Resonance and Reverberation: Sounding Out Screen Adaptation

Abstract

This chapter attends to the phenomenological quality of sound and how it contributes to the experience and appreciation of adaptation. Attending to an adaptation’s soundscape not only reveals how it faithfully ‘re-sounds’ its source novel through the use of dialogue, but also how an adaptation might use sound to be creatively divergent from its source. This chapter therefore not only examines how an adaptation’s non-diegetic score can smooth its narrative structure or give emotional and psychological insight into its characters. But further, this chapter also examines how the warped and uncanny use of the actor’s voice—or an extremely atonal soundscape and score—can palpably affect the spectator. In doing so, this chapter examines how sound—both ‘faithful’ and ‘unfaithful’ recording of its source—intersects with adaptations both ‘faithful’ and wonderfully ‘unfaithful’ to its source.