Monday, February 27, 2012

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.

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