Reflections on Sound Design: It's All Gone Pete Tong

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The whole movie “It's All Gone Pete Tong” is a wonderful example of all sorts of sounds. It follows the journey of a DJ who bursts his eardrums and is forced to learn how to feel the music through their vibrations in order to save his life. This scene in particular shows the point in time where Frankie Wild, the DJ, begins to discover how he can sense the vibrations if he focuses. To do this the sound designers put a lot of time in trying to make you feel like you were within his head and hear what he hears. Two examples of this can be found through their use of “Listening Modes” and “Time”. In terms of “Listening Modes”, during the scene within the restaurant the casual sound you hear is all of the musicians playing and the lady's shoes off the floor. In the Semantic sense, though, as it combines with the audio and is filtered some you can tell it represents the vibrations Frankie is feeling within his body. In terms of “Time”, as Frankie focuses more intently on specific things the “speed and loudness” begin to change. The tempo of the music begins to slow and different aspects of the song are made louder as others are taken down in volume. It also uses “recognition” by taking the way we normally hear/recognize the sound of music/audio in general and then transforms it into a very different sound to create the idea that we are within a deaf person's mind, something we aren't used to or able to recognize which catches our attention.