Current approaches to film sound systematically borrow a musical model. The most influential introductory film textbook of the last decade defines the acoustic properties of sound as loudness, pitch, and timbre.  

This definition is based on the apparent assumption that all film sounds have the nature of musical notes, that is, they are...  

• single phenomena
  
• produced instantaneously
  
• emitted from a point source
  
• perceived in an immediate and direct fashion
  
  

In fact, since the terminology is borrowed from the realm of music, we find that with these terms we can handle almost any of the types of analysis typically practiced on a musical score.   

We note..  

• the suspenseful diminuendo in Hitchcock´s films from a loud slam to muffled scratching
  
  

• the harmony of Orson Welles' bass and Joseph Cotten's tenor
  
  

• the melodic gifts of Gary Grant and Katherine Hepburn
  
  

• the awkward timbre of Zasu Pitts and Jerry Lewis 
  
  

• the varied instrumentation of the "Symphony of Sounds" with which Rouben Mamolulian opens Love me tonight. 
  
  

In fact, no even musical sounds can be fully described in musical terminology. More appropriate for describing musical scores than individual performances, musical terminology pays little attention to the details of any particular performance, concentrating instead on the common factors joining all performances of the same score.   

If I attended three concerts of Mozart's "Little Night Music" in a ..  

• upholstered salon
• large concert hall
• city park

Yet how different are the sounds that reach my ears during the three concerts!  

Musical notation assumes that each sound is..  

• single
• discrete
• uniform
• undimensional

• multiple
• complex
• heterogeneous
• three-dimensional

We can no longer continue to depend on a fundamentally conceptual terminology that remains insensitive to sound's phenomenally.   

Instead we must have a terminology capable both of respecting sound's heterogeneous nature and of figuring the narrative component built into the very process of recording and reproducing sound.