Once Upon a Time in the West (analysis)

Analyze the sounds in the opening scene to Once Upon a Time in the West. 

You can receive up to 5% extra credit on your final grade for this assignment - BUT you have to go above and beyond what I wrote here to get full credit. In other words, really write down as many sounds and categories as you can think of!

Refer to the chapter "Classification" from The Tuning of the World (reading #5 Download reading #5

On two different pages, group all the sounds in the opening scene from Once Upon a Time in the West into as many categories as you can think of. 

Write the categories at the top of the page. Then, list all the sounds in the scene. After each sound write the first letter of each category that the sound belongs to.

Page 1 should group the sounds based on their implied sources or literal meanings: e.g., animal, mechanical, natural / environmental, man-made, etc. This is NOT an exhaustive list, there are many more categories you should include. 

So you would write:

          Categories: Animal (A), Mechanical (M), Natural (N), Man-made (MM)..... and so on.

Then list the sounds:

          Door squeak (M, MM...)

          Wind (N...)

           Human speech (A, N, MM...)

          ......

and so on.

Page 2 should classify the sounds in terms of their musical characteristics (i.e., use the "reduced" listening mode to classify them as "sound objects").

So you would write categories like - Pitch: high (P.h), med. (P.m), low (P.l), modulating (P.m), static (P.s) || Texture: continuous (T.c), discontinuous (T.d), regular (T.r), irregular (T.i) || Sound-color (timbre), rough (S.r), pure (S.p), etc.

Do this for volume, rhythm, and any other category you can think of. If the pitch of a sound is  sometimes static sometimes modulating you can write (P.m/s). This goes for all the other musical parameters as well.

so for a sound that involves a high, modulating pitch in an irregular but continuous texture you would write, e.g.,

Telegraph - (P.h.m)(T.c.i)

Now apply all these categories to the sounds on your list.