The Ambient Sound Chorus

During a filmmaking workshop, when the shoot begins, how can we make sure everyone genuinely contributes, including those who are not acting or running the camera? The method I propose is to entrust the people who are off-camera with creating an ambient sound in real time, with simple musical instruments, while the scene unfolds. This practice, which I have tested and refined through years of workshops, produces remarkably effective results, both for the quality of the film and for the cohesion of the group.

The meaning of collective creation

To make a film in a workshop is to make a work together. At every stage, the question of each person’s place in this creation arises. How can we make sure that every person in the group contributes to the project, to the extent that they can, with what is their own, and by stretching themselves?

This question is pedagogical, and even ethical. If, at any given moment, some people in the group are not useful to the project, the very coherence of what we are doing together starts to crack. We say we are creating together, and we end up in a setup where a few people create while the others watch. The meaning of the collective experience, which gives a workshop its formative power, rests on the capacity to include everyone in the making.

This concern also runs through cultural contexts among adults, and professional contexts where people create together. The same question arises whenever a collective makes something together. How can we make sure that a collective creation truly draws on the contributions of each and every person, rather than being the work of a few surrounded by people assigned to technical roles with no real grasp on what is being done?

The pedagogy of Célestin Freinet posed this question long ago. For Freinet, work takes on meaning in the making of a real, useful object, one that goes beyond individual learning. The school newspaper, the printing press, correspondence between classrooms are not pedagogical pretexts: they are concrete productions in which each child has a function that counts. Genuine cooperation in producing a shared object is what turns the classroom into a community that creates. It is in this lineage that I situate myself.

When you are shooting a scene with a group of eight or ten people, you rarely need everyone to be acting at the same time. A scene calls for two or three characters, plus someone on the camera, and that’s all. The others, who are there, watch or keep busy. We can try to solve this problem by assigning technical roles (camera assistant, boom operator, script supervisor) to everyone, as some film workshops in school or university settings do. But these roles are often emptied of substance in a lightweight shooting setup, because they correspond to professions that exist only for larger productions. Holding a boom for a five-person scene in a fifteen-square-meter room is keeping busy, not creating.

Live ambient sound, performed by non-actors with musical instruments, opens another path. During the scene, these people co-create the film by producing sounds they adjust in real time to what they see, sounds that end up in the final film. Their contribution is neither decorative nor incidental: it is constitutive of the work.

How it is set up in practice

In concrete terms, here is how I proceed. Before the shoot, I bring a crate of simple instruments: kalimbas, various percussion instruments, metallophones, tuning forks, a Chinese hat, small cymbals, shakers. I deliberately choose instruments that require no prior skill. Anyone can produce a sound on a kalimba in five seconds, or hold a rhythm on a drum. The technical barrier is very low.

These instruments are part of my working tools. The workshops I lead are filmmaking workshops, not music workshops, but music has become, over the years, one of my essential tools, because I work a great deal on the function of the object as a third party. An object placed between people, whether an instrument, a camera, or a virtual reality headset, allows each person to enter into relation with the others through the mediation of the object rather than in a direct face-to-face encounter, which is often harder to bear. My instrument crate is therefore a working object that I keep developing as I run more workshops. I buy new objects, I test them in the field, I set aside what doesn’t work. Some instruments I used to bring no longer come out, because I find them less suited to what I am trying to produce. And depending on the group I begin to encounter, I don’t necessarily take out everything I have brought. With certain groups, for example, I don’t bring electronic instruments. They are too impressive from the outset and give too much power to the person handling them, which can throw off the dynamic of the group before we have even started working.

I lay the instruments out on a table before the participants arrive, or during the break if the workshop runs longer. When the young people discover them, they pick them up spontaneously, play them, test them. This time of free handling is important in itself, and it prepares what comes next: the participants have already experienced what these objects can produce.

When the shoot begins, I remind everyone who is in the scene (actors, camera) and I invite all the others to pick up an instrument and create the ambient sound. I do not say “make some music”: that phrasing can intimidate someone who does not see themselves as a musician. Creating an ambient sound means making sound in keeping with what is happening, and anyone can do that. If the scene is joyful, the sound becomes joyful. When it turns anxious, the sound shifts to muted, irregular scratching. And if someone speaks, the volume goes down so they can be heard.

The non-actors hide from the camera frame, behind a piece of furniture, behind a screen, behind the door depending on the configuration of the space. They play while watching what is happening, adjust their sounds to what they see, follow the variations of intensity in the scene.

At the end of the take, we watch it. The music is in the film, without having been added in editing. It has the quality of a live performance, slightly imperfect but right, because it was created in response to what was happening. If the take isn’t satisfying, we do another, and the music reinvents itself along with it.

Why call it a chorus

I use the word chorus to designate this function, because it seems more accurate to me than the technical terms (musicians, sound designers, sound illustrators). The word chorus comes from ancient theater, where it referred to a group of performers who did not take part in the main action, but who commented on it, extended it, gave it its emotional envelope.

In Greek tragedy, the chorus is not a sound backdrop. It is integral to the dramatic apparatus. It says what the characters cannot say themselves, because they are caught up in the action. It marks the transitions between scenes. It represents, in the theater, the community that watches and feels. Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), saw the chorus as the primordial element of tragedy, older than the individualized characters. For Nietzsche, the chorus is the collective expression of a shared ground from which individual figures can detach themselves.

This function, which we find again in opera with the orchestra pit, in cinema with extra-diegetic music, in podcasts with jingles and ambiences, is a function of envelopment. It is not in the narrative, it is around it. It allows the narrative to hold together, because it gives it an affective consistency that the dialogue alone cannot provide.

The ambient sound chorus, in the audiovisual workshop, plays this function of envelopment. It ensures that the scene is not only the actors and the camera. It is the actors, the camera, and the rest of the group holding the event through their sonic presence.

The sound envelope, according to Anzieu

The psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu proposed, in The Skin Ego (1985), the idea that the self is built in the child through a series of envelopes: a tactile envelope, a visual envelope, a sound envelope. Before the infant comes to distinguish themselves from the mother as a separate subject, they are immersed in a multi-sensory bubble that contains their existence. The mother’s voice, the sound of the home, the noises of daily life are one such envelope. Anzieu speaks of a primary “sound envelope,” prior to language, which constitutes the first sense of being held in a livable world.

This idea reaches well beyond early childhood. Every collective produces its own sound envelope. A classroom has its own quality of noise, which changes when the room listens to itself, which loosens when it gets distracted. A family meal has its background sound. A creative workshop produces, without anyone ever speaking of it, a sound envelope that is its signature.

The ambient sound chorus, during the shoot, deliberately fabricates this envelope. It transforms a dimension that ordinarily remains implicit into an object of collective work. The young people who play the instruments make the envelope within which the scene will unfold. This making gives them a responsibility that goes beyond simply producing sounds. Through their playing, they hold the climate in which the actors can perform.

The group psychic apparatus

Group psychoanalysis has theorized this collective dimension. In The Group Psychic Apparatus (1976) and later in The Group and the Subject of the Group (1993), René Kaës proposes the idea of a group psychic apparatus, that is, a psychic entity that exceeds the sum of the individual psyches of the group members. For Kaës, a group does not function only because each member brings their own thinking. It functions because, between its members, a collective apparatus is built, one that allows affects, images, and narratives to circulate.

When the ambient sound chorus is at work during a shoot, it produces, in the sonic register, one of these circulations. The sounds the non-actors produce are not their individual sounds, they are the sounds of the group holding the scene. And what these sounds reveal to the actors is that they are being carried by the group while they perform. This carrying is sensory, immediate, and does not need words to make itself heard.

This carrying function explains, I believe, why the ambient sound chorus produces such strong results in terms of engagement. The actors dare more because they are not alone. The non-actors invest themselves because they sense that their playing matters. The whole group commits to the production of a shared object.

Music neuroscience

Music neuroscience offers another lead. In Brain and Music (2012) and several earlier works, the neuroscientist Stefan Koelsch shows that making music together synchronizes cerebral and physiological processes among the members of a group. Heart rates draw closer, breathing rhythms align, attention levels synchronize. These effects are measurable, through brain imaging and physiological sensors.

In a workshop I was leading recently in a middle school, during the shoot of a virtual reality film with a group of students with intellectual disabilities, I saw this synchronization unfold. The tempo of the demon’s cries matched the percussion, or the other way around. The breathing of the actress playing the singer found the rhythm of the kalimba. This synchronization produces a coherence in the shoot that comes neither from instruction nor from rehearsal, but from sheer musical co-presence.

This is what explains why a shoot with an ambient sound chorus often produces more held-together results than a shoot where music is added in editing. What is at stake goes beyond the film that comes out of it. The shoot itself is different: it becomes an intense collective experience, shared in a continuous way, in which each person builds together with the others. This transformation changes the film, and even more so the experience of the young people or other participants. What they take away from the shoot is having been actively present in the creation from start to finish, in a construction at once personal and collective.

In therapeutic settings

The ambient sound chorus has particular value in therapeutic settings, where the difficulty of speaking or putting oneself forward is often the dominant issue. For people who are not ready to play a character in front of the camera, the chorus offers a less exposed way in. One contributes through the sounds one produces, without having to speak or be seen.

In workshops led in therapeutic settings, I have seen people who had not spoken for weeks invest themselves in the chorus with considerable intensity. Music offers an expression that does not pass through words. For some, it is a first step toward speech. For others, this wordless expression is sufficient in itself.

Inclusion through creation

The reach of the chorus goes beyond therapeutic settings. What these settings make visible, namely the possibility of contributing without putting oneself forward, holds for every workshop. The ambient sound chorus is a device for inclusion through creation. It offers each person the possibility of contributing to the extent that they can, by a route that does not demand self-exposure. This contribution adds something to the film that could not have been there otherwise.

This way of working did not come to me all at once, like an idea I would then have put to the test. It built up little by little, through my experiments, as I watched something happen that I had not planned. I first brought instruments into workshops, observed what it produced, made adjustments, took it up again in other contexts, systematized it. What I describe in this article is, in this sense, a clinical practice: built through trial, on the basis of what I have seen at work in groups. It is only today, with the perspective these years of workshops have given me, that I can name it as a method and conceptualize it as such.

This is what makes me hold this practice as central to my work. The ambient sound chorus addresses, all at once, a practical question (what to do with the people who are not in the scene), a pedagogical question (how to give them a real place in the creation), and, more deeply, an ethical question (that of each person’s place in a collective project). It turns the shoot into a moment in which everyone is doing something that counts.

Setting up the device

Several conditions strike me as important for the ambient sound chorus to work well.

Simple instruments. If you bring complicated instruments (guitar, piano, wind instruments), only those who already know how to play them will be able to contribute. The chorus would become elitist. Simple instruments (percussion, kalimba, shakers, metallophones) allow anyone to play within five seconds, without shame or fear of getting it wrong. The instrument table should offer enough variety for everyone to find an object that suits them.

A preliminary discovery. A time of free handling of the instruments is needed before the shoot. Without it, the young people pick up the instruments at the moment of “Action” and don’t know what to do with them. With it, they have already experienced what the objects can produce, and at the time of the shoot they can focus on the climate of the scene rather than on discovering the object.

A space that lets the musicians be off-camera but audible. The challenge is to place the musicians somewhere the camera does not capture them but the camera microphone does. With a standard camera, this is easy: you stand behind the camera. Even with a 360° camera that films the whole space, you can find a spot, behind a screen, behind a piece of furniture, behind the door depending on the configuration of the room, close enough to the microphone and concealed enough not to appear in the image.

An instruction for mutual listening. The minimum instruction does not say only “create an ambient sound.” It adds: “in keeping with what is happening, and lowering the volume when someone speaks.” This second point is essential. If the ambient sound covers the voices, the film becomes unintelligible. The listening instruction makes the chorus an attentive performer, not a decorative background.

Immediate viewing. For the chorus to improve from one take to the next, it must be able to hear what it has produced. Group viewing, after each scene or at the end of the session, allows everyone to adjust their playing for the takes to come. It is a feedback loop that consolidates learning in real time.