ABSTRACT
The past three decades have seen the emergence of a wave of specialized scholarship that has greatly enhanced our understanding of sound in cinema and raised awareness of its significance to an unprecedented degree. This new development in film studies was very much needed. It was not until the work by Rick Altman and Tom Levin in the early eighties, for instance, that fundamental questions about the impact of sound technology on the perception of auditory events in cinema were first raised (Altman 1985–6; Levin 1984; see also Lastra 2000). Michel Chion's seminal work, too, emerged in the eighties, and its influence in the Anglo-American world crystallized in the nineteen-nineties (some of its most important implications, in fact, still await further development).
