Sound design and Visual Memory in Film

What is it about?

This study explores a simple but surprisingly powerful question: Can sound in a film make us remember seeing something that was never actually shown? Filmmakers often use off-screen sound, like a crash, a scream, or a door slamming to suggest events happening out of view. Editors and sound designers have long believed that audiences mentally “fill in” these missing images, but this had never been scientifically tested in a realistic film-viewing setting. To investigate, we created a professionally produced short fiction film, Bird Sounds, with two nearly identical versions. In each version, certain key moments were either shown on screen or presented only through sound. More than 120 adults watched the film either in a cinema (Stage 1) or online (Stage 2). Afterwards, they completed a recognition test showing short clips that included events they had seen, events they had only heard, and events that never appeared in the film at all. Across both stages, we found evidence that some viewers confidently “remembered” seeing visual details that were never shown particularly for familiar everyday actions (like pressing a keyboard key or hearing a cat meow) and for one highly immersive sound event. These sound-only moments were more likely than expected to produce false visual memories. We also found that an event’s importance within the story and how much empathy viewers felt for the main character played a role in how confidently people remembered it. Overall, this study provides the first empirical evidence that sound alone can create psychologically real false visual memories in narrative film. It highlights how strongly our minds integrate sound and image, and how storytelling devices can shape what we believe we saw.

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Photo by Susan Wilkinson on Unsplash

Photo by Susan Wilkinson on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This research is important because it suggests, for the first time that sound alone can make people believe they saw something in a film that was never actually shown. Filmmakers have long assumed this, but it had never been tested scientifically in a realistic viewing environment. Understanding this matters because it reveals how strongly our minds combine sound and image when we make sense of a story. The study confirms that audiences don’t just watch films they actively construct them in their imagination. This means the soundtrack plays a far more powerful role in shaping memory, emotion, and narrative understanding than most people realise. The findings also have broader implications. They contribute to research on how false memories form, how different senses interact, and how storytelling influences what we think we remember. As media becomes more immersive through streaming, VR, games, and AI-generated content it becomes increasingly important to understand how sounds can subtly alter what we believe we’ve seen. This study helps show that memory is a creative process and that sound is fundamental part.

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