Don't Just Look, Listen: How Bernard Herrmann Composed a Sonic Gaze in Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bernard Herrmann provided strong scoring to accompany nine of Hitchcock's films including, Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960).Hitchcock, and his representation of women, has long been a source of criticism of feminist film scholars.This critique later expanded into art, most notably by Cindy Sherman.I use the term "sonic gaze" to describe the aural counterpart to Laura Mulvey's, traditionally visual, male gaze.I argue that Herrmann's sonic gaze maintains the perspective of the male protagonists in Vertigo and Psycho, and therefore objectifies and silences the female characters in the narrative.I use Sherman's Untitled Film Stills series as a critical tool to explore how Herrmann's sonic gaze expands the feminist meanings of the still images.I place Herrmann's score over Sherman's Untitled Film Stills to interpret how the imagined underscoring affects the unseen narratives of the film stills.Through this interpretative experiment, I encourage the practice of "listening" to photographs.move from Carleton University to the University of Victoria.Your mentorship is an inspiring light.Professors like you are making the industry a positive and inclusive space which is vital for the future of scholarship, thank you.I also want to thank Dr James Wright for not only stepping in to facilitate and support a co-supervision, but for teaching the film music class that inspired me to study the collaboration between Hitchcock and Herrmann.Thank you to Dr Derek Knight for introducing me to Cindy Sherman's work in 2015, and Dr Carol Payne for pointing me in the
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".