Private Cinema Design
The Emotional Response to Home Cinema
July 2022
Sitting in my home office without air conditioning during the UK heatwave is bittersweet. The sound of the kids in their paddling pool is joyous, but the inescapable sticky claustrophobia of humidity keeps pulling at my focus.
The contrast reminds me of a recent visit to one of our suppliers. I spent far longer than planned with Dean Sutton and Paul Cummin, firing demo clips at each other.
The Artcoustic party trick, and I'm sure they would agree, is dynamic range. The ability to deliver sound levels matching a commercial cinema is a key component in delivering the emotional response the creative artists intended.
The problem with playing loud
We have all been guilty of showing off systems that play loud with precision. The opening race from Spielberg's Ready Player One has been a demo staple for years: loud, brash, chaotic and a perfect showcase of audio precision. But that scene starts at ten and only ramps up from there. It creates no real emotion. There is no contrast, no subtlety for the chaos to break free from.
Near silence shattered by an explosion, the visceral jump scare heightened by the contrast: that creates emotion. So we ended up in the psychological thriller section, a place where the soundtrack is the difference between success and failure. Like humidity with heat, a good thriller lets you enjoy the moment while surrounding you with an almost unpleasant sense of foreboding.
Us (Jordan Peele, 2019)
Us opens with a family at the amusements, our senses enveloped by the sights and sounds of the fair, delivered with believable volume and precision as a rollercoaster passes overhead.
The enjoyment soon turns as the young girl is drawn away from the noise and quietly into a house of mirrors. Here the audio truly shines. As she whistles to herself, breaking the silence, the sound moves around the room. Our eyes tell us we can see the girl, but the whistle comes from one of her reflections. Discombobulated, the contrast between what we think we see and what we hear makes this scene a masterclass in suspense.
Possessor (Brandon Cronenberg, 2020)
The opening of Possessor, probably not a film to watch with clients, sets a deeply relatable scene. Realistic sounds bring us into the world: keys quietly dropped on a table in the background sound exactly as they should. The sense of realism is built through the sound designer's restraint, not overplaying their hand.
As the scene builds, there is an almost unnecessary deployment of firepower, each shot shattering the peace. The contrast is devastating.
Why the room matters
These scenes create vast emotions, unimaginable when watching on a TV or a phone. Only through correct design and planning can we bring these experiences into your home. Sufficient sound isolation from the outside world makes your private cinema the quietest room in the house, creating the backdrop for correctly specified loudspeakers to awaken your senses.
This is the art of the cinema. It is what we do, and why we do it.
Cinema Lusso. Better by design.