About Room Tone

To a newbie, room tone means silence. To an audio professional, room tone means the subtle, low-volume sounds present in every room. Importantly, room tones are not all the same — every room has its own unique sound.” — Media College

Most audiences don’t realize the silence that hangs within dialogue is this deliberately captured sound. The silence in films isn’t the silence of absence, but the silence of ‘presence’ (an alternative vocabulary word for the process). Room Tone — as an important step in sound design, but also as a symbol — captures a moment as it is, and the pieces of that moment that we take for granted.

What is most fascinating to me is how the Room Tone we hear when watching something on screen is not the Room Tone that was captured by an audio professional. The Room Tone melds with our own moment of place and time, whether the airy hum of a movie theater, the little drums of your cat pattering across the couch, the reverberation of a home stereo system testing the give of your speakers, or the quiet waves of blood rushing in your ears against headphones.

I’m taken by Room Tone as an idea. How do you capture the sound of the room as we process our thoughts on any given work? How do you record the tone of the conversations we have around culture? How do you document what noisy thoughts may hang within silence?

These writings are an attempt to reflect those unique sounds and to present the Room Tone of the thoughts, feelings, and questions incited by cultural works.

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