Sound Reading Response

The relationship between audio and visual image is one of the most important things in a viewing experience, in my opinion.  Working with Shannon's film really opened my eyes to this, even though I already had a pretty good idea of the concept.  Certain scenes demand a certain tone of music, and when this is off it is very noticeable.  The "anempathetic" concept Chion mentions in the reading seems to lie somewhere in the middle.  The music is neither appropriate nor inappropriate.  Perhaps documentaries make use of this more than any other form.  Narrative films generally seek to bolster the mood of the plot/characters, whereas many documentaries wish to remain non-biased.
Another thing Chion touches on is the "mickey-mousing" effect sound can have; accents in the sound design can draw attention to certain movements.  This is often used in animation.  Again, I worked fairly extensively with this on Shannon's film, and the effect is quite striking.  It really changes the focal points of the scene for the viewer.
Finally, I found Chion's numerated conditions for sound to temporalize images quite interesting.  I'm always a fan of academic analysis of somewhat obvious/taken for granted things, so this was right up my ally.  I think I am going to show Chris McKee this article; his 495 experimental is attempting to be somewhat of an audio Kuleshov experiment, so this definitely applies.

Cameraless Filmmaking Thus Far

First off, I have to start by saying that this has been a completely new experience for me.  I have thoroughly enjoyed it, and have been thinking about other opportunities to incorporate these techniques into my repertoire.  After taking History of the Avant-Garde with Dr. Kase, I was very curious about how exactly some of the films were made.  Of course, we discussed some of the techniques in that class, but I really wanted to get a hands-on appreciation for how difficult, or easy, some of the films would have been to make.  That being said, I must say that most of those films must have taken many many weeks if not months or years of constant work.  Now that I have worked in some of the ways that the filmmakers did, I have a serious appreciation for their craft and talent.  Most of all, I have gained a new appreciation for pre-visualization.  It is one things to sit down and begin to scratch film, but it is entirely different to scratch film in order to realize an abstract vision.  

Sequential animation of natural forms is logical; however, organic shapes and forms interacting with each other on a frame-by-frame basis is all together something much more intensive.  First, it seems there must be a solid vision or idea.  Then, you must be a skilled enough craftsmen to create that.  Anyone can animate a person walking from left to right if they take enough time.  The keyframe techniques we discussed last class allow for a concrete and mathematical formula to rigidly outline the art.  What though does it take to create something outside this formulaic realm?

This seems to be where the real craft comes into play.  Taking that into account, this whole experience has actually given me a new appreciation for narrative filmmaking pre-production.  Of course, I valued the time it took to sit down and draw overheads or storyboards.  But, taking this new concept of abstract implementation of formulaic practices seems like it could lead to promising new visualizations of storytelling in both the narrative and avant-garde realms.

Synesthesia and Cymatics

Synesthesia has always been fascinating to me.  In fact, my younger brother, a student at the University of Chicago, is actually trying to publish his first fictional novel which centers on a synesthetic victim of neurological trauma.  The creative implications of the synesthetic condition are quite interesting and open-ended.  Pertaining to the Wikipedia article, I found the concept of the "color organ" to be very intriguing.  Not only does it seem like a way to understand synesthesia better, but it also seems like it would be very useful in teaching people to play an instrument.  Instead of reading sheet music, you could simply assign colors to chords and play a horizontally oriented painting.  I might try that sometime.  This idea is similar to the binary composition of Peter Kubelka's Arnulf Rainer, in which the filmmaker alternates white noise and silence to a series of strobing white frames and black frames (we saw this in History of the Avant-garde with Dr. Kase).  The resulting viewing experience led me to begin to associate white noise with the white frames, since there was a clear rhythmic and visual association.

As for cymatics, this is utterly fascinating to me.  This sort of cross-referencing between seeing and hearing seems like it is a very promising area of research in terms of understanding more about human perception of sound.  Particularly, the relationship between sound and the visual image could be aided by cymatics.  We discussed this fairly extensively in Dr. Laudadio's Writing About Sound class, and I did my final senior seminar research paper (for my English major) on some psychological affectations of sound on basic moving images.

On a side note, below is a link to a video of some people engaging in a sort of cymatic-like experiment.  I found this a while ago because I like the band that one of these guys is in (they also run a company called Robot Repair which makes music for famous commercials).  But, when I found this, it made me happy to see they were artists too, not just commercial musicians.

http://robotrepairprojects.com/windmills.html