The Politics of Cinematic Sound: Voice and Silencing

1. The Politics of Audibility: Who Has the Right to Be Heard?

At its core, the politics of representation is a question of power: who has the power to represent, and who is merely represented? In sonic terms, this becomes a question of audibility.

This question echoes the title of Gayatri Spivak's seminal essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" which critiques the idea that marginalized groups (the "subaltern") can ever truly speak and be heard within the dominant structures that oppress them. The following text introduces this line of inquiry in the context of audiovisual media.

As the text highlights, the crucial concept here is Jacques Rancière's "distribution of the sensible." This refers to the implicit, often unspoken, system that determines what is visible and invisible, what is audible and what is mere noise, and consequently, who is included in or excluded from the common political space.

• Speech: When a voice is recognized as legitimate, contributing to public discourse.
• Noise: When a voice is dismissed as meaningless, disruptive, or animalistic—as sound without sense.

The politics of sonic representation, then, is the struggle over this distribution. It’s about who "gets to occupy the auditive spaces" and have their sounds recognized as meaningful speech, versus whose sounds are relegated to the status of noise.

2. Mechanisms of Sonic Silencing

How does cinema participate in this political act of silencing? It's rarely an explicit act of censorship. More often, it operates through ingrained conventions of production and representation that perpetuate a particular "distribution of the sensible."

A. The Politics of Language

The most direct form of sonic representation is language. The choice of which language is spoken, and how, is a deeply political act in postcolonial cinema.

As the video explains, the convention in Hollywood and "Empire Cinema" of having non-Western characters speak accented English—even to each other—is a powerful form of silencing. It erases linguistic diversity and reinforces a world where English is the default, the center. The indigenous language is rendered inaudible.

In contrast, a postcolonial filmmaker's choice to have characters speak their own languages is an act of resistance. It asserts cultural specificity and re-centers the narrative, forcing the audience to engage with a different linguistic reality (often through subtitles). This directly challenges a colonial legacy where indigenous languages were often suppressed. For your research, this raises immediate questions about the interplay of Darija, Amazigh languages, French, and Arabic in Moroccan films.

B. The Hierarchy of the Mix

Your professional experience as a sound mixer gives you a unique insight into another, more subtle mechanism of silencing: the mix itself. A film's sound mix is not a neutral reflection of reality; it's a carefully constructed hierarchy of sounds.

In dominant Western cinema, this hierarchy typically follows a predictable pattern:

1. Dialogue: Given maximum clarity and presence.
2. Score: The primary driver of emotion.
3. Key Sound Effects (Foley/SFX): Tied to narrative action.
4. Ambiance/Backgrounds: The sonic "scenery."

Within this structure, the "distribution of the sensible" is clear. Non-Western music might be used diegetically but is often mixed as "background" or "atmosphere"—part of the scenery rather than a primary expressive element. The complex social information within a bustling market's soundscape might be flattened into a generic "walla" track, its specific voices and interactions rendered as noise. As the text "Silence(d) and Silencing" asks, "how do sound mixing conventions perpetuate cultural hierarchies?" The answer is often by relegating the sounds of the "Other" to the bottom of the mix.

C. Internalized Silencing and the Colonial Mentality

The most insidious form of silencing is not external but internal. The Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon theorized how colonialism impacts the psyche of the colonized.

Fanon argued that generations of exposure to media that depicts one's own people as inferior or "other" can lead to a form of self-alienation. In sonic terms, this can manifest as a rejection of one's own sonic culture in favor of the dominant one, or an unconscious adoption of the dominant culture's sonic codes in an attempt to be "heard" and legitimized. It is a silencing that comes from within, born from a history of being told your sounds are mere "noise."

3. Sonic Resistance: Making the Silenced Audible

Postcolonial cinema is not just a story of oppression; it is a story of resistance. Filmmakers actively use sound to "talk back" to colonial representations and forge new, decolonized sonic spaces.

A. Polyphony and Fragmentation

One key strategy is to disrupt the clean, authoritative hierarchy of the dominant cinematic soundscape.

As the text suggests, postcolonial filmmakers often employ:

• Polyphony: A dense mix where multiple voices, languages, and sounds coexist, competing for attention and refusing to resolve into a simple hierarchy. This reflects the complex, multi-layered reality of postcolonial societies.
• Fragmentation: An editing style that breaks up sound and image, resisting a smooth, seamless narrative and instead creating a sense of rupture and dislocation that can mirror the experience of colonial trauma and hybrid identity.

B. The Assertive Voice: Ululation as a "Sound of the South"

Sometimes, resistance is not about creating complexity but about asserting the presence and meaning of a single, culturally specific sound that is often misunderstood or dismissed by Western ears.

Meintjes's analysis shows how a sound like ululation, which a "hungry listener" might dismiss as exotic background noise, is in fact a powerful political and social act. It is:

• An "assertion of a relational presence."
• A voice that is "critical to proceedings."
• A sound that "genders Sound Studies" by centering a female vocal practice.

By focusing on such a sound, we can see how specific sonic practices can reclaim auditory space and insist on their own meaning, refusing to be silenced or misinterpreted.

C. When Noise Becomes Voice

Finally, what happens when a community is so systematically silenced that conventional speech is no longer an option? In such extreme cases, acts that the dominant order defines as "noise" can become the only available channel for political expression.

This powerful argument suggests that riots—with their sounds of shouting, breaking glass, and sirens—can be interpreted as a political voice born of desperation. It is the sound of a community refusing to be invisible and inaudible. This forces us to expand our definition of "voice" beyond organized language to include any sound-making that asserts political existence against a backdrop of enforced silence.

Conclusion

Today we have explored the deeply political nature of the film soundscape. The choice of what is heard, what is foregrounded, and what is silenced is not merely aesthetic, but is tied to histories of power and resistance.

Key Takeaways:

• The politics of sound revolves around the "distribution of the sensible"—the struggle over which sounds are legitimized as "speech" and which are dismissed as "noise."
• Sonic silencing in cinema operates through multiple mechanisms: the political choice of language, the creation of hierarchical mixes that marginalize non-Western sounds, and the cultivation of an internalized "colonial mentality."
• Sonic resistance involves strategies to reclaim auditory space. These include creating polyphonic and fragmented soundscapes, asserting the meaning of culturally specific sounds like ululation, and, in the most extreme cases, using what is deemed "noise" as a form of political speech.

Preview of the Next Lesson:

We have now critiqued dominant frameworks and discussed the politics of silencing and audibility. In the next lesson, we will focus more specifically on proactive strategies of representation. The learning outcome is to describe how non-Western filmmakers use soundscapes to assert cultural specificity and resist sonic homogenization. We will look at how sound is used not just to "talk back" to the colonizer, but to build rich, affirmative, and culturally distinct sonic worlds.