Areas of interest
The following post is not a reflection on a specific article. On the contrary, it will be dedicated to my ideas and areas of interest.
During my academic studies, I have explored various fields but since I dedicated my main interest in electroacoustic music I started to narrow my research interest.
First I studied broadly about soundscapes and soundscape composition, which was the main subject of my undergraduate dissertation. In my masters in Music Composition, I continued studying soundscapes but narrowing down to the distribution of sound in space and the consequences of this technique in the perception of the composition. Since spatialisation is so important in the perception of the audio experience, I found even more tempting to study rigorously about perception itself. My main inspiration was Michel Chion[1]
Michel Chion and his book Audio-Vision where he talks about the relation of sound and moving images and how they interact for the purpose of the perception of the content.
He is considered one of the greatest theorists about the perception of sounds, after he followed up and developed Pierre Shaeffer[2] theory of Listening Modes. However his theory reflects on art made by editing procedures and material from the natural environment, and not computer generated sounds or images.
Learning more about computational art and how to generate sound or image through programming processes made me questioning how the aforementioned theory can relate to contemporary computational art.
Considering the above ideas the following questions emerge:
How the image and the sound combined aesthetically in order to create a unique experience?
What percentage of this experience is being perceived by the audience?
Is this abstraction (and this insecurity of what computer may produce after the programming instructions) that lead more and more artist to produce audiovisual performances or installation in order to make their art more direct instead of making uncombined art pieces?
1) Chion, M., Gorbman, C. and Murch, W. (1994). Audio-vision. New York: Columbia University Press.
2) Schaffer, M. (1977). The soundscape : Our sonic environment and the tuning of the world, Rochester, Vt.: Destiny Books