Sound permits the filmmaker to represent time in various ways. This is because the time represented on the soundtrack may or may not be the same that represented in the image. 
 

• Story time   

Story time consist of order, duration and frequency of all the events pertinent to the narrative whatever they are shown to us or not.   

  

• Plot time   

Plot time consists of temporal qualities (order, duration, and frequency) of the events actually present in the film.   

Plot time shows us selected story events but only refers to others. It usually covers a shorter span than the complete story. 

Story and plot time can be manipulated in two principal ways, by..   

(1) Simultaneous sound   

Image in the present    Sound in the present

Images [IMG] and sound takes place at the same time.   This is the most common temporal relation which sound has in fiction films. Noise, music, or speech that comes from space of the story occurs at the same time as the image. Like other diegetic sound simultaneous sound can either be external (objective) or internal (subjective).

By means of nonsimultaneous sound the film can give us information about story events without showing them to us. 

a) Sound from earlier in story than image   
The sound comes from an earlier point in the action currently visible on screen.  

• Sound flashback: 

Image in the present    Sound from the past

We might see a character on screen in the present but hear another character's voice from earlier scene.   A example of a "sonic flashback" occurs at the end of Joseph Losey's Accident. Over a shot of a driveway gate, we hear a car crash. The sound represents the crash that occurred at the beginning of the film.

• Image flashforward:

Image from the future   Sound in the present

Sound can belong to an earlier time than image in another way. The sound from one scene may linger as sound bridge while the image is already presenting the next scene.  One scene in Jonathan Demme's Silence of the lambs ends with the heroine talking on the phone, identifying a location as the "Your Self Storage Facility.."   Her over the phone description continues on the soundtrack ("right outside central Baltimore.") while the image track presents a medium shot of the Your Self Storage Facility sign, a shot which introduces the next scene.

b) Sound from later in story than image  
Nonsimultaneous sound may occur at a later time than the depicted by the images.  
 

• Image flashback: