Analysis of Sound Design in Whiplash

The recent lectures on sound as it relates to the moving image have made me listen more critically to all the layers of sound in film. Utilising this mindset, I'm beginning to notice the way sound and music can hint not only at the emotions of the characters but also recurring themes of the narrative. I recently watched the film Whiplash and noted a few interesting ways in which sound was used to reinforce the uneasy tone of the film.

As one might expect from a movie about a competitive jazz drummer, musical timing is a prominent theme, and there's a scene early on that plays at this theme in a clever way. It takes place in a rehearsal room at the music conservatoire where the film is primarily set. All the musicians are warming up as they wait for the instructor Terrence to arrive, a temperamental, impatient man who ends up being the central villain of the story. With the camera fixed on the clock on the wall, the musicians play a jumble of dissonant passages that crescendo, the tension ever mounting, until the second hand signals 9:00, and Terrence arrives exactly on time. Throughout the film, Terrence constantly berates and abuses his drummers for rushing, dragging and generally not being on his tempo, so the extremely tense buildup of dissonance that leads to his perfect timeliness is quite a fitting introduction to the character that also establishes the theme of musical timing.

Another interesting moment makes use of starkly contrasting scenes placed right next to each other. In the first scene, the protagonist Andrew is struggling to keep up with Terrence's unreasonably high expectations. He's in a small rehearsal room privately practicing his drumming, and what starts as him working up a sweat gradually turns into his hands bleeding profusely because he's playing so hard. Throughout this scene, the drums become louder and faster, and finally at their peak when the camera shows Andrew's hands bleeding, the scene abruptly ends and transitions to a restaurant where he's on a date and soft jazz is playing in the background. This sudden transition from the thunderous intensity of Andrew's drumming to the calm of an intimate date night was in my opinion a very effective juxtaposition of sound and the mood created by it.

Finally, one aspect of this film that I found really intriguing was its sparse approach to ambience/score. While most films rely heavily on frequent occurrences of either score or soundscape work to highlight a given mood, Whiplash rarely uses either, and this lack of background ambience creates an uptight atmosphere in and of itself. Instead, most of the score comes in the form of the band performing jazz numbers, and it's the scenes before these performances that are the quietest in the film. In these scenes, the only sounds are those of the performers preparing: reeds being adjusted, the shuffling of chart papers, chairs squeaking etc., and this evokes a sense of tension that perfectly mirrors the palpable anxiety felt before a big performance especially in such a competitive context.