The Democratic Voice

Abstract

More than any other American director from the 1970s, Robert Altman used film sound as a means for dissolving the industrial and technological divisions between voice, effects and music in order to construct a radically new form of cinematic storytelling. This chapter examines this prolific period in Altman's work and his cultivation of a new sound aesthetic emerging from the use of multitrack recording technology. It refers to his overarching sound aesthetic as “the democratic voice” to describe how it reorganizes the vertical hierarchy of sound recording, mixing and reproduction to allow for a non-hierarchical structure of sound that liberates the multiple speaking voices in his films and gives them equal potential to be heard. The significance of Altman's sound aesthetic is that it represents one of several efforts in 1970s American

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