Room Tone 2024
Since I created our first annual room-tone montage in 2020, I’ve found the act of watching dozens of people sitting silently, each in their own distinct manner, to be a meditative and moving way of looking back at all the work we’ve done at Criterion in the past year. When trying to explain what room tone is to someone unfamiliar with the concept, I reach for an architectural metaphor. If words are the bricks of a scene, then surely room tone is the mortar that binds them together. It gives sonic coherence to an edited piece built from different takes within the same location.
Asking a cast and crew to observe a moment of silence is an acknowledgment that room tone cannot be faked. You cannot substitute it with a recording from another production, and you cannot generate it using artificial intelligence. It is something you capture at a specific time and place that has not occurred before and will not occur again. This is our attempt at freezing such fleeting moments—and welcoming those to come.
