Week 3

The lecture for week three was a continuation of last week’s lecture only focusing on sound and how sound can be used to portray meaning. The best way that I can describe this for myself is how sound is used in horror movies. Sound is typically used in horror films to help build up fear in the viewer for when the antagonist jumps out to scare us. Usually it’s an out of tune violin that gets louder and high pitched but personally this isn't the best use of sound in these movies. I personally think keeping the sound ambient or silent it’s the best way to build suspense. There’s nothing creepier than hearing the panicking breath of person when they are in complete silence. I guess this plays on what was talked about in a lecture as culture memory comes into play. We recognised the panicking breathing as something that’s associated with fear and then the feeling is engaged within us.

Paul talked about John Cage’s 4 33 and how it was consider avant-garde for it time. We were even shown it being played, despite it putting an entire audience into complete silence, you didn’t hear silence. It’s amazing how hundreds of people gathered together and stayed silent. It knocks you back to say the least. Its not something I could really put my finger on straight away, but it something that I see countless people being pissed off because they bought tickets for. I am saying this because I think I fall into the category at least for awhile but its because of that reason that I think its so impactful. A successful artist either makes love or hate their work.

Something that stuck out to me when Paul was talking about sound qualities was that sound cannot be frozen. I had never thought about this before. If I was photographing a person I would be doing freezing an image of that person in time to be view upon at a later time. But with sound you have to take it in through a period of time, if you try to pause sound, it ceases to exist. The reason why this stuck out to me was because last year in tech my final project was to do with photography. My main influence for this work was an artist called David Hockney, while researching his Joiners work he mention how limiting photography was as medium due to photographs being an image frozen in time, which he found to be lifeless. In his Joiners work he collaged photographs together in order to create a scene thats not frozen in time and I used this idea to create pieces of work that were made up of different perspectives, showing different perspectives through mirrors.

I'm personally not someone who looks to deeply into sound although I understand its importance within film and animation to give scenes an atmosphere. Even when it comes music I don't really look into the meaning of most songs that listen too, I fact half the songs I listen too I don't even know the meaning. I can't something that I would dedicate a lot of my time too, but I am interested in it.