4

Listening to History: Band of Brothers

Television (and film) is generally thought of as a visual medium, and, indeed, up until now this book has in many respects focused on the image on-screen: the mise-en-scène in Deadwood, visual signifiers of character in Boardwalk Empire, and visual icons of New Orleans culture in Treme. Many of the names and phrases assigned to the two media—television, motion pictures, moving pictures, video, film, silver screen—include reference to the visual without acknowledging the aural aspect of the television or motion picture experience.¹ “This neglect,” Herbert Zettl fears, “may have caused some people to believe that sound is either a less important or nonessential adjunct of the visual fields of video and film. Far from it. Sound is indispensable to video and film communication.”² Although Zettl, like many others, singles out the importance of sound in film, it is equally important to TV. Television, too, is an audiovisual medium, and viewers’ understanding and enjoyment of a narrative involve both visual and aural senses.³

Sound is undoubtedly an integral part of the ten-episode World War Two miniseries Band of Brothers. This is not to say that sound has not been crucial in all the series under discussion, but war, much like science fiction, is a genre in which the soundtrack often stands out. Sound is integral to all film and TV experiences but can escape the notice of viewers, who tend to be drawn to visual spectacle. It can take a resounding soundtrack to make audiences pay attention, and the often unrelenting and inescapable soundtrack of Band of Brothers does just that. Produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, the series was an unofficial follow-up to Saving Private Ryan (1998), starring the former and directed by the latter. Ryan clearly served as a blueprint for the series; not only does it utilize the same “filmmaking language,” but it shares the film’s interpretation of the American experience during World War Two and focus on ordinary American men.⁴ The sound for Ryan, designed by Gary Rydstrom, as well as the music, composed by John Williams, also clearly influenced the sound team working on Band of Brothers. Based on the book by Stephen Ambrose, the series follows the men of Easy Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne, from their training in the United States through D-Day, Operation Market Garden, and the Battle of the Bulge, to the capture of the Eagle’s Nest at Berchtesgaden. Most memorable are the intense combat scenes like that at Brécourt Manor in “Part Two: Day of Days,” when the soundtrack positions viewers right in the center of the action. Sequences such as these are balanced with quieter moments, when Michael Kamen’s musical score is subtly employed to underline often complicated feelings of victory and defeat experienced by an individual soldier or by the company at large.

An analysis of the sonic elements in Band of Brothers demonstrates that the soundtrack is an incredibly intricate construct that is crucial to the history-on-screen experience. The music, sound effects, and human voices all create meaning and contribute to building and shaping the series’ historical interpretation. As with the visual elements discussed in the previous chapters, aural history benefits from the longer running time and flexi-narrative structure of TV. More speaking roles (almost five hundred in this series), more battles involving various weaponry, and more opportunity to experiment with how sound is employed across individual episodes result in an incredibly dense and complex sonic narrative. Furthermore, what sound contributes to the historical narrative has been strengthened by recent developments in audio and home-theater technology that allow for crisp, clear, multilayered, and immersive sounds.

Once again, HBO has been at the forefront of these new technologies and has not shied away from spending a premium to both acquire the content it desires and to maintain its “cinematic” production values. Band of Brothers was a $125 million production, a sum almost unheard of in 2001 for a ten-part series. “I’m not saying they didn’t bat an eye,” Hanks stated when discussing the budget. “Oh, they did bat an eye. But the reality is this was expensive. You have to have deep pockets. And HBO has deep pockets.”⁵ Jeff Bewkes, then chairman of HBO, insisted publicly that HBO took on the project because they “could treat this story in a way no other medium could treat it” and because “no one else could have given it this level of authenticity.”⁶ The large budget and the desire for authenticity shaped not only the mise-en-scène but the sound design as well. Mike Dowson, an experienced rerecording mixer at Shepperton Studios, explained that “TV productions don’t have the same kind of money as feature films do.” “However, on this particular project,” he continued, “HBO has spent a lot of money and time, and as far as I can tell, they’re very keen to promote 5.1 and high-definition in the home.”⁷ On this point HBO was in agreement with Hanks and Spielberg, who insisted from the get-go that the series be mixed in surround sound.⁸ While 5.1 surround sound mixing has since become standard for both cable and broadcast networks, in 2001 only a limited number of shows were mixed this way. HBO began mixing and broadcasting many of its drama series—The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under (2001–5), Carnivàle (2003–5), and, of course, Band of Brothers—in 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound before it became standard practice.⁹

Film and television sound is often considered to be a technical aspect of production, but it is an area with incredible scope for creativity. As Vincent LoBrutto points out, there is a certain illusion when watching film and television that the sound “has been captured by a single, magical microphone which records the dialogue, sound effects, and music on-set in perfect balance.” In reality, though, “just as every visual component in a film is designed and executed by the writer, director, cinematographer and design team, each single sound in a film is carefully conceived, chosen, recorded, edited, and mixed by an array of sound artists and technicians.”¹⁰ Those in charge of sound must not only gather or create all of the sounds—capturing them live on set, recording out in the field, utilizing sound libraries, producing Foley effects, and manipulating sound electronically—they must also mix all the sounds together so they work in harmony and add to, rather than detract from, the central narrative.¹¹ Rydstrom explains that sound is about more than adding the “obvious” and matching up what the audience members hear with what they see on-screen; he chooses sounds based on whether or not they “are appropriate to the drama of that scene.”¹² “You’ve got to be very selective,” states fellow sound designer Ben Burtt, “because you can’t hear everything that’s on the screen.”¹³ Trying to incorporate every sound that might be heard in a given environment would create a cluttered soundscape in which the sounds become muddied, so chosen sounds should serve a purpose in helping to tell the story and enhance the drama.

Sound, or aurality, has been a relatively obscure area in historical studies until recently. George H. Roeder Jr. proclaimed in the mid-1990s that “ours is a nearly sense-less profession,” and outlined how smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and sounds were generally missing from the work of historians.¹⁴ One of the potential difficulties of studying sound is the “lack of hard evidence,” especially before the late nineteenth century when sounds started to be recorded. Historians must largely rely upon written sources to get both a sense of the sounds of the past and to understand the significance of those sounds to the people experiencing them. Even when sounds have been recorded, they remain elusive to an extent; “sound recording allows for the temporal dislocation of a sound from its time and place or origin, but does not facilitate the ability to do the auditory equivalent of sustaining the gaze on an image for as long or as short as one desires.”¹⁵ There is, however, currently an emerging interdisciplinary field that takes “the culture, consumption, and politics of sound seriously” and places sound firmly at the center of its scholarship.¹⁶ Historians are very much a part of this movement, with key works authored by Alain Corbin, Richard Cullen Rath, and Mark M. Smith, and the appearance of collections like Hearing History, The Auditory Culture Reader, and a special issue of American Quarterly on “Listening to American Studies.”¹⁷ It is not only historians, though, who have been slow to recognize the importance of sound.

While history on-screen has become an increasingly popular area of scholarship, it is only recently that the specific role and function of sound in historical film and television series started to garner significant attention. Many works simply overlook sound, giving it an occasional mention, particularly the music tracks, without analyzing in-depth what each of the different elements of the soundtrack has to offer. Robert Rosenstone is one scholar who does regularly acknowledge the importance and centrality of sound in the creation of history on-screen. He states that dialogue in the sound film is a “crucial element that allows us to understand characters and their motivations, situations, particular events and their course, outcomes and impact.”¹⁸ More importantly, he often identifies the soundtrack as part of what makes history on-screen a unique way of experiencing the past. In Rosenstone’s most recent edited collection, J. E. Smyth and Guy Westwell both delve into more detailed analysis of elements of the soundtrack—sound bridges in the case of the former and sound montage and design in the case of the latter—and look at how the sounds affect or shape the history being presented on-screen.¹⁹ Alison Landsberg is, perhaps, the scholar who has paid greatest attention to sound and the part that it plays in “soliciting complicated forms of engagement” in historical films and television shows. In Engaging the Past, Landsberg focuses her analysis of Deadwood on the soundscape, particularly the human voice and human sounds, and the way these sounds encourage empathetic engagement with the past.²⁰ Winfried Pauleit’s, Rasmus Greiner’s, and Mattias Frey’s articles from 2018 delve deeply into the construction and role of historical film sound and signal a promising new level of attention in this area.²¹

That history-on-screen scholars have been slow to focus their attention on sound is unsurprising given that it has also long been a subject on the periphery of film and television studies. Gianluca Sergi identifies a clear “bias towards the image” and argues that “the majority of scholars and critics have by and large remained impervious to all things sound for nearly a century.”²² Although film sound does not receive the same level of attention as other areas of film studies, there has always been a small group dedicated to exploring this topic, including John Belton, Elizabeth Weis, Rick Altman, and Michel Chion, whose work in particular has been central to the development of film sound studies. Similar sentiments to Sergi’s can be found in nearly all works on film sound, although many of the most recent acknowledge an increased interest in the subject and a steady appearance of new works (mirroring and overlapping with increased interest from other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities). New collections such as Lowering the Boom and Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media, as well as individual works by Sergi, Mark Kerins, K. J. Donnelly, and William J. Whittington, explore the full scope of the soundtrack, not only music and dialogue, the two areas that have received the most attention. Alongside these sound histories, theoretical approaches, and case studies are a range of practical guides to film and television sound that cover the entire process, from preproduction through to final rerecording mixes.²³

Except for these more technical guides, the majority of scholarship focuses on sound in theatrical films, not on television programs.²⁴ As briefly discussed, in many fields sound has “arrived,” yet, as Michele Hilmes points out, TV sound remains “neglected in academic study.”²⁵ Synchronized recorded sound was introduced in the cinema, and the first experimentations with on-screen sound and sound technology took place in movies and movie theaters. Correspondingly, most of the literature is centered on feature film and its exhibition in public spaces. Major milestones in the history of sync sound have been fairly well documented and analyzed, including the 1927 release of the first ever talkie, The Jazz Singer (Crosland); Disney’s Fantasia (Algar et al., 1940), which, with its specially created “Fantasound,” was the first real attempt at cinema surround sound; Star Wars (Lucas, 1977), a film with a highly innovative soundtrack that showcased the potential of Dolby Stereo; and the rise of digital surround sound in the 1990s with blockbusters like Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993). Theatrical films are just that—they are produced knowing that they are going to be screened in theaters equipped with surround sound, allowing the audience to experience the full impact of the soundtrack.²⁶ Feature films have traditionally been “mixed down” for release on home video, simplifying the soundtrack so it functions more effectively for the standard two-channel TV set.

Sound in the home, however, is now in a state of flux. The changes brought about by DVD and Blu-ray technology, discussed in the previous chapter, also extend to sound. DVDs, with their greater data capacity, allow “higher fidelity sound with more audio channels and a richer set of mixes, so that it has become standard for films to be released encoded in 5.1 sound whenever appropriate.”²⁷ More and more households are also investing in home theater systems that allow them to experience sound through a number of discrete channels, similar to how sound would be heard in a cinema. A 5.1 home theater package includes a center speaker, left and right front speakers, left and right surround speakers, and a subwoofer to be arranged at various points around the viewing room. This conversion to surround sound in the home is by no means total. Mark Kerins notes that although high definition television takes 5.1 surround sound as its audio standard, many people still “hear those mixes downconverted to two-channel stereo for playback over their television speakers, making it difficult” for TV networks “to incorporate sound design as an integral part of their shows’ aesthetics.”²⁸ That television shows have previously been “conservative” in their use of sound, in part due to this discrepancy in technology and in part due to smaller budgets, partially accounts for the focus on sound in feature film.²⁹ Band of Brothers, though, shaped by HBO’s generous budget and the network’s commitment to cutting-edge technology, demonstrates that sound produced for television can be just as complex and integral to TV as sound is for feature film. Dowson explains that he did not make concessions for the reductive qualities of TV sound when producing the final sound mix for Band of Brothers. “I want it to sound as good as I can make it,” he stated, even though he was well aware of the fact that not everyone watching would be able to hear it as it was intended to be heard.³⁰

Screen sound can be broadly separated into three main categories: music, sound effects, and speech. The following sections address each of these areas in order to better understand what sound contributes to the narrative and history on-screen. The first section on music establishes the historical interpretation of World War Two that Band of Brothers puts forward. Music plays a central role in fashioning the series’ historical interpretation, which is further developed by other aspects of the soundtrack. Focusing particularly on the “Main Titles” theme and the music from “Part 9: Why We Fight,” this section examines how music is used to help audiences capture the preferred meaning of a text. Different melodies and musical themes are employed to convey the feelings experienced by the men of Easy Company and to elicit similar emotions in the audience. Indeed, sound contributes just as much to the various elements that make up the “feel of the past” as the image track does, with music playing a significant role in influencing and heightening emotions. Sound effects, probably the most overlooked aspect of the soundtrack, or at least the most taken for granted in history-on-screen scholarship, create sonic textures that affect viewers in a bodily way, especially in a home theater environment. Building on the ideas in chapter 1, this section considers the process behind the creation of the sound effects track and the historical work that goes into it. Sound effects (as well as the voice) again raise interesting questions about the role of invention in history on-screen, with many of the sounds of the past re-created and invented using sources of sound far removed from the original. The final section on speech looks less at what is said than at how things are said. How lines of dialogue are articulated by actors and how the speech is recorded and mixed on the soundtrack help to shape viewers’ understanding of the characters and are yet more elements that affect the development of allegiance. Rather than analyzing only one element of the soundtrack, or addressing different sound elements haphazardly, this chapter methodically, although not exhaustively, explores the role that sound plays in the creation of history on-screen. It is difficult to analyze a TV series soundtrack, as they are mixed in numerous ways—there is often a 5.1 master, a Lt/Rt master, and a mono master—and so not all viewers will hear the show the same way, depending on how and where they are watching it. This particular study of sound in Band of Brothers has been based on its original 5.1 mix.

Anchoring the Image in Meaning: Music

Music has always been a part of the film and television experience. Whether this is because music and drama have always gone hand in hand dating back to Greek theater, or because of more practical reasons (such as covering the sound of noisy projectors and audiences during the silent era), music, in its various forms, plays a significant role in how on-screen narratives are shaped and understood. As film sound scholar Claudia Gorbman notes in her seminal text, music occupies a unique position because it “takes many more liberties with the diegesis than does the image track” and has a certain flexibility within the “realist” televisual narrative.³¹ The image track is often composed and edited so as not to alert viewers to the constructed nature of what they are watching, and even within the soundtrack itself dialogue and sound effects are generally designed to maintain the illusion of reality. The nondiegetic voiceovers provided by Richard “Dick” Winters, Carwood Lipton, and David Kenyon Webster in Band of Brothers are considered “narrative intrusions,” while the nondiegetic music that accompanies many scenes is not.³² Music is a “subliminal signal for most audience members” and “is not apprehended with the same semantic precision as dialogue or even sound effects.”³³

The music in Band of Brothers helps to tell the story by enhancing the emotional tone of individual scenes while also establishing and fortifying the series’ historical interpretation of World War Two as the “Good War.” The majority of the music is nondiegetic, with only very rare instances of diegetic music. Diegetic music (just like all diegetic sounds) emanates from within the storyworld, while nondiegetic music comes from outside the storyworld and is unheard by the characters. All of the nondiegetic music for Band of Brothers was scored for the series by Michael Kamen, who worked extensively on film and television scores throughout his career.³⁴ Each episode opens with the “Main Titles” theme and closes with a different arrangement of the same music. Within the episodes a variety of music is employed; some themes, such as “Winters on Subway,” only appear in one episode (“Part 5: Crossroads”), whereas other pieces of music are used at numerous points throughout the series.³⁵ How music is employed in each of the episodes also differs greatly: there is only one instance of nondiegetic music in “Part 6: Bastogne,” perhaps because of the exceptionally bleak and stark tone of the episode, while in “Part 10: Points,” there are ten instances of music in order to help unify what is otherwise a less focused and more sprawling narrative.

To fully understand and appreciate the role that music plays in Band of Brothers, we need to briefly explore the historical interpretation the show presents and how the series fits into wider popular representations of the war. The Second World War occupies a special place in American public memory; it is remembered as the Good War, fought by the “greatest generation.” Amongst other things, these myths stress the unity, sacrifice, and heroism of the American people, both on the home front and the battlefront.³⁶ They are based in truth, but are problematic largely because of what they omit. According to Michael C. C. Adams, Americans looking back on World War Two “have come to see the war years as a golden age, an idyllic period when everything was simpler and a can-do generation of Americans solved the world’s problems.”³⁷ Film, and later television, played a significant role in shaping the Good War and greatest generation myths, which are constantly changing and adapting with the passage of time. Many modern representations choose not to stress the grand ideals of God, freedom, and the American way, as many 1940s films did, instead focusing on the courage and bravery of the average American soldier.

World War Two, and particularly the World War Two combat film, has remained a staple of Hollywood, although there have been ebbs in their production and popularity at times. The most recent cycle of World War Two films was in large part sparked by the popularity of Saving Private Ryan. Historian John Bodnar argues that despite the graphic depiction of war, the film is ultimately a “retelling of how the Americans won with daring and ingenuity” that supports the Good War narrative of “victory and virtue.”³⁸ “The fact that combat was so frightening,” he states, “serves mainly to reinforce our admiration for these soldiers and their gallantry.”³⁹ Similarly, Tanine Allison has identified how Hollywood’s digital revolution has contributed to the evolution of the Good War myth. Films like Ryan self-consciously re-create the look of World War Two documentary footage to generate nostalgia and employ visual effects to enhance the violence. The focus in these recent war films is on the extreme pain and suffering experienced by American victim-heroes; the camera lingers on spilled intestines, missing limbs, and spurting blood.⁴⁰

Many of the films that followed Ryan, including U-571 (Mostow, 2000) and Pearl Harbor (Bay, 2001), present similar interpretations of the American war experience, although others, such as The Thin Red Line (Malick, 1998) and Flags of Our Fathers (Eastwood, 2006), complicate and challenge the Good War and greatest generation myths. Band of Brothers fits into the former group and closely parallels the interpretation of the war presented in Ryan. Anne Mork concludes that the series “clearly confirms the myth of ‘the Greatest Generation’ by its overwhelming positive portrayal of Easy Company and the special bond the soldiers shared.”⁴¹ While this is potentially a problematic and simplistic historical interpretation, the intent of this chapter is not to critique the historical argument of Band of Brothers; rather, it is to examine the role that sound plays in shaping this particular interpretation.

Even before the episode proper begins, it is evident that Band of Brothers will adhere to the Good War and greatest generation myths. Following the first montage of veteran interviews, the two-minute-and-fourteen-second opening title sequence starts, effectively setting the tone for the entire series. The opening credit sequence, which for most television shows almost always involves both a set of edited images and theme music, serves both phatic and connotative functions. In terms of the former, the theme music signals the start of a program and draws viewers to the TV and, along with the closing credit music (which may or may not be the same every week, depending on the show), acts “as a sort of sonic frame or curtain by demarcating and separating the diegetic text from the extradiegetic televisual flow.”⁴² This is arguably less important these days, when viewers do not have to settle in to watch a show when it first airs on television but can instead choose to stream, download, DVR, or watch on DVD or Blu-ray at their own convenience, outside of the televisual flow. The theme music, however, through its repetition at the beginning of each episode, still forms a “phatic semiotic bond with the program” so that the theme music and the television program are intrinsically bound together in the audience’s mind.⁴³

Perhaps most crucially, the theme music serves a connotative function, helping the viewers to interpret the images they are seeing on-screen and guiding them towards the preferred meaning of the text. Music for film and television cannot be analyzed in isolation but instead must be considered in conjunction with the other sensory channels: written language, spoken dialogue, sound effects, and the image track, which ideally work together to create a message or meaning that is comprehensible to the audience.⁴⁴ “Music,” Ronald Rodman asserts, “functions by combining or correlating with the other sensory channels to produce a preferred meaning.”⁴⁵ How audiences interpret and understand a television text is not something that can be guaranteed with any certainty: education, personal experience, and varying cultural, ethnic, and social backgrounds can result in differing readings of the same text.⁴⁶ Music, though, is a tool that can be used to promote the intended meaning of a text. Borrowing from Roland Barthes, Gorbman uses the term “ancrage” to describe how music anchors the image in meaning, supplying “information to complement the potentially ambiguous diegetic images and sounds.”⁴⁷ This ancrage applies to music employed during the episodes, as well as the theme music that plays over the opening credits. Of course, music interpretation is subjective too, and it is impossible to definitively state how people will respond to and perceive individual pieces of music. However, as Anahid Kassabian notes, in analyzing film and TV music, “we can at least begin by considering the usual or dominant meanings.”⁴⁸

Music for film and television draws upon common musical tropes or codes that viewers will be familiar with. For music to be able to communicate with a wide range of viewers and reinforce the desired meaning, “it must express a musical language that is understood by and accessible to the recipients of that text.”⁴⁹ Gorbman argues that the institutionalization of musical meaning occurred well before the coming of sound in film. Meanings were “inherited from a long European tradition whose most recent forebears included theatrical, operatic, and popular music of the latter-nineteenth century.”⁵⁰ These were solidified and reinforced during the silent era with the publication of popular lexicons such as Erno Rapee’s Encyclopedia of Music for Pictures (1925), which included categories such as “Sinister,” “Oriental,” and “Wedding.”⁵¹ Audiences have a competence in decoding musical codes that is learned through experience. “As with language and visual image,” Kassabian states, “we learn through exposure what a given tempo, series of notes, key, time signature, rhythm, volume, and orchestration are meant to signify.”⁵² Drawing upon a study undertaken by Philip Tagg and Bob Clarida, Kassabian concludes that in “mass-market narrative film music, correspondence between producer’s intention and consumer’s reading, between transmission and reception, between encoding and decoding, and among decodings, is high.”⁵³ Music, then, is used in film and television to encourage audiences to interpret and understand the text in a specific way, and it achieves this through employing established and familiar musical codes.

The theme music and opening credit sequence in Band of Brothers signal not only a show that fits within the war genre but one which will focus on the heroic actions of the soldiers and the hardships they faced while fighting for the greater good. The image track is made up of numerous short clips and still images from the series, often arranged to give a time-lapse-like effect. These scenes and images have been manipulated for color, mirroring the look of the episodes proper, but intensified here to an even greater degree.⁵⁴ Some images are washed in an icy-blue hue, while others are saturated in olive or ochre tones. Unlike the main narrative, which has sharp, clear visuals, many of the images in the opening sequence have been given a soft-focus or gritty look. The impression is of looking at old photographs or camera footage, enhanced by the creases, lines, scratches, and textures that have been imposed over the image. The music itself is performed by a choir and orchestral strings, with the choir adding a human expressive element and the strings recalling late Romantic classical music. The piece centers mostly around the F-major chord for the bass movement, with the choir and orchestral strings adding and weaving melodies on top to create additional upper chord extensions. The shift from F-major to a D-minor chord towards the end of the piece results in a melancholy conclusion to the “Main Titles” theme.

This type of music for a Good War and greatest generation interpretation may, at first, appear surprising. Combat films of the World War Two period, and many subsequent war films that presented US actions in a positive light, often contained heavy drum beats, marchlike meters, and lots of brass instrumentation. But, as Wesley J. O’Brien demonstrates in his study of combat film soundtracks, scoring practices are not static; they change and evolve. Focusing on recent World War Two films like Saving Private Ryan and Flags of Our Fathers, O’Brien contends, much like Bodnar, that common-man heroism and bravery are the focus of these films. Band of Brothers also fits into this new category that expresses a very particular, and very narrow, understanding of World War Two. Gone from these films are the big brassy scores featured in early World War Two combat films, replaced “with a smaller score to signify smaller (though not less significant) ideals.”⁵⁵ There are “representations of soldiers ideologically motivated” in films like Ryan, states O’Brien; “however, those ideals are personal—even selfish—not uniformly patriotic.”⁵⁶ The men in Band of Brothers do not fight for the “grand ideals” of freedom and democracy, as many of the soldiers in 1940s combat films were likely to proclaim. Instead, they fight for their family, for the chance to simply go home again and be with loved ones, and, of course, for the men next to them. The show’s “Main Titles,” as well as much of the rest of the score, manages to capture this pathos.

Replacing Kamen’s main theme music with another piece of music could create an entirely different (and inaccurate) impression of the series. In Unheard Melodies, Gorbman explores how playing different music to the same scene from the film Jules and Jim (Truffaut, 1962) has an enormous impact on how viewers may read and understand the scene.⁵⁷ A similar experiment can be undertaken with the opening credit sequence of Band of Brothers. A traditional bombastic military score with lots of brass instrumentation would suggest a more overtly patriotic series, in which the protagonists regularly espouse the moral righteousness of their crusade and the inhumanity of their opponent. Or, set to Samuel Barber’s beautiful yet somber “Adagio for Strings” (used in the Vietnam War film Platoon [Stone, 1986]), the series would take on a much more despairing and tragic tone, with no signs of hope or salvation. Elements of patriotism, righteousness, despair, and tragedy are evident in the series, but these themes do not adequately capture its main message. In many ways Kamen’s title score, and the new breed of combat film scoring more generally, blends components from both, bringing together full orchestral minor-key music that evokes lament with familiar military musical codes. The theme music, alongside the images that appear in the opening sequence, form a microcosm of what Band of Brothers is about. Even without watching any of the actual series, it is possible to get a sense of the historical interpretation it is presenting—that war is a terrible thing but that those American men who fought in World War Two rose to the challenge, conducted themselves admirably, and became heroes.

That audiences have been able to accurately “read” the music and extract the desired meaning can be evidenced by the myriad reviews of the music available on Amazon. These reviews, often detailed and comprehensive (some run over five hundred words), demonstrate that audiences have understood the intended meaning, both of the series as a whole and of Kamen’s music. It is clear from the majority of the longer reviews that these people have not only purchased and listened to the soundtrack but done so after watching the miniseries. One reviewer opines that “Main Titles” “reflects the series perfectly. The theme reflects the solemn honor, duty, courage of soldiers facing war. It is difficult to describe otherwise.”⁵⁸ “Kamen has composed and arranged a work of music that testifies to the heroism and great sacrifice made by those who served in the war,”⁵⁹ states an early reviewer from 2001. Another comments on the fluctuating “sensations of melancholy and dreariness, where the typical military march influences sound like pounding Roman galley drums rather than proud propaganda.”⁶⁰ Even reviewers who were obviously not fans of the music still understood its message: “The main theme sounds like an uneven mixture of heroism and schmaltz.”⁶¹ The music in Band of Brothers fulfills its role as a storytelling agent by supporting and enhancing the series’ central message. Of course, it is not only the “Main Titles” music that does this; music is used to great effect throughout the body of the episodes.

The use of music in “Part 9: Why We Fight” particularly stands out because of notable uses of both diegetic and nondiegetic music. Lewis Nixon is the focus of this episode, which opens on April 11, 1945, in Thalem, Germany. Members of Easy Company watch as the German people work to clear the rubble from the town square before the episode flashes back to what the intertitles tell us is one month earlier. Nixon is almost at a breaking point after narrowly escaping death during a combat drop with the Seventeenth Airborne Division. Tasked with notifying the parents of the soldiers who died, Nixon is at a loss as to what to tell them. “You tell them what you always tell them,” Winters advises, “that their sons died as heroes.” “You really still believe that?” Nixon asks, and while Winters answers in the affirmative, it is clear that Nixon is experiencing a crisis of faith. By the end of the episode, though, his question about why American soldiers are fighting and dying in Europe is answered when they come across the Kaufering IV concentration camp filled with men dying of starvation and with stacked bodies of the dead. The episode concludes by returning to the scene in Thalem, where Nixon tells the Easy Company soldiers that Hitler is dead. “Why We Fight” is notable in that it is the only episode in the series that really attempts to provide “viewers with the moral justification for WWII.”⁶²

The nondiegetic music that plays during the discovery of the camp serves an important role in this sequence by highlighting the emotions felt by Easy Company soldiers and by transcending the scene depicted—it is not just about this one camp but about all the work camps and death camps across Europe. The scene and accompanying music help answer Nixon’s question about why they fight and, in fact, draws upon a diary entry from the real Dick Winters, who wrote after the encounter, “Now I know why I am here!”⁶³ The music begins very quietly, playing under the sound effects of the jeep as Winters, Frank Perconte, Ronald Speirs, and Nixon pull up to the camp with a truck full of men behind them. It slowly rises in volume as Winters approaches the camp fence. Underneath the sweeping violins, a threatening and menacing chord is repeated, giving viewers advance warning of the horror that is to follow. As Easy Company unlocks the gates and moves into the camp, the music becomes increasingly complex, adding layers to express how the men of Easy are feeling. It is their experience that the music enhances, not the emotions of the camp prisoners. Immense sadness, grief, and the incomprehensibility of what they are seeing are all emotions that are underscored by the music. It plays continuously during the ten-minute sequence, lowering in volume as Winters and Joseph Liebgott interview one of the prisoners and rising as the soldiers survey various areas of the camp and are confounded and sickened by what they see. This particular piece of music, used for this extended scene, triggers a response of what Gorbman describes as “epic feeling.” “In tandem with the visual film narrative,” she explains, “it elevates the individuality of the represented characters to universal significance, makes them bigger than life, suggests transcendence, destiny.”⁶⁴ Most audience members will realize that this is only one work camp in a much larger system, that the horrors witnessed here by Easy are evident throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. The music helps to transform the scene, making this particular sequence not only about just one company of American soldiers but about the reasons why America as a whole is fighting the war.

The diegetic music featured in the Thalem bookend scenes adds another layer of complexity to Nixon’s (and the audience’s) struggle to come to terms with the evil that is presented in the course of the episode. The episode starts after the opening credits with an extended close-up of a violin. The camera pulls back to reveal a quartet of men playing music as the German townspeople clear rubble and a handful of Easy men watch from an elevated vantage point. This close-up and slow reveal ensures that viewers pay attention to the music, which Nixon informs the men is not Mozart, as Liebgott suggested, but Beethoven. Over the course of the series the audience has come to learn that Nixon is one of the more affluent and better-educated men of Easy, so it is unsurprising that he recognizes the music and, indeed, the central conundrum of the episode. The men continue to play the same piece, Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-sharp Minor from Opus 131, during the second bookend, and the episode closes by reestablishing the focus on the quartet and the violin. This is immediately followed by the end intertitles, which provide some basic information on the Holocaust, including the number of Jews and ethnic minorities murdered. John Orloff, the writer of “Why We Fight,” chose to use that piece of music in this episode because it prompts a specific question: “The Germans gave [us] Beethoven AND the holocaust. How can that be?”⁶⁵ How could a people so rich in culture and so industrious (as demonstrated by their efficient clean-up) be responsible for the Holocaust? Even viewers with only the most basic musical knowledge—that Beethoven was German—can piece together the significance of the music and marvel at the incongruity, along with Nixon, of something so beautiful alongside something so evil.⁶⁶

Music can enhance a televisual narrative in many ways, and Band of Brothers provides only one example. Certainly, music plays a central role in Treme, with diegetic music often the focal point of numerous beats in each episode. But in fact, the use of music in Band of Brothers and Treme could not be more different—David Simon is notoriously wary of using nondiegetic music and avoids it as much as possible in most of his series. Boardwalk Empire provides yet another completely different case, mixing contemporary music for the opening title sequence with period music throughout the episode and for the end credits. In each show, though, the music serves a narrative function. Whether it is a classically composed score or a pop hit, the right music deployed at the right point can help viewers better understand either the message of a particular scene or the approach of an entire series. The classically composed scores in Band of Brothers generally fly under the radar and are “invisible” to audiences but are still an important ingredient in the history-on-screen experience, in this case working to shape the Good War and greatest generation interpretation of World War Two.

“Part 9: Why We Fight” opens and closes with a close-up of a violin, highlighting the importance of music to this episode.

A Sonic Interpretation of the Past: Sound Effects

Stephen Ambrose writes in Band of Brothers that, in the early hours of June 6, 1945, as the C-47s carrying the men of Easy Company passed over the coast of France, they began to get hit with light antiaircraft fire. “When it hit the planes it made a sound like rocks being shaken in a tin can,” Ambrose informs the reader. Later on he describes the sounds of mortars in the distance as a “waump, waump, waump, waump.”⁶⁷ It is admirable that in these instances, as well as others in the book, Ambrose attempts to convey the sounds of war as the men of Easy Company experienced them. It is incredibly difficult, however, to accurately and vividly convert sounds into words. When watching “Part 2: Day of Days,” it is hard to compare Ambrose’s description of the C-47s being under fire with what can be heard on the series soundtrack. A very talented writer could, perhaps, do a reasonably good job of evoking the many individual sounds and the cumulative effect when all layered together, but even if all historians possessed this artistic flair, it is unlikely they would have the space to devote long passages to sound. Even so, sounds can never really be words on a page, and physically being able to hear the sounds of the past is undoubtedly an element that makes the history-on-screen experience completely unique.

Although sound effects are often overlooked in film sound studies and history-on-film studies, they are an integral component of the soundtrack. Sound effects, Stanley Alten explains, “can be classified as anything sonic that is not speech or music. They are essential to the storytelling, bringing realism and added dimension to a production; they shape what you see.”⁶⁸ As noted earlier, there is not a single microphone, or even multiple microphones, on set that captures all the sounds we hear when we watch a television show. The jingling of the men’s packs as they walk, the rustling of their uniforms, their footsteps, the sounds of the guns, tanks, jeeps, planes, and everything else we hear are pieced together by the sound team. Sound effects can be gathered and created many different ways: they can be sourced from prerecorded sound libraries, they can be created by Foley artists in studio producing the sound effects in sync with the picture, they can come from live field recordings carried out by the sound crew, and they can be electronically generated. Once recorded, these sounds can be infinitely altered and manipulated—sped up, slowed down, played backwards, given reverb, layered with other sounds—to create a completely new sound. Quite often the sound effects that are synced with the picture on-screen are completely unrelated; the sound of a depth charge, for example, can be achieved with a toilet flush slowed down with reverb added.⁶⁹ This raises interesting questions about the authenticity of sound effects in historical television shows like Band of Brothers. Developments in sound technology, particularly digital sound and surround sound, mean the audience can be immersed in the sounds of the past, but do the invented and manipulated sounds have any historical value? This section explores what could be termed “historical film sound,” how it is created and exhibited and its validity as a form of history.

“Historical sound” and “historical film sound” are two admittedly broad terms that require some definition before moving on further. Here, historical sound refers to sounds unfamiliar to contemporary ears that are related to a specific time and place/event. The sounds of an M1A1 rocket launcher firing and a Tiger tank rolling through a village, for example, could be classified as historical sounds, as could all the weaponry and vehicles featured in Band of Brothers. “Historical film sound” refers to these historical sounds produced for film or television. However, “historical film sound” is a more inclusive term that applies not only to these specific sounds but to more general ambiences. While there is nothing inherently historical about the sound of wind whipping through trees and snow crunching underfoot, they are essential components for re-creating a specific moment in history, in this case Easy Company’s winter in the Bois Jacques. I also refer to the sound team that created the sound effects for Band of Brothers collectively, because on a production this large, it is impossible to know exactly who did what on each of the episodes, and it is ultimately, like production design and costume design, a collaborative effort.

Can historical film sounds be considered a legitimate form of history? It is useful here to employ Alun Munslow’s definition of the terms “past” and “history” to explore this question as well as the differences between historical film sound and historical sounds that have been recorded. “The past,” he explains, “is what once was, is no more and is gone for good.”⁷⁰ Film sound theorists Alan Williams, Tom Levin, and Rick Altman make related claims about the nature of sound and the relationship between original sound and sound recordings. “Every sound is spatio-temporally specific,” James Lastra explains, summarizing their argument. “Given that a sound is inseparable from the time and space of its production, each sound becomes an essentially unrepeatable event—an event distinguishable from all others.”⁷¹ We can never truly hear the sounds of the past—they are gone for good. What we are left with are representations of the historical sounds that can be used as sources by historians. Like all primary sources, a sound recording will provide only a partial picture. In a World War Two combat setting, a microphone attached to a soldier or placed in a stationary position on the battlefield would only provide one point of audition, capturing a narrow slice of the sonic event as a whole. In reality, even this much information for a World War Two battle would be rare, as “heavy and unwieldy sound recording equipment made it virtually impossible to record sound on the front lines.”⁷² If it exists, an original sound recording is undoubtedly a useful source as an artifact of the past, but it is not history.

History is distinct from the past, although the two terms are often used interchangeably. Munslow describes history as “a corpus of narrative discourses about the once reality of the past produced and fashioned by historians.”⁷³ If we use this definition, it is valid to suggest that historical film sound is a form of history. Rather than writing about the past and creating a narrative of people/places/events with words, as traditional historians and the writers of historical television series do, sound teams create a narrative using a completely different “language” that nonetheless adds to this corpus. In many respects the way the sound team crafts the sound effects, and the soundtrack more broadly, mirrors the processes and objectives of historians. Research forms the bedrock of the project for the sound team, just as it does for the historian. For Band of Brothers this research included finding out what weapons and vehicles were used by each army during World War Two, sourcing each of them and recording all of the sounds they produce. This is no easy feat for a ten-hour-long series that covers months of combat and is set in more than six countries. In the Brécourt Manor battle alone, the American soldiers use the M1 Garand, M1A1 Thompson submachine gun, M1A1 carbine, and a Browning .30 caliber machine gun, amongst others. According to sound effects supervisor Jimmy Boyle, every weapon and vehicle featured in the series was sourced and recorded, “even down to the last running Tiger tank in Europe,” found with an original engine at the Tank Museum in Bovington. As well as speaking to military advisors, they had access to multiple armorers and recorded all aspects of a weapon’s sounds: loading, reloading, bullet ejections, and firing.⁷⁴ These individual recordings of vehicles and weapons and their various actions function as the primary sources used to fashion the aural representation of the past.⁷⁵

Rather than being tied to one point of audition, the soundtrack is edited to match the images, allowing the audience to encounter a variety of sounds from different vantage points. Consequently, the Band of Brothers soundtrack contains more sonic information than any one historical recording could. While Lipton is up a tree during part of the Brécourt Manor battle, the soundtrack matches his point of audition, situated as he is above the battle. This contrasts sharply with scenes of Winters on the ground in the thick of combat, where the sounds are appropriately more intense. The sounds of each of the American weapons being discharged are heard at close range when the camera is fixed on the men in a close-up or medium close-up, and at one point (29:47) the camera does three rapid cuts of different men firing, giving the viewer the opportunity to hear the slightly different popping sounds and the different rhythms of how each gun fires. When the camera pulls back to a long shot, the audience hears what these weapons sound like at a greater distance. Historical film sound actually provides a more complete picture of the sounds of war than would be possible from an original historical recording. Like any work of history, historical film sound cannot claim to definitively reproduce the past—in this case, the sounds of the past—rather it is an interpretation. Based upon the research, the sound team connects the dots and fills in the blanks to create a coherent sound narrative that they believe captures the sounds of war and fits in with the series’ overarching Good War and greatest generation interpretation. Much like a historian writing a historical monograph, the sound team decides what to include, what to exclude, and how to structure all the individual pieces of information in order to best shape their narrative.

As with history on-screen more generally, invention is employed in the creation of historical film sound, and Band of Brothers is no exception. In part, this is due to film and television sound practices that have developed over decades and affected audience expectations. As David Sonnenschein points out, very often a single realistic sound will not have the full effect required to accompany the image on screen; the sound may need to be manipulated or have other sounds added.⁷⁶ This manipulation seeks a “balance between realism and entertainment,” and audiences have become so conditioned to these heightened sounds that the real sounds on their own would sound incomplete or “wrong.”⁷⁷ Audiences’ familiarity with war sounds and their expectations will come primarily from other films and television programs. As stated earlier, sync sound was not usually recorded with combat footage, and the sounds of war that accompanied World War Two newsreels were added in postproduction from sound libraries, blended together with music and the newsreel commentary.⁷⁸ Masha Shpolberg argues that Great War films of the 1930s were responsible for priming “audiences for what war was supposed to sound like, and the newsreels modelled their own soundtracks to satisfy those expectations.”⁷⁹ These sound conventions continued on and were solidified in subsequent World War Two films. Ultimately, there is a tension between “intelligibility and fidelity when aiming at a ‘realistic’ sound.”⁸⁰ The sound needs to be recognizable and intelligible to the audience, who draw upon a wealth of past experience with film sound, while also retaining a fidelity to the real-world sound. In this sense, the task of the sound team is not unlike that of production and costume teams, who have to balance their own historical research with the visual signifiers of a genre familiar to audiences.

Boyle explains that in Band of Brothers manipulation of sounds was employed for dramatic effect or proximity, often by layering Foley sounds to enhance the original sound. For the Normandy drop sequence featuring C-47s, they “added a lot of detail to basic reality.” “On the interiors we hear the C-47 droning and faint turbulence shakes and the fuselage rattles,” Boyle states. “In reality the interiors didn’t have rattles in them because they were so loud the noise drown[ed] out any subtlety. So we used a track we recorded in one of the vehicles; a Deuce and a half truck I think, or maybe a 6×6 freewheeling over bumps and the back bed and covering rattling.”⁸¹ Even though sounds were added to the interiors, veterans applauded the sound team for their work. They raved “about the sound inside the planes, and the sound of the flak took them back there; they thought it was very authentic.”⁸² Overall, the inventions in Band of Brothers are relatively minor; more substantial inventions are employed in Saving Private Ryan. At one point in the film, tanks can be heard closing in on the American troops. The noise of the engines and their squeaks and rattles echoing off surrounding buildings was created by scraping different objects against concrete and manipulating motor noises from other vehicles.⁸³ Inventions such as these, large or small, do not jeopardize the overall legitimacy of historical film sound and should be classed as instances of Rosenstone’s true invention. Whether created from disparate sources or heightening sounds for impact, these inventions still capture the spirit of the historical sounds but make them work better within this dramatic form. They add detail and depth to the sound narrative and enhance the drama of the series overall while also satisfying audience expectations so that the soundtrack does not become distracting.

Developments in technology, particularly surround sound and digital sound, have aided sound teams in the creation of complex and rich historical film sound. One needs to first look to the movie theater and then to the home theater to understand current sound practices. Multichannel sound (sound with two or more loudspeaker channels) has a long history in the cinema dating back to the 1930s. There have been numerous cycles in which multichannel has come to the forefront only to fade once again—that is, however, until the advent of Dolby Stereo.⁸⁴ Dolby Stereo placed three audio “channels behind the screen (left, right and centre) with a fourth channel (surround) employing an array of speakers emanating non-directional sound from around the auditorium.”⁸⁵ Films with innovative soundtracks, such as Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg, 1977), were mixed using this four-channel system and sold both audiences and exhibitors on Dolby Stereo, which was quickly adopted in thousands of movie theaters across the United States.⁸⁶ The next major step was the shift from analog to digital sound in the early 1990s. Dolby Surround Sound (DSS) and Digital Theater Systems (DTS), the two most popular and widespread digital sound systems, both use a 5.1 channel system, with three channels once again behind the screen, but with two separate rear surround channels and a low frequency channel (the .1). Digital surround sound not only offers an increased number of discrete audio channels but cancels out virtually any background “hiss” and allows for greater frequency and dynamic ranges.⁸⁷

Developments in movie theater sound are adapted to work within home theater environments and on mobile devices. The number of American households with multichannel audiovisual systems is on the rise.⁸⁸ Not only are there an array of home theater in a box systems that offer basic 5.1 surround sound setups and top-of-the-line systems with over thirty speakers, but soundbars are an increasingly popular budget-friendly and compact alternative. As Dolby advertises, “Every DVD worldwide and all HD broadcasts in the United States use Dolby Digital,” and viewers can also experience surround sound when they stream content through certain providers on an enabled device.⁸⁹ This means that millions can experience digital surround sound in the home and while watching on mobile devices. Of course, sound in the home (and on the go) still differs from sound in the cinema. Take a standard 5.1 home theater setup as an example: rather than the right and left front speakers being positioned behind the screen, as they are in a movie theater, in the majority of home theaters right and left front speakers are positioned beyond the frame of the television screen. Furthermore, in the standard 5.1 home setup there are only two rear speakers, while there are walls of speakers in the movie theater.⁹⁰ Sound in the cinema and sound in the home are not identical, but it is fair to say that sound in the home no longer has to be inferior. Band of Brothers is proof of this.

In at least three major ways, digital surround sound has greatly affected soundtrack aesthetics and the level of complexity sound teams are able to achieve. First, digital surround sound can be used to design and create moments of contrast. Contrasting volumes, frequencies, and use of the surrounds can greatly influence the visuals and help shape the narrative. “The more tools we have to shift a sound track, the more dramatic we can be,” states Rydstrom.⁹¹ Sound-reproduction systems, whether analog or digital, all produce unwanted background noise, but there is decidedly less hiss or background noise with digital surround systems.⁹² This means that silences can be that much more complete and profound, which can have a disconcerting effect. The start of “Part Five: Crossroads” provides one such example. The main narrative opens as Winters runs through a field, his breathing, pounding footsteps, and clicking equipment audible. He stops suddenly, and the camera steadies as a young German man in uniform rises up out of the long grass. This scene is silent; there is no wind in the grass, no rustling of either man’s uniform. The complete silence lasts over three seconds before an ear-piercing shot rings out. Pairing a loud sound and a soft sound together is not a new concept. However, because the dynamic range of digital sound is that much greater—loud sounds can be louder, soft sounds can be softer—the contrast between loud and soft is so much more striking.⁹³ Another effective contrast is employed in “Part Three: Carentan” when the use of the surrounds is abruptly altered. Edward Tipper is making his way through a pharmacy when a bomb blasts through the shop’s front windows. As the loud explosion fades away, it is replaced by an enveloping underwater-like tinnitus that issues from all speakers. Liebgott can be heard calling Tipper through the center speaker, but his voice is very quiet and unclear. What dominates in the left and right front speakers and the left and right rear speakers is Tipper’s breathing and his own voice as he asks, “Joe, is that you?” Liebgott’s voice in the center speaker slowly gains volume and clarity as the soundtrack returns to its normal balance. Rarely are voices heard in the rear speakers, so the unconventional use of the surrounds stands in stark contrast to the usual deployment of the voice in the center speaker. These sound contrasts serve a narrative function: in the first case alerting the viewer to the significance of this shot for Winters’s character and, in the latter, providing the audience with a subjective point of audition.

Second, as Rydstrom points out, digital surround sound’s discrete channels can be used to overcome the masking effect. “As frequencies compete when sounds are added together,” Rydstrom explains, “the characters of the sounds change, sometimes disappearing into each other.”⁹⁴ If trying to incorporate a number of sounds at the same time, especially sounds of a similar frequency, adding too many in the same channel could result in individual sounds becoming distorted or muddied. Digital surround sound allows sound mixers to “orchestrate” the sounds, placing individual pieces of the soundtrack in each of the distinct channels so that they work together rather than against one another. This means that in a full-scale battle scene, such as the one on the outskirts of Carentan in part 3, sound effects can be layered without losing clarity. Roughly halfway through the scene, a German tank rolls in towards Easy Company, and Easy soldiers Harry Welsh and John McGrath enter an open field to take aim at the tank with a rocket launcher. In the course of this short sequence, we can hear Welsh and McGrath talking, the low rumble of the tank, its squeaking tracks, the bullets ricocheting off the metal hull, the tank gun fire, the debris flying, and the machine gun fire from the Germans and Americans. In one shot alone, as a dazed soldier looks up after a near miss, flying debris can be heard as well as the continued rumble of the tank, a call for a medic, and machine gun fire coming from multiple directions. The more flexible mixing environment that discrete channels offer means that more sounds can play at the same time, providing the audience with more information and greater detail.⁹⁵

Third, digital surround sound can be used to create an enveloping environment that builds upon the on-screen image. It achieves this partly through moving sounds through space. Dowson notes that, given the subject matter in Band of Brothers, he and his staff were often able to use the surrounds to pan various things around: “Bombs fly over you, planes fly over you, debris flies over you when there’s a big explosion on the screen; so it’s a myriad of things rather than one particular thing.”⁹⁶ “Part 7: The Breaking Point” features a German artillery attack on Easy Company while in the Bois Jacques. An accelerated whirring noise originates in the rear speakers, and the explosion and flying debris is picked up in the center, front right, or front left speakers to match up approximately with where the explosion lands on-screen. This creates the impression that the German shells are being fired behind the viewer and making their way across the room and exploding on-screen. Later in the episode when Easy attacks the village of Foy, the same technique is used with the sound of individual bullets, which zip back and forth between the rear and front speakers. “Surround sound,” William Whittington states, “offers a kind of peripheral vision not provided by the screen directly ahead. . . . Sound and sound in the surrounds offer access into areas the image is not willing or is unable to go.”⁹⁷ Even when experienced without surround sound technology, sound provides a third dimension. “Seeing is always directional,” explain Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, “because we see only in one direction, whereas hearing is always a three dimensional, spatial perception, that is, it creates an acoustic space, because we hear in all directions.” The body of the viewer becomes “enmeshed acoustically, spatially, and affectively in the filmic texture.”⁹⁸

Indeed, the “tactility of sound” plays a significant role in generating the “feel of the past.”⁹⁹ In both “The Breaking Point” and the preceding episode, Easy Company fights not only against the Germans but against the elements, as they are woefully underdressed and underequipped to spend winter in foxholes on the outskirts of Bastogne. Sound works in tandem with the image track to create an ice-cold atmosphere. During “The Breaking Point” when Easy is not directly engaged in battle, the sound of wind whipping through the trees issues from the rear speakers.¹⁰⁰ Like the rich fabrics, diseased skin, and thick mud of the Deadwood image track, this sound connects with viewers and has a haptic quality; the sound of whistling wind is so evocative we can almost feel it on our own skin. This frigid environment is accentuated by the rough, crunching footsteps of the men as they traipse through what looks and sounds like deep, fresh snow. Along with the huddled figures of the soldiers, their red noses, and the white horizon, the wind and crunching snow add to the icy feel of the images on-screen, so much so that the viewer can almost feel the cold.

Just like the music, the sound effects in Band of Brothers contribute to the Good War interpretation, with its focus on the heroism and bravery of the ordinary American soldier. “The essential ordinariness of the soldiers who served in Easy Company and the extraordinariness of their achievements” is the central message of the series.¹⁰¹ By immersing the audience in the sounds of the past—allowing them to be sonic witnesses—the show allows them to more fully appreciate what these men went through. Viewers are placed in the midst of the horrors of modern warfare, as well as the more day-to-day discomforts experienced by Easy Company. “New technologies have made it increasingly possible to experience an event or a past without having actually lived through it,” Alison Landsberg points out, and surround sound is certainly one such technology that is remarkably effective in this sense.¹⁰² It “offers a total sonic environment, which masks the real environment of the theatre space to create a sonic space with no entry and no exit.”¹⁰³ The graphic depictions of war, which are made up not only of visuals but of the soundtrack as well, serve to focus the audience’s attention on the remarkable actions of the soldiers in the face of such dangers. The sound effects in Band of Brothers, benefitting from technological improvements, help the audience understand what these men experienced and, in doing so, marvel at what they endured.

It is incorrect to think of sound effects, and sound more generally, as a purely technical endeavor, as it often is.¹⁰⁴ Creating the sound effects for Band of Brothers required creativity and ingenuity on the part of the sound team, not only to source and record all the sounds but to choose how exactly to craft them into a compelling representation of the past that worked in perfect harmony with the image on-screen and the series’ overarching interpretation of World War Two. It is not only a technological feat but a creative and historical one. The historical film sound in Band of Brothers, taken as a whole, does contribute to the discourse surrounding the Second World War, particularly the frontline experiences of the soldiers, by presenting a sonic interpretation of the past.

Articulating History: The Voice

The human voice is arguably the most important element of the soundtrack and the one viewers pay the greatest attention to. The voice is to the soundtrack what the face is to the image, the focal point that viewers are drawn to. Arnt Maasø explains that the voice is the most important sound in human communication and that “research on perception and cognitive processing indicates that recognition and processing of faces and voices appear more specialised than processing of other visual objects and sounds.”¹⁰⁵ Film scholar Michel Chion suggests that “human listening is naturally vococentrist,” that is, that human listening privileges the voice over all other sonic elements. “There are voices,” he states, “and then everything else.”¹⁰⁶ Not only does the human ear pick out the voice and center its attention on it when watching film and television, but the soundtrack is also manipulated so that voice is at the forefront. Just as the image on the screen is arranged so that the central action takes place in the foreground, the human voice is placed in the sonic foreground, while music and sound effects are usually relegated to the background.¹⁰⁷ In Band of Brothers voice is employed in a number of different forms. As they do in most current films and television series, characters speak within the diegesis and it is largely through their dialogue that the viewer is able to follow the narrative. There are also two types of voice that operate outside the diegesis: voice-over narration that accompanies a few of the episodes and voices of the veterans themselves as they tell their own stories, either at the beginning or end of each of the episodes. Most of the discussion of television speech and dialogue in this study thus far has been concerned with what was said and the role it played in shaping and constructing the history on-screen. This is still a consideration here, particularly with regard to voice-over narration, but this section focuses on how things are said—how lines written on a page are verbalized by an actor or how a veteran articulates memories carry their own set of meanings, often as powerful as the words themselves.

Band of Brothers is a fairly unique dramatic series in that, through the inclusion of interviews with the veterans, the audience gets to hear directly from the historical figures being portrayed. In the first nine episodes, either before or after the opening credit sequence, snippets of interviews with individual men of Easy Company are edited together, usually into segments of no longer than one minute and ten seconds. They are organized and edited thematically, either discussing what will be an important theme or event in the upcoming episode and/or commenting on the events of the previous episode. Band of Brothers is not the only dramatic representation to incorporate interview footage of real people being portrayed in the dramatic narrative; the German film Downfall (Hirschbiegel, 2004) opened and closed with the real Traudl Junge, a central character in the film, and The Pacific, another ten-part World War Two series created by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg for HBO, follows the same interview format as its predecessor. In these segments the audience gets to hear the voices of the real men—the real accents (although they likely sound quite different from how they spoke over fifty years earlier), and the real emotion behind the words. Indeed, this is what proponents of oral history cite as one of its main contributions. “We collect passion, detachment, enthusiasm, hesitancy, accent, cadence, sarcasm, sincerity, shyness, bombast, and a dozen other nuances that rarely make it into even the most scrupulously accurate transcript,” argue Charles Hardy III and Pamela Dean.¹⁰⁸ The Band of Brothers interviews are audiovisual, adding yet another layer to the information provided. It is not just the words we hear and how they are spoken; we can also see “physical gestures and facial expressions” that expand on the meaning of what is being said.¹⁰⁹ When one of the veterans explains how he struggled after the war with the death of many of his friends and never forgot them, the power of his words and the real evidence of the impact the war had on his life comes from the slow, halting way he starts to speak, how his voice cracks right at the end, and from the nervous blinking and licking of his lips.

The inclusion of the veterans and the act of them voicing their own stories once again encourage the audience to venerate these members of the greatest generation. They provide an “emotional connection for the viewer and a legitimate sense of authenticity.”¹¹⁰ The interviews also have an intriguing effect, giving viewers the opportunity to see and hear the real people almost side by side with their dramatic counterparts. The actors are essentially impersonating these men, and while there is little they can do to alter their appearance, they can significantly manipulate their voices. It is not until the end of the final episode that the talking heads are actually named, so up until that point it is a guessing game as to which character in the narrative represents each veteran.¹¹¹ One of the veterans it is relatively easy to identify is William “Wild Bill” Guarnere due to actor Frank John Hughes’s spot-on impersonation of Guarnere’s accent, rhythm of speaking, and tone and pitch of voice.

Vocal performances are central when specifically considering what actors contribute to the history being crafted on-screen. Actors manipulate their voice in order to build and shape character and to imbue the words in the script with meaning. As Jeremy G. Butler points out, in television the viewer often does not have direct access to a character’s emotions, state of mind, or personality. A written text can represent these pieces of information “simply by describing them verbally,” but a TV show must do this through performance signs, one of which is the voice.¹¹² The human voice is incredibly expressive and can “combine a range of vocal features,” all of which “are capable of fine gradation.”¹¹³ Loudness, pitch, timbre, breathiness, roughness, nasality, and rhythm are just some of the vocal features that can be manipulated to create the desired effect. How words are spoken directly affects how a listener processes and understands those words, and some studies suggest that adults place more weight on tone than on what is actually said. If the delivery and tone do not match up with the content of what is being said, it can result in confusion or misunderstanding on the part of the listener.¹¹⁴

Comparing the vocal performances of two of the characters in Band of Brothers illustrates just how integral the voice is to constructing character. The two central figures in “Part 1: Currahee” are Herbert Sobel (David Schwimmer) and Dick Winters (Damian Lewis). Sobel’s voice, more often than not, is loud, high, and tense. When he first appears on-screen, he yells to the men lined up around him: “You people are at the position of attention.” He stresses the plosives and enunciates the words crisply and curtly in a high, harsh tone of voice.¹¹⁵ As he is the company commander, this is the baseline for how he will address the men under him, whether speaking to them as a group or berating an individual soldier for infractions. He adopts a more moderate tone when addressing other officers in the company, both below and above him in rank. Winters’s voice, on the other hand, is low, even, and calm in the first episode, whether speaking to his friend Nixon, addressing his platoon during a night-time march, or challenging his unwarranted court-martial. The differences in their vocal performances and how they address others encapsulate their contrasting personalities and leadership styles. Stephen Ambrose remarks that every man interviewed for his book “said Winters was the best combat commander he ever saw.”¹¹⁶ In his memoirs, Donald Malarkey described Winters as “cool as a cucumber when the pressure was on,” “fair to all,” and “absolutely willing to go through whatever [his men] went through.”¹¹⁷ The men of Easy remember Sobel in a very different light, as being cruel, petty, and brutal.¹¹⁸ “All he did was scream,” remembers Bill Guarnere. “He was high-strung, ranted and raved, criticized everything, a mean son of a bitch.”¹¹⁹

The vocal performances of Damian Lewis (left) and David Schwimmer (right) help to emphasize the contrasting leadership styles of their characters.

Accents are another consideration in the evaluation of the actor’s vocal performance and construction of character. In “phonetic terms, an accent is a set of habits that make up someone’s pronunciation of a language or language variety.”¹²⁰ Sociolinguist Peter Trudgill states that when humans speak, “we cannot avoid giving our listeners clues about our origins and the sort of person we are. Our accent and our speech generally show where we come from, and what sort of background we have.”¹²¹ Accents provide information about the countries and regions a person has spent considerable time in, as well as social factors such as class and education. Accents are often used in American films and television series as a type of shorthand to signal the status of a character in the narrative (lead or secondary, good guy or bad guy).¹²² In the American war genre the range of accents amongst the soldiers serves to signify the diversity of the combat platoon. Jeanine Basinger identifies the mixed combat group, with men from various parts of the United States, of differing ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds, as one of the core elements of the combat genre.¹²³ This element also aligns with the Good War and greatest generation myths, with their focus on all Americans banding together to defeat a common foe. Band of Brothers certainly adheres to this theme, especially since it focuses on the much larger unit of the company instead of a single platoon. There is little time to develop many of the minor characters’ backstories, many of whom appear in most or all of the episodes but do not feature prominently in any one. Their varied accents, though—Darrell “Shifty” Powers’s Virginian accent and Eugene “Babe” Heffron’s South Philly accent—add to the rich and varied tapestry of the Easy combat unit.

The accuracy of the accents in Band of Brothers received much attention from reviewers and audience members, illustrating that this is a topical issue for many. Because the series was filmed in England, many of the five hundred speaking parts went to British actors, including the central roles of Winters, Eugene “Doc” Roe, Johnny Martin, and Albert Blithe. Damian Lewis was one of the few actors to receive near-universal praise for his “perfect American accent.”¹²⁴ Other British actors, including Shane Taylor, who played the company medic, generated more mixed reviews.¹²⁵ Emily Todd VanDerWerff of the AV Club opined that Taylor’s Louisiana accent was, as “typical for Brits, a little shaky.”¹²⁶ Various commenters agreed with VanDerWerff’s appraisal, while some applauded Taylor for doing an admirable job with the difficult Cajun-inflected Louisiana accent. Others pointed out that it was not only the British actors who struggled with the regional American accents but the American actors themselves, some of whom, like Donnie Wahlberg, chose to use their natural accents rather than adopting the accent of the person they were portraying (Bostonian in the case of Wahlberg, when his character, Lipton, was from West Virginia). The actor who faced the harshest criticism was Marc Warren, who played Philadelphian Albert Blithe, a central figure in “Part Three: Carentan,” with a southern accent.¹²⁷

Accents can provide a wealth of information and add nuance to characters, but they can also prove to be distracting to audiences and thus should be carefully considered by those bringing history to the screen. Many of those commenting online appear to have done extra reading or research on Easy Company, as it is not always explicitly stated in the series where each of the characters originates. When viewers are armed with that knowledge and it conflicts with what they hear from the character, it seems to become distracting, almost taking them out of the story and potentially jeopardizing the validity of the larger history being presented on-screen. For many others, though, particularly non-Americans (myself included), the accuracy of regional accents will not even register. What matters most, perhaps, is consistency and clarity. If one actor is going to strive for authenticity (whether portraying real people, as in the case of Band of Brothers, or invented characters, such as Jimmy Darmody in Boardwalk Empire, who was meant to have been born and raised in Atlantic City), then all the actors should be required to do so. There should be a systematic methodology employed, just as there (ideally) is in written history. It is also important that the accent is understandable to a wide audience who may be unfamiliar with it. Taylor explains that when crafting his accent, he made the decision, in consultation with producer Tom Hanks, to moderate the accent and make it sound more modern and less like the tapes he had of Cajun accents from the historical period.¹²⁸ This, of course, is an issue that written histories do not have to contend with; the words are flat on the page and rarely explore what a historical voice may have sounded like. An accent can be a problematic element and detract from the history on-screen, as with Warren’s performance, but when done right, as with Lewis, it can add yet another layer to the character. It can provide audiences with a sense of what historical figures may have sounded like when they lived and breathed, even if there is no interview footage included, as there is in Band of Brothers.¹²⁹

Voice-over narrators provide yet another manifestation of the human voice. Three different characters provide narration in four of the episodes: Winters very briefly in “Part 2: Day of Days,” and then more substantially in “Part 10: Points”; Lipton in “Part 7: The Breaking Point”; and Webster in “Part 8: The Last Patrol.” They are all homodiegetic narrators, meaning they are participants in the story they are relating. Voice-over narration is, of course, an element of discourse, or how the story is told. In this sense voice-over is also relevant to the previous chapter on narrative and could have been discussed there if Treme had used voice-over in any of its episodes. As a purely aural storytelling technique, however, voice-over narration is equally relevant to this chapter on sound. Many television series (as well as countless films) use voice-over, although its function and frequency can vary greatly depending on the show; Magnum P.I. (CBS, 1980–88), The Wonder Years (ABC, 1988–93), and HBO’s own Sex and the City (1998–2004) used voice-over every week, while other long-running series employ it in one-off episodes.¹³⁰ As Sarah Kozloff points out, the use of a voice-over narrator gives the audience the impression that it is the narrator controlling what the viewer sees, that he or she is in charge of the syuzhet organization, the way the events of the film or TV show are ordered and plotted.¹³¹ This adds a “subjective note” to what is shown on-screen, as the voice-over privileges the perspective of the narrator, who is, in all the examples cited here, one of the characters.¹³²

Voice-over has great potential in that it offers the possibility for adding another layer to the narrative, but it also has the drawback that it can be overused and become redundant, both of which can be seen in the narrated episodes of Band of Brothers. Lipton’s narration in “The Breaking Point” generated much discussion in online reviews and comments on blogs, perhaps because seven episodes into the series, it was the first to include considerable voice-over narration. Alan Sepinwall criticized Graham Yost’s script for “moments where the voice-over feels unnecessary” and for not trusting the audience to grasp certain things “without spelling it out for them.”¹³³ There are numerous instances when Lipton’s narration does indeed mirror what is being shown on-screen. Midway through the episode, as the camera rises to a high-angle long shot, we see splintered tree tops clearly visible in the foreground while the men of Easy move across ground littered with tree branches. Lipton’s narration at this very point that “the Germans had been shelling our old position—there were signs of tree bursts everywhere” is superfluous given the images on-screen and dialogue provided by the characters in the diegesis. Both “The Last Patrol” and “Points,” albeit to a lesser degree, feature similar instances of empty voice-over that seem to function as little more than filler to keep up the regularity of the narration.

Equally, though, there are instances when the voice-over conveys information that cannot be included in the diegesis, particularly the thoughts and emotions that a character would not express out loud. “The Last Patrol,” for example, is narrated by Webster, who, after being wounded in Holland, missed the Battle of the Bulge and is rejoining Easy as it moves into Haguenau. Episode co-writer Erik Bork explained that he wanted to explore Webster’s “unique perspective coming back to the Company.” “These were men who wouldn’t believably discuss their inner perspectives with each other in scenes very much,” Bork stated. “It would be hard for the audience to know what they were [thinking] otherwise, especially since there were so many characters, and different ones who were central to different episodes.”¹³⁴ The aim in “The Last Patrol” was to examine Webster’s feelings as an outsider, and since the writers felt it would be “hard or unnatural for him to voice his feelings and thoughts through dialogue with others,” they used voice-over to clearly convey them instead.¹³⁵ “The guys I knew were either gone or very different from what I remembered,” Webster narrates at the beginning of the episode. “I was a veteran of D-Day and Market Garden and had been with the company since its formation, but now, because I had missed Bastogne, I was treated as a replacement and felt like I was starting all over again.”¹³⁶ In “Points,” Winters’s voice-over narration supplies a sense of unity and cohesion for an episode that otherwise might appear disjointed or sprawling, as it brings the series to a close. It also allows Winters, the central figure of the series and respected leader of Easy, to relate the postwar lives of many of the men in a way that is far more personal and, therefore, meaningful than intertitles could achieve. The viewer has learned over the course of the series that Winters cares about his men, and it comes through in the emotion in his voice and choice of words: “Bull Randleman was one of the best soldiers I ever had; he went into the earth-moving business in Arkansas—he’s still there.” Sound allows for the expression of intimate thoughts and helps foster a deeper connection between audience and character, generating and developing allegiance.

The distinctly different sound quality of voice-over narration also strengthens the connection between viewer and character. Michel Chion calls the narrating voice the “I-voice” and argues that “sound film has codified the criteria of tone color, auditory space, and timbre to which a voice must conform in order to function as an I-voice.” Chion identifies two technical criteria essential in the recording of voice-over, the first being close-miking to create “a feeling of intimacy with the voice, such that we sense no distance between it and our ear.”¹³⁷ Even choosing the correct microphone for voice-over is a complex endeavor that must take into account the performer’s voice and the desired sound, whether it be “crisp and bright, warm but not overly bright, transparent, or silky in the treble range.”¹³⁸ The second criterion derives from the first and relates to the “dryness” of the voice. Dryness is essentially the absence of reverberation, as reverb situates the voice in a real-world space. Voice-over is usually recorded in a purpose-built studio “offering low reverberation time and background noise” in order to capture the clearest possible sound.¹³⁹ If reverb is added to the voice, “it is then no longer a subject with which the spectator identifies, but rather an object-voice, perceived as a body anchored in space,” breaking the illusion that the narrator speaks directly into the ear of the listener.¹⁴⁰ This effect is further manipulated in the final sound mix, where it is heavily compressed to enhance its clarity and to stop it being overwhelmed by other sounds, such as music and sound effects.¹⁴¹ This unique sound quality has become a standard convention, so viewers know when they hear this particular type of voice in conjunction with the use of past tense, they are listening to the character narrate from some (usually) unknown place and time in the future.

Previous chapters have already touched on speech and its narrative function. The writers strive to imitate natural conversation, but, in reality, character dialogue is “designed to communicate certain information to the audience” and differs significantly “from spontaneous everyday speech.”¹⁴² The speech of characters—be it through conversations, monologues, lectures, or songs—provides context, assigns meaning to events, explains complex plot points and historical issues, and helps to build character, as outlined in the Treme and Boardwalk Empire chapters. However, it is worth remembering that the dialogue is the product of not only the writers but the actors, who deliver the words and imbue them with meaning, and the sound department staff, who capture the voice, make it distinct, and manipulate how it sounds to achieve a desired effect. Dialogue once again illustrates the truly collaborative nature of history on-screen that stretches across individuals and various departments.

Conclusion

Sound is an area that has been overlooked for too long in a range of disciplines. It is pointless to argue for the primacy of the aural over the visual, or vice versa, but as Robynn J. Stilwell states, sound is “easily the equal of such components as lighting, design, camera angles and editing and therefore needs to be integrated into the study of film as these other elements have been.”¹⁴³ Exactly the same can and should be argued for the place of sound in history-on-screen scholarship. While elements of the image track are considered and critiqued, the soundtrack is often taken for granted and left unexplored. It is vital to remember that just as much time and energy is spent on the soundtrack: songs are carefully chosen and musical scores are composed, sound effects are individually crafted and orchestrated, and actors hone their vocal performances. Looking at each of the three categories of screen sound in Band of Brothers demonstrates just how rich an area of examination sound is.

To ascertain how each of these categories of screen sound function and what they add to the narrative, this chapter has been divided into sections, each dealing with a separate category. Such separation is, of course, artificial. The sounds interact and overlap and are designed to work in harmony not only with the image but with each other. Music, sound effects, and speech are the individual elements of sound design, the “total sonic universe” of the series.¹⁴⁴ “Sound design” can be a slippery term with many interconnected meanings, as outlined by Whittington. It can refer to the creation of specific sounds or the “conceptual design of the overall sound track”; it can also relate to how the sounds are designed to be heard in different exhibition spaces. “Sound design” can also refer to and incorporate all of these elements: “Sound design represents the planning and patterns of the film sound track and the meanings that result from its deployment within the exhibition space.”¹⁴⁵ No matter how well researched or well executed each of the individual elements of the soundtrack are, they must be able to work together to produce a cohesive whole.

The overall sound design of Band of Brothers—with its meticulous attention to detail in the battle scenes, the inclusion of veteran and narrating voices that generate intimacy, and the carefully composed musical scores enhancing the emotions of the soldiers—plays an important part in shaping the Good War and greatest generation interpretation of World War Two promoted by the series. Sound design, Mark S. Ward contends, “is, first and foremost, a form of emotion design. Each set of decisions which goes into the crafting of a sonic element is focused upon the task of designing affect at both the sensory and narrative levels.”¹⁴⁶ The way the sound is constructed and organized encourages the viewer not only to care about these soldiers but to appreciate their sacrifices and contributions to the struggle against fascism.

Listening to a sequence from “Part 5: Crossroads” provides just one example of how the different elements of sound are worked together to develop a desired idea or meaning. After shooting the young SS officer at the beginning of the episode, Winters is sent on a forty-eight-hour furlough to Paris, but continues to struggle with his actions that day. We first see him at a busy sidewalk café. The hum of conversation around him, most of it indistinguishable but with some clear snippets from American soldiers behind him, enhances the impression that he feels claustrophobic, confined by all those happy, seemingly lighthearted people around him. After this short scene (fifty seconds), the episode cuts to Winters sitting on a subway car. The sound of the train is loud, coming from all speakers, and the continuous rattling and rumbling of the car as it picks up speed is soon punctuated by the sound of gunfire as Winters experiences brief flashbacks to the battle at the crossroads. The sounds of the car eventually start to slowly decrease in volume as Winters looks behind him and sees a teenage boy who reminds him of the SS officer. The image track cuts back to the scene, only this time, in Winters’s imagination, the silence is even more drawn out. Rather than lasting only three seconds, as it had when the event originally occurred, as he remembers it in his mind there is fifteen seconds of silence between the moment he comes across the boy and shoots his gun. The image track returns to the subway and the silence resumes—the train has stopped. The boy speaks kindly and softly to Winters in French, breaking his stupor. Just as the boy stops speaking, gentle music begins and picks up a bit of volume as Winters exits the station, walks along the Seine, and heads back to his hotel. Sound effects (cars, footsteps) and speech (ambient conversation of other people along the Seine) are layered over the music, and the sequence ends as he enters the bathtub with a contented sigh. The final shot of the sequence is through a doorway, looking at Winters as he lies in the tub; the music concludes and is immediately replaced by a unknown male voice talking, providing a sound bridge between this scene and the next one, which takes place as the men of Easy watch a John Wayne film. The sounds and silences in this sequence, constantly shifting in volume and focus (depending on what the audience is supposed to be listening to), and varied use of the surrounds all work to further the impression that Winters is guilt-stricken, is traumatized by war, and is seeking solitude.

The complex sound design of Band of Brothers does more than heighten emotion and provide access to the sounds of the past: it has the dual effect of drawing viewers into the narrative and pulling them out of it, especially when experienced in surround sound. As Landsberg argues in her study of the soundscape in Deadwood, sound can also lead to cognitive thinking on the part of the audience. Viewers can be both engrossed in the narrative and invested in the characters while also realizing there is something “profoundly different” about what they are watching on-screen. “We oscillate,” she states, “between these two poles of mimesis and difference, moving back and forth between the bridge.” Viewers’ investment and emotional response to the narrative do not necessarily result in facile identification, rather this affective engagement “can lead to new thoughts, ideas, or historical insights.”¹⁴⁷ The sound design, issuing from multiple speakers, does not create the simplistic illusion that the viewers are in the narrative, experiencing World War Two as it actually happened. Rather, the incongruity of sitting in a comfortable armchair while surrounded by the sound of bombs, bullets, anguished cries, and heart-wrenching music snaps viewers out of the storyworld. The bodily response they have to the harrowing sounds highlights the stark difference between their own setting and that experienced by the men of Easy Company. Viewers are prompted to reflect upon what war really entails and, in turn, the difficulties of those who lived through it, reinforcing, once again, the series’ Good War interpretation.

The soundtrack ultimately adds a dimension to history that just cannot be replicated in written form. It gives history texture and brings the image to life; without sound, even the most impressive visual sequence feels flat and one-dimensional.¹⁴⁸ The addition of sound—of voices, sound effects, and music—surrounding us as we watch is, arguably, that magic ingredient that brings the history on-screen to life. This is why it is so surprising that it has received so little attention. In Band of Brothers the visual and the aural complement each other; both have been crafted to present audiences with a gritty and “authentic” window to World War Two and to enhance the creators’ interpretation of history. There is potential, though, for filmmakers to play with sound, to experiment with how it is employed and its relationship to the image.

It is worth, perhaps, briefly returning to the issue of the simplistic and problematic historical interpretation of Band of Brothers. This was not HBO, Hanks, and Spielberg’s last foray into World War Two together. Nine years later, The Pacific premiered, putting the $125 million budget of Band of Brothers to shame with a $200 million price tag.¹⁴⁹ Like its predecessor, The Pacific spared no expense in creating a visually and aurally authentic representation, from the sets, props, and costumes to a meticulously crafted and immersive soundtrack. The historical interpretation of the American experience did, however, evolve. As Debra Ramsay points out, The Pacific disrupts and muddies elements of the Good War myth, even while it maintains those of the greatest generation.¹⁵⁰ The subsequent series is significant for two reasons: first, it showcases the importance of HBO’s on-going relationships with individuals and production companies (particularly Hanks and his production company, Playtone), and second, it again illustrates the network’s willingness to present a variety of histories and interpretations.¹⁵¹