Surrounded By Sound

Music changes everything. For that matter, sound can create its very own world within the cinematic universe. Mundane images become alive, dynamic, and overall more interesting. An image on the screen may be beautiful and colorful within its own right, but may very easily loose attention. But add sound to those images, be it music or a designed soundtrack, the image instantly engages with the audience. As any film student learns in the most basic of classes, music tells people how to feel about the image. But sound does not just involve the use of music. The subtle nuances of sound design, the quality of one sound over another, the level of different sounds, can create an entire world all unto themselves. Remove image from the soundscape and you could still determine your general location and perhaps even some activity happening in the scene. But lay the created soundscape over an image and it comes alive. Images can also be made to stand out when the sound and image do not match one another.

It was extremely interesting to read Acoustic Ecology. I do not think it is often in the everyday that we stop to pay attention to the sounds around us outside. The birds, wind rustling the leaves, water running, frogs croaking. Then there are the man-made sounds that punctuate the natural soundtrack. Cars, sirens, air conditioning units, the Clock Tower. It was not until recently when working on sound for a class project last semester. It seemed there was something not right about the video, even though it was in the final stages of editing. Some of our interviews had been shot with people in the surroundings as well as outdoors. It was the ambient sound that made the image lacking. When the problem was corrected, we found our project much better. Or at least as good as an intro class video can be!

Let Us Dance In An Imaginary World of Color and Light

Animation. It's something we are all are familiar with, and most likely it is one of the first types of video you experienced as a child of the 1990s. We all remember Warner Bros. Loony Tunes and the Disney classics such as The Lion King. Perhaps some even recall the Japanese anime feature Spirited Away. But all of these animations tell a clear story. They are linear and the characters are humanized. This type of animation is commonplace, and the artists (at least in the past) were acclaimed for their skill with a pen and pencil.

But animation does not have to be in this style to communicate some form of idea. Instead, feelings and ideas can be conveyed through series of shapes, colors, and their formation and subsequent destruction if that is what the artist so chooses. A linear narrative is not necessary in experimental animation, nor is continuity of surroundings a concern. Some experimental animation may be blatant in its conduction of ideas to the audience. Perhaps a tree grows from a sapling, into a tree, only to be covered by snow and collapse. I would take this to mean death. But what would a swath of the color green mixed with a myriad of swirling blue mean? How would you as an audience member interpret this? Is it rushing water, is it the ocean, the sky, or something else entirely? That's the thing about experimental animation. Show the film to ten different people (who may or may not necessarily be film students) and you will most likely receive ten different answers as to what the animation is attempting to convey. In my opinion this is one of the beauties of experimental animation.

Seeing Sound In A World of Color

Although the term of Synesthesia is new to me, the concept is not. I have encountered the idea in books, magazines, and the lyrics of music such as the introduction to Everything Comes From You by Peter Gabriel's project, Big Blue Ball. The accounts of better memory recall by those who have Synesthesia is unsurprising. Indeed, I remember reading about studies conducted on people without Synesthesia related to memory recall. For instance, if students studied while chewing their favorite flavor gum, wearing perfume,or listening to music, all those things could help with memory recall during a test. In my experiences, these studies are correct. While preparing for an exam last semester, I listened to my favorite Sanskrit chants. There was information on the exam I could not remember, even with attempting to draw diagrams and think of notes. But when I began to think of the music in myhead, the answers came almost instantly.

When reading about sounds appearing as color to some with Synesthesia, it made me think about a concept album by The Dear Hunter. On this album are eleven songs, each which are supposed to represent and invoke the feeling of a color. The song Things That Hide Away is green. While Filth and Squalor is black, and What Time Taught Us is indigo. If you are interested in hearing further about the concept behind the album The Color Spectrum, I highly recommend reading the interview by Guitar World with Casey Crescenzo. The interviewer even asks him specifically about the phenomenon of Synesthesia.

In other forms of art, I have seen a representation of Synesthesia at the Smithsonian's rotating exhibit in Washington D.C. On a series of screens, different colors and abstract shapes would appear each time a note was struck or a chord played on the piano. Although I do not recall the artist, this is the most blatant form of Synesthesia I have encountered in art.

The other encounter I remember as a child was with Cymatics. We made art with Crayola paints and paper placed on a platform (I do not remember the material it was made out of as I was quite young), and simple songs were played as a series of tones. We used different color paints and created very beautiful shapes. I remember being amazed that I could see music! Little did I ever think our arts and crafts experiment was actually a field of scientific study!

Overall I found the concepts of Synesthesia and Cymatics quite fascinating. Now that I am more aware of them, I wonder just how much more in the world I will notice that has been influenced by Synesthesia and Cymatics.

How To See Without Eyes

The assignment? In 5 minutes write a stream of consciousness about an experimental film set to jazz music. Here are my sleep-deprived musings after watching the film:

This film is what sounds would look like could the mind watch them as well as hear. Not the eyes. The eyes are shut. Instead the minds eye leads us through colorscapes that invoke though of autumn leaves and warm beaches. But as we watch the sounds become harsher, more forced, more mysterious, the colorscape is devoid of brightness. There is harsh contrasting of black and white, like monsters come to steal the rambunctious happiness of the sound-created world

In this world there are graceful movement of bright colors. A dance of sorts. but in the dark, the movement is slightly different. The objects are more linear and appear to have teeth or claws. Darkness and light of the mind. Seeing without using eyes. If ears had eyes, this film is what would be seen.

♫♫♫

Music is not simply another random sound wave vibrating the smallest bones in the human body. No. Music is something inspired by one person's life which can convey beauty, joy, pain, loss, hopefulness, and regret. Music reaches to the very core of who we are. Whether there are lyrics or not, music is a way of saying what we may be afraid to say. But rather than conveying some grand unsaid message, the filmmaker shared with us a feeling associated with the music. The crescendos and diminuendos of the jazz band rising and falling through our ears and into our chests. The film was simply an enhancement to music, adding onto the feeling as opposing to attempt manipulation of feeling. Something not often found in modern music videos, as perhaps this experimental film may be loosely labeled.

As I often like to say, "Without life there would be no music, and without music there would be no life."