That time I watched 60 porns in one week and told myself "oh i see, that could be audio in a porn"
/!\This is the script of my intervention in the lost episode 2 of Game Dolls Advance, beginning of 2024
CW : Mention of porn, mention of non explicit sex activities
For most people, the audio of a porn is either some kind of groovy music sounding like exploitation films of the 60s, or house music of the early 90s, or a total absence of music that is often found in movies with very little budget.
For the short story, at the end of October 2023, I went to the Berlin porn film festival to present a film on which I made music and audio mixing, and to make the propaganda of my free music public domain library. So, it's a film directed by the performer and director Manon Praline, of the BDSM genre, with impacts and lots of fluid noises in general. I don't tell you the title of the movie because there's also other stuff in it that can be quite triggering but that's it. I specify the nature of porn because it's important to my thinking path.
The festival in itself, if you don't know, it's two movie theaters in Berlin that project porns of the alternative and queer scene, in the presence of directors and performers. There are feature films, compilations of short films according to some really questionable curation themes, and if cast members of a film are present at the screening, there is a small Q&A at the end of the film and it is often very interesting.
So, about the movie soundtrack. Doing that work was really cool, I kind of stretched over ten minutes a song I composed years ago and that I liked, it was really nice to see that track exist on pictures like that. It makes me ask a lot of questions about how to make it live in the movie, because there's plenty of cool sounds to make exist and not to cover with music. The basic song is rather post-punk/shoegazy, we work with the director to make the music more dynamic to the images with effects of filter, misty reverberation, to suit the action, the atmosphere, we cut the moments of the song that are too melodic but also the moments that are too noisy to leave some room for images and sounds of the scenery.
That work on the dynamics of silences, music, murmurs, is super interesting to conceptualize. It sometimes requires, in order to bring out interesting sounds, to make incredible tricks of sound design, to normalize audio takes that are in very low volume to hear a whisper, creating intense white noise to treat. A total chaos in the sound consistency of a film for the pleasure of hearing the inaudible.
An other way to apprehend the sound
Back to the festival, I think I watch about 60 porn shorts over the week and I had time to analyze the music of the movies that were shown and especially mine. And I think 90% of pornos put music on movies and cover everything with sound while a few movies try to create breathing spaces of sound.
And it's in the middle of Berlin while in sleep deprivation that I'm tilting something. Sound in porn can be considered as ASMR. I explain.
The first ASMR videos are not people who rub stuff against a hyper-sensitive and sophisticated microphone. It is, among other things, a community of people who exchange podcast or video links on Reddit to trigger the sensation of ASMR. In an emerging practice of sound, unintentional. This non-intentionality of ASMR, we find it in particular in conferences or television shows because the person has a voice that causes sleep, because the person speaks with the patous mouth, because a person who comments a part of cricket has a very relaxing voice...
If this subject interest you, Rob Gallagher wrote a nice piece of work called « Eliciting Euphoria Online: The Aesthetics of “ASMR” Video Culture ».
So what is the deal with ASMR and porn. It's that fetishism, kink, sexual excitement can unintentionaly emerge from something that does not always relate to sex.
For the sound in porn, it's kind of the same thing. The sounds of the bodies, of impact, of fluid, the whispers, the moaning, the textiles, all this is potential to awaken fetishism, excitement, intentional or not.
You will tell me that there are already categories of porn that deal with fetishism, that is even the reason for the existence of these categories. But it is essentially in the visual and it shows that there is an intentional direction of the search for fetishism but there is little or no interest in its sound aspect. To see the load of films that cover their music montage bench without trying to think if they will cover all these diegetic sounds, the intentional search for audio fetishism is not an interest of directors. Obviously, extracting these sounds also requires ways that directors don't necessarily have, to have good microphones and filming teams that can handle it. It takes a lot of logistics, and a lot of money (please support your local queer porn producers).
Maybe it's a bad idea to put a music without thinking about the whole porn audio, and it would be cool to think about how music can support narrative changes, highlight the expression of bodies and spaces. Music can exist throughout a film, it is a recurring bias, but which unfortunately often hides a lack of budget (we'll talk about that idea that bad audio is always a bad thing - it's not) and prevents the emergence of listening practice of porn.
Beyond that, there is an experimental sound approach in porn, which remains a niche, but that exists. But it's poor in references and exposures. Yet one could imagine a whole bunch of new ways to add sound meaning in porn. What would prevent us in a post porn Body Horror from changing the sound of the bodies with chorus and pitch effects, from installing grinning noises in the mechanical movement of a muscle in a heterosexual vanilla scene on a bed because it's funny, adding spatial and sound dissonance by adding reverberation in a sex scene on a calm beach...
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