How Walter Murch Merged “Apocalypse Now” and “Ride of the Valkyries” | Hacker News Reader

How Walter Murch Merged “Apocalypse Now” and “Ride of the Valkyries”

nautil.us

53 pointspmcpinto5 comments

"The problem turned out to be a classic case of synesthesia. ... Although Leinsdorf’s performance of the “Valkyries” was rhythmically in synch with Solti’s, at this moment Leinsdorf had emphasized the strings in his orchestral balance, whereas at that same point Solti had chosen to emphasize the brasses, which—I realized now only in retrospect—were responsible for synergizing that wonderful acid blue of the ocean. In Leinsdorf’s recording, the strings were soft and pillowy, and as a result the blue looked dead: The chemistry of the image and sound worked against each other to the detriment of both."

If only we could hear both edits and compare.

I wasn't aware that there were "universals" in synesthesia. Might not the blues of the ocean have looked better when paired with strings to another synesthete or to the (presumably indifferent) mostly non-synesthetic audience?

Wouldn't it be interesting if, culturally, we more often hear brass timbres than string timbres when we are by a saturated blue ocean or looking at a bright blue sky (tense action scenes in movies, on horn parts in the latin-themed soundtracks to our summer vacations)? Then presumably someone with the capacity for synesthesia could be statistically more likely to develop the specific synesthesia in question.

It's virtually impossible to be quantitative about any of that, of course.

There's fMRI research being done on synesthesia [1], but I'm unaware of any studies that go into the exact correlation between specific colors and specific timbres.

[1] http://ist.ksc.kwansei.ac.jp/~nagata/nagata_lab_folder/nagat...

This reminds me of the recent research where the texture of food was changed by playing sounds in headphones while the subject chews the food. (e.g. playing a crunching sound would make vegetables seem fresher)

Since the film editor isn't a brain scientist, I presume he's using the term synesthesia quite broadly to describe these sort of sensory interplays that are apparent to him but have barely been explored by researchers.

Or more likely, the flowery language is just so much feel-good journalism, paired with the whimsy of a film editing audio technician enthralled by his own doings.

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