“This Ticking Noise in My Head”: How Sound Design, Dialogue, Event Structure, and Viewer Working Memory Interact in the Comprehension of Touch of Evil (1958)

This study tested the role of the audio soundtrack in the opening scene of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (Welles and Zugsmith 1958) in supporting a predictive inference that a time-bomb will explode, as the filmmakers intended. We designed two experiments and interpreted their results using The Scene Perception and Event Comprehension Theory (SPECT). Across both experiments, viewers watched the scene, we manipulated their knowledge of the bomb, and they made a predictive inference just before the bomb would explode. Experiment 1 found that the likelihood of predicting the explosion decreased when the soundtrack was absent. Experiment 2 showed that individual differences in working memory accounted for variability in generating the prediction when the soundtrack was absent. We explore the implications for filmmaking in general.