Radiophonics and film 

The idea of radiophonics extends beyond the radio itself, into the radiative, the vibrational, the parapsychic and the schizophrenic. It represents all that cannot be subordinated by the image. It even disrupts those realms where the image is said to predominate because at heart, the image-object is molecular, uncertain, radiative. However, even though both the film image and its sound have the potential for dissolving into noise, the image, as Chion notes, has a container, while sound does not. Multiplicity in the image accedes to the drama of the frame, while sonic information finds other, at times unconventional, guarantors of meaning: 

Why in the cinema do we speak of "the image" in the singular, when a film has thousands of them? The reason is that even if there were millions, there would still be only one container for them, the frame. What "the image" designates in the cinema is not content but container: the frame. . . .What is the corresponding case for sound? The exact opposite. For sound there is neither frame nor preexisting container. (Audio-Vision 66-7)

 
The break implicit in the radiophonic is described by Allen Weiss as "that of the separation of the acoustic event from the lived, eroticized, speaking body." For film, this could mean a separation of sound from bodies, or from the containing frame, and thus a close equivalent of the "acousmêtre." What would make a voice radiophonic proper might be, simply, the presence of the radio, which not only would mediate the voice and sound, but also the entire cultural imaginary of radio communication. Another difference between acousmetric sounds and radiophonic ones could be merely a question of destination, or even destiny. Gregory Whitehead describes radiophonics in terms of sonic destiny: "In radio, not only is the voice separated from the body, and not only does it return to the speaker as a disembodied presence-it is, furthermore, thrust into the public arena to mix its sonic destiny with that of other voices." For Whitehead, radio art is based on a "principia schizophonica." The head becomes the container of an overload of voices. In film, this effect is many times accompanied by a reflection on the nature of radio, since certain forms of voice-over experimentation emerged from the radio drama of the 30s and 40s. For example, Mankiewicz's Letter to Three Wives utilizes a voice-over effect that, in a story in which the radio becomes central, has more alliances with the metaphor of programming voices from afar and loading up the head with alien gibberish, than with the idea of the voice cast out from the body in a play for omnipotence.