologically hears. She is
fully absorbed in her own sorrow, and thus, for both her
and the viewer, background sounds largely cease to be
noticed. Another example of lowering background sound
for subjective purposes occurs in North by Northwest,
where Hitchcock’s notes dictate that the background
“voice and china clatter” in the dining car gradually be
lowered as Thornhill becomes smitten with Eve (“Dubbing
Notes,” 6). And in Family Plot, Hitchcock insisted that
Lumley’s (Bruce Dern’s) discovery of a crucial strip of paint
on the ground be accompanied by the cessation of nearby
traffic noise (10).
Though Hitchcock generally reduced background sounds
to subjectively indicate that a character’s attention is directed
elsewhere, in one famous scene he instead increased a
foreground sound that a character is attending to. After
listening to the original soundtrack for Norman’s cleanup of
the grisly shower murder in Psycho, Hitchcock stated that the
cleanup sounds “may need greater emphasis” (“‘Psycho’
Dubbing Notes,” 3). In the finished film, these sounds are
indeed loud and distinct, and they serve multiple purposes,
including the ironic foregrounding of quotidian sounds
24
MICHAEL SLOWIK
following an extraordinary murder. Yet from the perspective
of character psychology, elevating such sounds pushes them
closer to the way that Norman—who is devoting his full
attention to the clean-up job and may also be hypersensitive
due to distress—presumably hears the sounds. With Marion
dead and no one else on the screen but Norman, the urge to
identify with this character even as he covers up a murder is
intense. If such an identification indeed occurs, the enhanced
cleanup sounds surely aid this process.
Of all of Hitchcock’s notes that relate to sonic subjectivity,
arguably the most intriguing and complex is Judy’s fall from
the bell tower at the conclusion of Vertigo. Judy, of course, is
the second woman to plummet from the tower. Earlier, Judy,
impersonating Madeleine, had led Scottie to believe she had
fallen off the same tower, when the body in fact belonged to
the real Madeleine. Scottie, unaware of the deception and
haunted by his failure to prevent the death of the person he
thinks is Madeleine, discovers Judy on a street, is struck by
the resemblance, and gradually makes over Judy to look just
like Madeleine. At the film’s climax, Scottie, finally realizing
the deception, takes Judy, dressed and made up as Madeleine,
to the top of the bell tower to “rescue” her, only to have her
fall to her death.
Though the two bell-tower falls formally parallel each
other in many respects, there is one key difference on the
soundtrack that, to my knowledge, has never been
analyzed. When the actual Madeleine plummets from the
tower partway through the film, her body makes a loud
crunching sound when it lands on the lower roof. Yet when
Judy falls at the film’s conclusion, no sound is heard. This
absence of sound is something that Hitchcock insisted
upon. “When Madeleine falls,” Hitchcock dictated, “we
should hear a wild cry, echoing in the night, which is
suddenly cut short, but we MUST NOT hear any thud”
([“Dubbing Notes,”] reel #14).
Why did Hitchcock insist that this final body fall not be
accompanied by its sound? Though Hitchcock did not
spell out the reason in his notes, perhaps the most
HITCHCOCK’S NOTES ON SOUND
25
compelling explanation is that Judy, who has been altered
by Scottie to look like a woman who never really existed, has
ceased to become a physical, corporeal person in Scottie’s
mind. Judy, her earlier voiceover told us, had considered
leaving town the moment Scottie met her as Judy, yet she
stays because she wants Scottie to love her “as I am for myself,
and so forget the other and forget the past.” Yet Scottie, in
remaking Judy as Madeleine, proves incapable of doing this.
Scottie’s obsession and self-absorption is such that Judy
matters to Scottie only for her ability to look like the
Madeleine he fell in love with. Once the figure of Madeleine is
revealed to be a mere illusion, one could argue that Judy as a
distinct person holds little importance in Scottie’s mind—if
she ever did in the first place. Thus, the lack of a thud can be
subjectively read as a measure of Scottie’s disregard for the
flesh-and-blood Judy, and the extent to which his obsessions
instead revolve around the incorporeal Madeleine.
Further potential support for the above reading comes
from the language used in Hitchcock’s own notes on sound
for the film. Scholars have argued that Vertigo was deeply
personal to Hitchcock, as he identified with Scottie’s
obsession with finding and molding an ideal blonde
woman. It is thus intriguing to note that Hitchcock, much
like Scottie in Vertigo, slides between “Madeleine” and
“Judy” when dictating instructions to the sound
department. Hitchcock calls her “Judy” when Scottie first
sees her and follows her to the Empire Hotel, “Madeleine”
when she returns from the salon done up as Madeleine, and
then “Judy” again when she puts the pins in her hair. Such
name choices are indisputably Hitchcock’s, and they
confused his staff. A note at the bottom of Hitchcock’s
instructions for Reel 13 (which includes the transformation
and love scene) reads, “please check Judy and Madeliene
[sic]. Transcribed as dictated, but believe it should be
Madeleine” ([“Dubbing Notes,”] reel #13). By the final bell
tower scene, Hitchcock refers to Judy only as Madeleine,
leading one to wonder if Hitchcock was thinking about Judy
like Scottie is: as Madeleine, an illusion of an existence
26
MICHAEL SLOWIK
rather than an existence itself, a ghost that haunts both
Scottie and Hitchcock. From this perspective, the sonic
conclusion of the film makes total sense. If a ghost fell off a
tower, would it really make a sound?
Conclusion
What, ultimately, do we learn from Hitchcock’s notes
on sound? First, on a basic level, we gain new knowledge
of how Hitchcock conceptualized and adjusted his
individual soundtracks. Hitchcock’s notes reveal certain
sonic preoccupations across his films: highly accurate
location-based sound, the precise placement of characters
and their private actions within a larger public space, and
the adjustment of sounds to better reflect how key
characters hear sounds spatially and psychologically.
Hitchcock’s notes also demonstrate that his primary
interest was in using unobtrusive sound. Many of the
adjustments described in this essay are subtle and
challenging to detect without the aid of his notes. Yet once
recognized, we can see that Hitchcock’s use of sound
helped him achieve effects commonly attributed to only his
narratives or visuals: binding stories to particular settings,
exploring the dynamics of private and public space,
conveying the state of mind of a character, and subjectively
linking audiences with characters.
Hitchcock’s notes also reveal that his sonic interests did
not exist separately from the thematic concerns of his films,
but rather reinforced and enhanced them. We have seen that
Hitchcock used sound to augment his frequent push beneath
outer surfaces to one’s inner psyche and private desires.
Hitchcock wielded sound to express the often-dangerous
split between outward behavior and private drives, and the
looming specter of public detection. Through regular sound
adjustments as well as narrative and image choices,
Hitchcock explored the ever-present possibility of leaving
the ordered world behind and descending into
psychological chaos. And Hitchcock used sonic subjectivity
HITCHCOCK’S NOTES ON SOUND
27
to enhance our psychological alignment with central
characters, thus enabling us to better experience and
interpret the story as a single character does, or—in darker
films like Vertigo or Psycho—potentially identify with
disturbed or obsessed psyches.
Hitchcock’s notes also widen considerably our
understanding of sound’s role in Hitchcock’s famous
trumpeting of “pure cinema.” In her landmark 1978 essay
“The Sound of One Wing Flapping,” Elisabeth Weis was
among the first to point out that Hitchcock’s stated preference
for “pure film,” once thought to mean only visual
communication, had more to do with reducing a reliance on
foreground dialogue than dismissing sound’s importance
altogether.17 Hitchcock’s notes enable us to see with greater
clarity the precise elements that Hitchcock valued as part of
his understanding of pure cinema. For Hitchcock, foreground
sound, background sound, generalized chatter, sound effects,
background dialogue, overlapping sound, volume level
adjustments, bass adjustments, and whether sounds are heard
at all were vital tools for producing more expressive works of
pure cinema.
Most broadly, perhaps the great lesson from Hitchcock’s
notes is the value of seeking out and examining the lesssalient, smaller-scale elements of a movie’s soundtrack. It is
tempting in film sound analysis to focus on only the unusual
and overt at the expense of seemingly inconsequential topics
like background volume or whether a particular sound is
heard. Yet if Hitchcock is taken to be a master of the formal
properties of cinema, his notes suggest that these oftenneglected dimensions of the soundtrack deserve far more
attention for their expressive qualities. It was the
“unimportant” sounds that most concerned Hitchcock, and
they aided considerably the broader cinematic experience he
wished to provide and the themes he wished to explore.
Ultimately, Hitchcock’s notes may be most helpful for what
they teach us about the sizeable importance of the less
obtrusive sonic elements that constitute the bulk of the motion
picture soundtrack.
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MICHAEL SLOWIK
Notes
1. Andrew Sarris discusses these elements in his influential
“Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” in Film Theory and Criticism,
ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, seventh edition (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2009), 451-54.
2. In book-length scholarship on Hollywood cinema, the rare
examinations of directorial authorship and sound generally pertain
to directors’ use of music. See, for instance, Kathryn Kalinak, How the
West Was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2007); Jack Sullivan,
Hitchcock’s Music (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); and
David Schroeder, Hitchcock’s Ear: Music and the Director’s Art (New
York: Continuum, 2012). Elisabeth Weis’s excellent The Silent Scream:
Alfred Hitchcock’s Sound Track (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 1982) addresses non-musical features, though the
focus is not behind the scenes. For a rare book that covers the
entirety of a director’s soundtrack and uncovers the collaborative
processes, see Gayle Sherwood Magee, Robert Altman’s Soundtracks:
Film, Music, and Sound from M*A*S*H to A Prairie Home Companion
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
3. Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood
Filmmaking in the Studio Era (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 5-6.
4. François Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1967), 224. Quotations from Hitchcock’s notes on sound appear in
Dan Auiler, Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic (New York: St.
Martin’s Griffin, 1998); Sullivan, Hitchcock’s Music; and Schroeder,
Hitchcock’s Ear.
5. Unfortunately, I was unable to locate Hitchcock’s notes for
The Wrong Man (1956). Hitchcock’s dubbing notes in the
Margaret Herrick Library (MHL) for the following films are from
the Alfred Hitchcock Papers (AHP), with two exceptions,
identified below:
“Dubbing Notes,” Vertigo, AHP, MHL, December 18, 1957.
[“Dubbing Notes”], untitled document, Vertigo, AHP, MHL,
January 15, 1958.
“Dubbing Notes,” North by Northwest, AHP, MHL, February
23, 1959.
“Mr. Hitchcock’s Dubbing Notes After Screening Dubbed
Version,” North by Northwest, AHP, MHL, May 27, 1959.
HITCHCOCK’S NOTES ON SOUND
“Mr. Hitchcock’s Dubbing Notes,” Psycho, AHP, MHL,
February 24, 1960.
“‘Psycho’ Dubbing Notes,” Psycho, AHP, MHL, undated.
“Dubbing Notes,” Marnie, AHP, MHL, undated.
“Mr. Hitchcock’s Dubbing Notes,” Torn Curtain, AHP, MHL,
November 8, 1965.
“Mr. Hitchcock’s Sound Effects and Dubbing Notes on
‘Topaz,’” Topaz, AHP, MHL, May 15, 1969.
“Dubbing Notes,” Frenzy, AHP, MHL, October 14, 1971.
“Final Dubbing Notes Made by Mr. Hitchcock,” Frenzy,
Peggy Robertson papers, MHL, November 26, 1971.
“‘Family Plot’ Dubbing Notes,” Family Plot, AHP, MHL,
December 10, 1975.
29
Quotations from these notes will be identified by brief parenthetical
references in the text of my essay, including the relevant page or reel
number of the source. I use a short title to distinguish between two
dubbing notes for one film.
Two of Hitchcock’s notes on sound from the Margaret Herrick
Library are reprinted in their entirety in Dan Auiler, Hitchcock’s
Notebooks: An Authorized and Illustrated Look Inside the Creative Mind of
Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Spike, 1999): “The Man Who Knew Too
Much Notes,” reprinted on 496-505, and “Background Sounds for
The Birds,” reprinted on 516-23. Quotations from these notes will be
identified by parenthetical references in the text of my essay, citing
page numbers in Auiler.
6. For a layout of these tasks during different phases of
Hollywood film history, see James Buhler, David Neumeyer, and
Rob Deemer, Hearing the Movies: Music and Sound in Film History
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
7. Auiler, Hitchcock’s Notebooks, 110.
8. Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, rev. ed. (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002), 94.
9. Schatz, The Genius of the System, 400.
10. For examples of Wood’s take on chaos in Hitchcock, see
Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, 86, 106.
11. Quoted in Elisabeth Weis, The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock’s
Soundtrack, 166.
12. For more on the film’s human/bird inversion as a larger
structuring principle, see Elisabeth Weis, “The Sound of One Wing
Flapping,” Film Comment 14, no. 5 (September/October 1978): 48, and
30
MICHAEL SLOWIK
Michael Slowik, “‘Not for Tourists’: Hitchcock’s Sparse Sonic Set
Pieces,” Hitchcock Annual 21 (2017): 92-98.
13. Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and
Modernity (London: BFI, 2000), 347.
14. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An
Introduction, Tenth Edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013), 285-90.
15. The term “point-of-audition sound” appears in Rick Altman,
“Afterward: A Baker’s Dozen Terms for Sound Analysis,” in Sound
Theory/Sound Practice, ed. Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 251.
16. Later, Hitchcock also had the bass taken out for Norman’s
famous line, “Oh, mother, blood,” though at this point we are not
hearing along with anyone else—Marion is dead (“‘Psycho’ Dubbing
Notes,” 3-4).
17. Weis, “The Sound of One Wing Flapping,” 42.