A sound and an image that occur at the same instant are fused into a single event, whether or not the sound belongs to the object shown.
Chion coined the term in L'Audio-vision (1990; English translation 1994) from synchronism and synthesis. Its everyday proof is the foley studio: a cabbage struck with a bat becomes a punch, footsteps recorded on a gravel tray become a walk across a car park, and audiences hear them as the thing they see.
In practice
- Celery snapped beside a microphone is accepted without question as a breaking bone in a horror film.
- A software demo adds a soft click to each on-screen button, and testers report the interface feels more solid.
- Possible explanations
- Chion's account is that the coincidence in time is enough: perception binds what happens together into one cause, and the image tells us what that cause is. The sound need only be roughly appropriate in character.
- In its favour
- It describes standard practice in film sound and game audio, and it agrees with research on audiovisual binding, which finds that temporal coincidence is a strong cue for treating a sound and a sight as one event.
- Against it
- It is a descriptive concept from film theory rather than a tested law, and critics note that binding fails when a sound is too implausible or out of sync by more than a fraction of a second, limits the term itself does not specify.
- Standing
- A film-theory name for what the Ventriloquism Effect and the McGurk Effect show in the laboratory.
- Subject
- Communication & Media
- Essay
- What happens to a message after it is sent