Analyzing Moroccan Film Sound

1. The Audiovisual Contract: Chion's Core Concepts

While Schafer asks us to listen to the world, Chion asks us to analyze what happens when the world is re-presented to us as a combination of sound and image. His work is a powerful critique of "ocularcentrism"—the tendency in film studies to privilege the visual. As you'll see in your wider reading, this focus on the aural makes Chion's work particularly valuable for postcolonial film analysis, which often seeks to uncover and amplify marginalized voices and sonic worlds.

Let's define two of his most influential concepts.

Added Value (Valeur Ajoutée)

Chion argues that sound does not simply accompany an image; it fundamentally transforms our perception of it. Added value is the expressive and informative value with which a sound enriches a given image, making us believe—often unconsciously—that this information originates from the image itself.

Consider a classic example: a character throws a punch in a silent film. We see the motion. Now, imagine the same scene with a loud, bass-heavy "thwack" synchronized to the impact. The punch now feels more powerful, more painful, more real. The sound has added value to the image of the punch. The crucial insight is that we don't perceive this as "image of a punch + sound of a thwack"; we perceive it as a single event: a "powerful punch." The properties of the sound have been transferred to the image.

This can work in many ways:

• Music adds emotional value, coloring a neutral expression with sadness, joy, or suspense.
• Sound effects add a sense of materiality, texture, and impact.
• Voice-over can add psychological depth, revealing a character's internal state.

Synchresis

The phenomenon that allows added value to occur is what Chion calls synchresis. The term is a portmanteau of "synchronism" and "synthesis." It describes the spontaneous and irresistible psychological fusion of a sound and a visual event when they occur at the same time.

Synchresis is not an artistic choice but a fundamental aspect of our perception. If we see a door slam and hear a bang at the same instant, our brain will forge a link between them. This is the basis of all sound-image synchronization in film. Filmmakers exploit this perceptual habit to create meaning.

The following diagram illustrates the spectrum of relationships that can exist between sound and image, with synchresis being the central binding force.

As the diagram suggests, synchresis can create different effects. It can produce a sense of harmony and realism when sound and image match perfectly (A/V Unison), or it can create jarring and thought-provoking effects when the sound seems to contradict the image (Dissonant Harmony or Counterpoint).

2. Case Study: The Audiovisual Contract in the Houma

Now, let's return to the article "Hearing the Houma" by Chris Vandermeulen. In our last lesson, we focused on its use of Schafer's terms. Today, we'll see how the author's analysis is also deeply informed by Chion's ideas. In fact, the author explicitly states his intention to use Chion's concept of the "audio-visual contract" to understand the "audio-visual synthesis" in these videos.

Please re-read the same analysis of Muslim's "Dmou3 L7awma" that we examined in the last lesson. This time, however, read it with Chion's concepts of added value and synchresis in mind. Focus on how sound and image are fused to create meaning.

Unpacking the Analysis with Chion's Tools

Vandermeulen's analysis is a masterclass in identifying how added value and synchresis work to serve a pedagogical goal. Let's break down a few examples:

1. Added Value through Music: The author notes that the video's "muted drum-and-synthesizer track contributes a quiet sense of foreboding." This is a perfect example of added value. The visuals of the "dark, dirty, and cramped" neighborhood are enriched by the sonic texture of the music. The foreboding is not just in the image or just in the sound; it exists in their synthesis. The sound makes the visual space feel more oppressive.

2. Synchresis and Dehumanization: The analysis points to a moment where a "salivating Rottweiler [is] barking in time to the music, vocalized on the track by shouted male background vocals." This is a striking use of synchresis. The image of the dog and the sound of the human shouts fuse in our perception. This creates a hybrid, unsettling entity—a dog with a human voice, or a human reduced to animalistic barking. This powerful audiovisual event adds value to the image of the "guard dog"-like pimp, reinforcing the dehumanizing violence of the houma.

3. Visuals Indexing Sound: The author's central concept of "indexical audio-visual crossovers" is deeply connected to Chion's theories. He notes that the video shows "an ambulance’s flashing lights, which index the sound of the accompanying siren." We see the lights, and through synchresis, our brain completes the picture by "hearing" or imagining the siren. The visual indexes a sound that isn't literally present, yet the siren becomes part of the scene's value. The same happens with the weeping mother: we see her silent grief, and that image adds a powerful, tragic value to the implied soundscape of tears that Muslim's lyrics describe. The video teaches us to hear what isn't there by providing powerful visual anchors for our sonic imagination.

3. Rejecting the Contract: The Politics of Sound in "Walou"

Chion's framework is also useful for understanding when filmmakers resist a tight fusion of sound and image. Let's now look at the article's analysis of another artist, El Haqed, whose video for the song "Walou" ("Nothing") takes a very different approach. This contrast will highlight how these theoretical concepts can be used to unpack artistic and political choices.

Please read the following sections from the article, which analyze El Haqed's "Walou" and contrast it with the other videos.

As the analysis explains, the videos by Muslim and Don Bigg rely heavily on indexical relationships—strong synchretic links where visuals point to and give value to unheard sounds (weeping, sirens, the call to prayer). They create a tightly constructed audiovisual argument, "teaching" the listener how to hear.

El Haqed's "Walou," in contrast, "performs a more subtle political move of elevating urban soundworlds without the added baggage of moralizing rhetoric." It does this, in part, by resisting those tight indexical bonds. The author notes:

"...the video’s politics are enacted through its evasion of the kind of indexical audio-visual constructions that “Dmou3 L7awma” and “T-JR” rely on. Audio-visual parallels are largely mimetic rather than indexical, with various urban residents mouthing El Haqed’s many interjections of “Walou.”"

Instead of a sound adding value to an image (or vice versa), the sound and image run more in parallel. The keynotes of everyday life—"the sounds of children, of roosters, of motorbikes"—are presented as they are, without being forced into a tight synchretic relationship with a visual narrative of moral decay or uplift. The video refuses to "teach" us how to hear in the same way. By weakening the audiovisual contract, El Haqed's video insists on the value of the soundscape as it is, challenging the viewer (and perhaps the state or cultural elites) to listen without a pre-packaged interpretation.

Conclusion

In this lesson, we have added two of Michel Chion's foundational concepts to our analytical toolkit, providing a crucial perceptual counterpoint to Schafer's environmental framework.

Key Takeaways:

• Added Value: Sound enriches and transforms the image, creating a perception that contains more information than the image alone.
• Synchresis: The psycho-physiological fusion of sound and image is the mechanism that allows added value to occur.
• These concepts can be applied to analyze how filmmakers construct meaning, as seen in the "indexical audio-visual crossovers" in Muslim's "Dmou3 L7awma."
• The rejection or weakening of the strong synchretic audiovisual contract can also be a significant artistic and political choice, as suggested by the analysis of El Haqed's "Walou."

By combining Schafer's environmental listening with Chion's perceptual analysis, you can build a comprehensive framework for your own research. You can analyze the composition of a film's soundscape (keynotes, signals) and also analyze how that soundscape is fused with the image to create specific meanings, emotions, and arguments in the mind of the viewer.

Preview of the Next Lesson

Having established these foundational theoretical approaches from Schafer and Chion, our next lesson will apply them to a more specific thematic concern: the construction of place and identity. We will focus on how diegetic sound elements—the sounds that belong to the world of the film, such as ambient sound, music originating from a source on-screen, and language—are used to build a tangible sense of cultural and geographical identity.