EPISODE 31 — Psyché Tropes

Psyché Tropes Episode 31
11pm, 26 May 2025 on Resonance 104.4 FM

Presented by Steven McInerney, Psyché Tropes Episode 31 continues our look at the powerful use of drone as a cinematic device. Throughout film history, directors, composers, and sound designers have understood the principles of psychoacoustics. This interdisciplinary field combines aspects of psychology, acoustics, and physiology to understand the subjective experience of sound.

When psychoacoustic techniques are combined with cinema, they can trigger a response in the sympathetic nervous system, responsible for the "fight-or-flight" response—preparing the body for stressful or dangerous situations. It primarily activates bodily functions that aid in survival.

That being said, the immersive sound experience in film can manipulate and control the audience's vital organs and psychological state. Furthermore, an added layer of cognitive dissonance in the viewer is present due to a dichotomy of feeling vulnerable and exposed, threatening one's own survival, while seated in the comfort and safety of a theatre or at home.

In the 1966 film Persona, Ingmar Bergman's exploration of duality, insanity, and personal identity reflects the Jungian theory of an external identity or mask separate from the soul. The prologue's minimalist composition with a slow-building drone sets up the film's dissociative tone in what many critics consider one of the most challenging and complex films of all time.

In the 1962 cine-poem on violence and innocence, War Games, directed by Donald Richie, swells of white noise from the wind and ocean waves could easily be mistaken for the relentless bombing from a frontline battlefield. Instead, a group of boys playing on the seashore in Tokyo find a goat and kill it in a game of tug-of-war for ownership.

Gus Van Sant's 2003 film Elephant relies heavily on the use of environmental drones combined with its cinéma vérité, non-narrative style to capture the mundane, everyday life and horror experienced by high school students during the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado.

Considered one of the greatest anti-war films of all time, the 1985 film Come and See, directed by Elem Klimov, follows the footsteps of a young teenager who joins a Soviet partisan unit and witnesses the Nazi atrocities inflicted upon the Belarusian people. The film exemplifies the powerful use of diegetic sound throughout, as the constant background hum of Nazi bombers, distant screams, and swamp-like groans, smudged with bursts of Mozart strings, create a hellish and hyper-real soundscape with additional drone composed by Oleg Yanchenko.

Klimov and Yanchenko's understanding of the relationship between physical sound properties and the psychological experience of hearing is evident with the use of a 4 kHz drone following a cacophony of bombing. 4 kHz is considered the most susceptible area on the basilar membrane within the inner ear to damage from excessive noise exposure. This temporary threshold shift inextricably forces the sound of terror to the auditory cortex of the audience.

A remarkable Finnish film that heavily utilises drone, which centres around man's survival—a hundred thousand years into the future, is the 2010 documentary Into Eternity, directed by Michael Madsen. The original soundtrack composed by Karsten Fundal with sound design by Nicolai Linck, sends chills down the spine, acting as a sober realisation of how our consumption of energy and management of its waste will have long-lasting effects on civilisation. Far beyond our comprehension.In the 1971 film The Andromeda Strain, directed by Robert Wise, based on the novel by Michael Crichton, an existential dread threatens the mortality of man when an extraterrestrial virus that thrives on nuclear energy attempts to transform into a super-colony that would destroy life on Earth once a nuclear bomb is detonated.

The drone now pervades as a cinematic trope in almost every horror, science-fiction, and war film, becoming an invaluable device in the language of cinema, heightening the awareness of the viewer both physically and mentally—activating the thoracic and lumbar regions of the spinal cord while endogenously secreting norepinephrine and adrenaline into the bloodstream. Like an intoxicating substance, audiences return to it time and time again.

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