Thanks to Flippant News for pointing out this great article by accomplished film editor Walter Murch. It delves deeply into the underlying motivations and cues in great sound design. Not to be missed! Here’s an excerpt.

“This metaphoric use of sound is one of the most flexible and productive means of opening up a conceptual gap into which the fertile imagination of the audience will reflexively rush, eager (even if unconsciously so) to complete circles that are only suggested, to answer questions that are only half-posed. What each person perceives on screen, then, will have entangled within it fragments of their own personal history, creating that paradoxical state of mass intimacy where—though the audience is being addressed as a whole—each individual feels the film is addressing things known only to him or her.”