World music: Three techniques in sound design in Jia Zhangke's "The World"

In this presentation i will be talking about the music in Jia Zhangke’s film The World. I will not really be talking about the plot, the cinematography, or the characters. But of course all of that is very relevant. But i want to particular focus on the claim that the music in The World has been very deliberately chosen and choreographed to further the message of the film, and any addition, subtraction or otherwise alteration of the soundtrack would detriment the final product.

At first glance, there’s not a lot to say about othe music in the film, and in fact that was Flair’s first reaction when i said i only wanted to talk about the music. What music? And it’s true! This film, for its 135 minute runtime, features a 14 minute long soundtrack. That’s enough music to cover just over 10% of the total screening time.

In contrast, another long slow arty film, interstellar, has a 72 minute soundtrack for its 169 minute runtime, which is enough to cover more than 40% of the film. And kung fu panda’s soundtrack is 60 minutes long for its 92 minute length, which is more than 65% of the film.

My point is, the soundtrack of The World is abnormally short. And in fact the situation is even more interesting, because of those 14 minutes, only about 5 unique minutes are used within the film. Almost every time you hear part of the soundtrack within the film, you will have already heard that exact same part.

Furthermore, as i will discuss shortly, almost every time you hear part of the soundtrack within the film, you will have already heard that exact same part in a very similar context. That is, the choice snippets of sounds are assigned as motifs and used to ground the audience throughout the film.

And i think that this idea of music as a grounding force rather than a compelling force is very important in this film. The soundtrack is not meant to inspire you, scare you, or cause you to feel any other emotion. The soundtrack is a tool that is being used to bring about the emotion through interplay with the other cinematic elements.

So now i’m going to do a brief analysis of the soundtrack and some interesting parts of it, and how it is used throughout the film. Then i’m going to cover two techniques used that serve to represent the interplay between the soundtrack and the content of the film, and end by discussing the frequent use of everyday sound in musical ways, to serve in lieu of a soundtrack.

So let’s talk about the music itself. This is a picture of the waveform of the whole soundtrack of four songs. You can see that except for the second one, they’re all a similar shape, starting quieter and gradually increasing in intensity, with a drop in the middle.

Stylistically, there is nothing particularly unique, innovative or special in this music. It is all in common time and the chord progressions are standard. A drum machine drives most of the compositions forward with a basic beat. Every song is ambient electronic music, with some funk influence.

Still, there are a few interesting stylistic aspects. The first is in the introduction, which uses a mysterious clicking noise which doesn’t appear to have much rhythm.

This section appears prominently once in the film, during a bus journey, one of the only times the characters are outside of the park. The use of this slightly unsettling part of the soundtrack represents the unsettling nature of travelling beyond the boundaries of the small world the characters inhabit, as a repeated refrain within the film is the fact that most of them have never travelled far from home.

Another significant part is the use of a reverse symbol crash before the drop in the first song of the soundtrack. This part of the soundtrack is used as the backdrop for the main performances within the film. The juxtaposition between the elegance of the dancing and the basic and driving crudity of the music serves as a way of highlighting the perception of the performance from the perspective of the tourists in the park, and from the perspective of the performers themselves.

Next, we have this much more acoustic section in the middle of the third track. Within the park, this short section serves as a form of elevator music, and is predominantly heard during transitions from one place to another, or one character to another, or one time to another.

The whole film is about normal people going about their lives as employees at a theme park portraying a world they will never get to experience. They spend most of their time moving between different performances. This is a repetitive part of their lives, and this motif highlights the mundanity of such an existence.

This particular aspect of the soundtrack also really highlights how this film contains almost no background music. Sometimes, there is diegetic music playing in the background of a scene, such as in the cafeteria or in the ktv. But the soundtrack itself is almost never played while the characters are doing anything. Either there is talking, or there is soundtrack. When the soundtrack is playing, it is foreground music, it is the centre of attention. And as you, as a viewer, hear the same short section again and again, you come to associate these different parts of music with different parts of the lives of the people you are looking in on.

In some ways, this makes the overall feeling of the film almost predictable. The music is acting as a pavlovian trigger.

The final song of the soundtrack appears only once in the film, during the wedding at the end. It is also the most different sounding track, with an emphasis on bells and heavy reverb effects. This again serves to highlight the difference between this part of the workers’ lives and their usual routine. In many ways, the composition is stylistically similar to the acoustic section of the third track. The lack of a strong beat doesn’t pull as forward, but lets us sit back, slow down, and finally take a break.

That covers basically all the occurrences of the soundtrack within the film, so we can start to talk about the more technical aspects of how it is attached to the narrative.

First, this idea of diegetic latency, when diegetic music becomes non-diegetic for a few seconds. This is not music first acting as non-diegetic music and then being demonstrated to be diegetic, or vise versa. Rather, the music remains totally diagetic, but the transition is outside the bounds of the cut. This might be best demonstrated with examples.

And what is the purpose of this technique? The first is that it helps to provide synchronicity between cuts, as some aspect of the previous scene is carried on into the next. This helps to maintain cohesion between different parts of what is otherwise a sprawling world with a vast number of characters and locations.

But i think there’s more to it than that. Having myself worked, if not in a theme park, then in similar occupations that are not so mentally taxing and that require repetition of the same kinds of movements over and over again, i can relate to the difficulty of context switching from one boring task to another. This diegetic latency then is a way of allowing the viewer to also experience the disorientation of a busy day. I mean, the main characters have to dress as members of different cultures all day long, which is certainly a disorienting experience, and the divergence between the picture and the audio shares a part of that with the viewer.

Following on from that, the latency allows the director to highlight the contrast between the world portrayed to tourists and the world behind the scenes. This is particularly prominent in the examples of the dance scenes, where we cut from an epic dance number to a grimy back hallway. It wouldn’t be a bad choice for the director to abruptly cut the music at the same time, which would result in almost whiplash for the viewer, and in some way also represent the mentality of the dancers. But by continuing the music on slightly into the next scene, we can get an even deeper understanding of the dancers’ lives. Do they want to be there? Almost certainly not, but it’s like their lives are particularly bad. We can see that they enjoy music and dance, they enjoy performing and wearing the costumes. Coming off the stage doesn’t result in whiplash so much as a feeling of contentment for a short period, before the reality of the misery of their surroundings sets back in. The final chords of the soundtrack set to a shot of an empty hallway lend some majesty to the hallway that perfectly reflects the feelings of a performer after a successful performance.

The next technique i am calling pseudo-diegesis, which is when music appears to be diegetic, but its diegetic nature does not make sense as part of the fictional world.

Again, i think that several of the dance numbers are a good example of this. We know that the first dance performance that we see is not actually diegetic music, because the dance they are performing would not be performed to that kind of music. We can see in a slightly later scene the kind of music that they are actually dancing to.

So when we see these costumes, and the music displays none of the stereotypical features of ancient egyptian music, we know that what we are hearing is not what they are hearing. Even so, they dance in time to the music that we can hear, and for all other intents and purposes it is diegetic.

What’s the purpose of this? Firstly, deliberately obscuring a part of the cultures that the staff are appropriating represents the indifference that they feel towards any of the cultures. As is mentioned frequently throughout, they have not been abroad and, like with the visitors to the park, view all this external culture as a bit of a novelty, an aesthetic, not something to be deeply considered or appreciated.

To them, the dancing is just a job, which is emphasised by the strong beat in the pseudo-diagetic soundtrack. For the workers, the most important thing is that they give a good show, because if they don’t, they will compromise their job security. What kind of show it is doesn’t really matter.

From a technical perspective, the different parts of the soundtrack can also serve as motifs for us to understand the mental state of the staff at different moments. That is, by always playing the beat drop from the first track during performances, or always playing the acoustic section of track three while the workers are on the monorail, we as viewers can become more grounded in their everyday life and start to understand how it feels for them to live like this. While the visitors at the park witness the dance performances and feel excited, the workers do the same things so frequently that it just feels like a series of rote movements to carry out.

Finally, i want to touch on the use of non-instrumental instrumentation in the film. Throughout the film, the ambient sounds display some musical qualities. In fact we can see this right at the start of the film, which was when i first decided that the sound design was certainly going to play a huge role in the cinematography here.

Before there are any visuals on the screen, we hear one sentence, repeated twice. The sentence is a question or, to use musical terminology, a call. Over the next two minutes, we hear this same call repeated a total of sixteen times (with some minor grammatical variation).

This call is made up of five characters, spoken with regularity, and with a stress on the first and final syllables. In other words, we are in four/four time.

As these two minutes progress, we follow a woman we do not know, asking for something we don’t know why. We follow her closely as she moves from solitude into an environment surrounded with more and more people, accompanying and complementing her request. Her melody is developing towards a climax.

And then we receive the response: a change of one character, representing finality, in some regard.

So the film begins with a motif. The motif is one of uncertainty, in content but also in rhythm. We know that it will come, and when it comes, we are not surprised. But could we say exactly when? Not until it gets here.

And then the call receives a response. But is the motif resolved? Is a plaster a reliable, long term preventative measure against dancing all day in shoes that were designed to value style over comfort? Or is this just a band aid over the real problem?

Similarly we hear the repetition of the loudspeaker recording at regular intervals over and over again during this scene. No one seems to pay it any attention, and yet it serves as a semblance of regularity. Here the security guard is unexpectedly called away from this important duty, and must hand the loudspeaker over to another member of staff. And still the loudspeaker reliably shares its message.

Five minutes later, we briefly return to this scene, for no reason other than to see that the loudspeaker is still there.

Here are two further examples, but i think that both of them work significantly better with headphones. I encourage you to go back and listen to the ambient sounds throughout the film and consider how they might have been deliberately orchestrated.

But what’s the point?

These everyday sounds keep us grounded in the reality of the film. As mentioned in the earlier slides, a key theme of the film is the dichotomy between what the visitors see and what the staff see, and the playful use of rhythm instead of composed music, and especially the teases of soundtrack which turn out just to be diegetic sound effects serve as a reminder of how little music there is in real life.

As dancers, the workers’ whole lives are split into the time they spend on the stage and the time they spend off the stage, a part of their existence set to music, and a part of their lives absent of music. Bringing rhythm into the other side of their lives implicates just how deeply their work has permeated their existence, that wherever they go the echoes of music can be heard.

Finally, it allows us as viewers to reflect on how we deal with background music in our own lives. When the film was released, the ipod was still not really old news, mobile phones were still not totally normalised, but slowly these things were becoming more and more commonplace in public, what previously would have been musicless, places. How does adding a soundtrack to your whole life affect how you perceive it?

So to conclude, although music is used sparingly within the film, the audio design has not been neglected, and in fact has been painstakingly crafted to help advance the overall feeling and vision of Jia Zhangke.

The development of motifs in the form of short phrases from the soundtrack help to situation the viewer in what is actually quite a mundane viewing experience, in some regards adding themselves to that mundanity. But these techniques also reflect a real sense of sympathy towards and understanding of this everyday drudgery of the working class.

If there was more music, the film would feel too overloaded and unnatural. If there was less music, it would feel boring and samey. Giong Lim and Jia Zhangke have managed to strike the perfect balance here, and The World is all the better for it.