Chion: Sound bites...

I agree with Chion on the importance of sound in film. It has dangers and advantages to what it can add to cinema. The moment people could capture still photographs, they wanted them to be able to move, so why not be able to hear what is going on in them? Soundtracks, FXs, Dialogue etc. are required to be in our mainstream films. We need the roar of a monster. Gunshots that lead to explosions, and so on. But sound, while it adds a great deal to what the filmmakers intended a scene to be like, can also dominate the image. Just like Sergei Eisenstein's experiments with picture editing, one could take the same clip of a dog playing and sitting in the yard. The change in sounds (FXs, music) can make things seem sad and nostalgic, tense and frightening, or humorous and playful.
Of course, an image carefully constructed and played silently can have the intended emotional impact that sound can lend to it. So sound has the danger of also becoming over used, and a way to (in Chion's reference to Bergman) cover sloppy filmmaking.
One will notice the absence of sound. But you will also notice bad sound editing/design. Chion points that sound is perceived far quicker than vision, which is why sound (if used) needs to be quality at all times because it will affect the sense of cinema before the eye ever takes it in.