ABSTRACT
The word 'sound' has always had several positive meanings. Indeed, expressions such as sound thinking, a sound person, and sound judgements belong to our everyday vocabulary. However, all this stops when we reach the realm of Film Studies. Here, sound seems like an obstacle in the way of the essence of cinema: the image. This bias against sound, generated mainly by early film scholars, was partly supported by the limitations that characterized Hollywood film production and reception prior to the mid-1970s, as we shall see. However, since then, a series of technological developments and changes in production and reception have ensued, and these have modified the ways in which film sound has been constructed, and the relationship between sound and image, audience and film. It is this period, which we may define as the 'Dolby era', upon which I wish to focus here. In exploring its characteristics I shall follow two distinct 'tracks', an aesthetic one and an economic one. It is in the interaction between them that one can perhaps begin to identify the parameters of what might be called 'post-classical' film sound.
