Research On New Hollywood Film’s Sound Design Before The Emergence Of Dolby Digital System

There are little analyses on the sound design of New Hollywood movies in the study of the New Hollywood. After reading a large number of domestic literature researches the author finds that the domestic research focus is the sound design of the movie and only a few people study the sound design of a certain director. The emphasis of the study about a school or a film movement is usually the whole audio-visual language feature. There are only a few studies only about the sound design.The New Hollywood Movie Movement plays a decisive role in the movie developing history of Hollywood because the movement had helped Hollywood movies to develop from the classic Hollywood period to a new development direction. The development cannot continue without the update of the filming equipments, the update of the concepts caused by new knowledge that film-makers absorbed from the new wave as well as the heritage and development of the classic Hollywood movies. What’s more, the movement has broken a lot of rules in classic Hollywood movies. Films in this period have become more personalized and diversified because film-makers shoot films by using the methods that can add their own ideas at that time. Film-makers not only make experiments on the macro-perspective of the films such as the narratives, the styles and other things, but also make creative experiments on the microcosmic perspective of the films such as the frames, sounds and sound painting relationships of the film.This paper analyzes the features of the sound in a great number of new Hollywood movies. The first part of the paper concludes the foreign studies and explains the two concepts “sound design” and “sound designer” from the historic perspective. The second part analyzes the three factors that influence the form of the sound design style which respectively are the updates of the cinemas and equipments after the Classic Hollywood Period, the European Movie Movement and the “Paramount Case”. Among these, the paper also analyzes how some of these factors influence the sound design in the new Hollywood movies and what are the influences. The third part analyzes the elements in the sound design based on the new Hollywood movies themselves from three parts: the sound, the dialogue and the music. Among these, the dialogue is analyzed by the three language models of the film language and the display of the words in the frames and sound tracks. The sound part analyzes several particular audio elements in the new Hollywood movies. As for the music part, this part mainly analyzes the rock music and then analyzes the characteristics of the sound source from the perspective of the music source. In the last character, the author analyzes two new Hollywood films with different sound elements which respectively are Midnight Cowboy and Dialogue. Among these analyses, the new Hollywood movies need to pay attention to are the movies made by the simulate sound and the movies made by the Dolby sound after the year 1977. The characteristics of the sound design reflected by the two making modes are different. Therefore, there are also the respective analyses of the two sound making methods in this paper.