[8] One of them turns on the radio, and the image takes on a pinkish hue as the women drink beverages and listen to "Strawberry Fields Forever" by the Beatles before abruptly leaving.

[9] The scene briefly cuts to a solid red screen, accompanied by a low-pitched hum that gradually increases in pitch until the end of the film.

[12] The camera continues to zoom in on the photographs hanging on the wall, two of which depict graphics of a walking woman and another showing waves.

[14] Snow's production notes before Wavelength show variations on the concept of an extended zoom from a wide shot to a close-up.

[15] The film emerged from an exercise playing with combinations of words, clustered around "room", "wave", "length", "Atlantic", "time", and "ocean".

He selected Amy Taubin because of her previous acting experience in a Broadway adaptation of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

The silhouettes are a design that he had created in 1961 for his Walking Woman series, which involved recreating the shape in different media and materials.

For the final scenes showing the wave photograph, Snow had to physically move the camera from its original position, having reached the limitations of the zoom lens.

After deciding a glissando would be more suitable, he developed plans to record it on a trombone or violin and mix together multiple takes to fill the duration of the film.

[33] Snow had intended to make use of whatever sync sound was recorded during filming but made an exception for the music on the radio.

[20][31] Wavelength was first shown at a private screening at the Film-Maker's Cinematheque attended by Shirley Clarke, Richard Foreman, Ken Jacobs, George Kuchar, Jonas Mekas, Nam June Paik, and Amy Taubin.

However, Snow expected the separately recorded soundtrack to prove challenging for wider exhibition and decided it would be better to transfer the score to the film's optical track.

[38] In discussing the shortcomings of digital projection, Taubin emphasized the importance of presenting the various film grains of Wavelength and the difference in "visual cues through which we read space".

"[43] Analyzing the emerging structural film movement, Sitney highlights Wavelength for its use of a fixed camera position in defining the shape of the work.

[44] To Stephen Heath, the principal theme of Wavelength is the "question of the cinematic institution of the subject of film" rather than the apparatus of filmmaking itself.

"[33] In a 1968 L.A. Free Press review of the film, Gene Youngblood describes Wavelength as "without precedent in the purity of its confrontation with the essence of cinema: the relationships between illusion and fact, space and time, subject and object.

It is the first post-Warhol, post-Minimal movie; one of the few films to engage those higher conceptual orders which occupy modern painting and sculpture.

[53] Wavelength established a template for many of Snow's later films, which critic J. Hoberman characterizes as "anti-illusionist, reflexive, and often paradoxical investigations of cinema's unique, irreducible properties.

"[57] Wavelength was an early influence on minimalist composer Steve Reich, and his 1970 recording of Four Organs uses the film's closing photograph for its cover artwork.

[58][59] Anthony McCall has detailed how descriptions of Wavelength influenced the development of his 1973 work Line Describing a Cone, pointing to "the possibility that a single idea can define the essential outline of an entire film.

The film opens with black leader accompanied by a reworking of Amy Taubin's phone call about discovering a dead body.