Week 5

I found literacy to be a common theme among the readings this week, a concept we started to touch on at the end of class on Thursday. We talk a lot in film about the idea of visual language and how the creation and development of a new art form demanded a new epistemological system. This system is accretive, with films today relying on audiences’ ability to innately understand the language of film, making works of art that would not be intelligible in the  1920’s. This need for a medium-specific language is reflected in both the readings of Truax and Schaefer, and though they don’t say this directly they imply the greater challenge of having to make art for an audience in which you can’t be certain of their literacy. Because sound art is not a dominant form of art in the way film is, the artist can’t make that same assumption of accretive knowledge. Thus, the need to study how sound art is rendered comprehendible by a listener. Truax finds the two main processes to be in pattern recognition and in “meaning-making”, processes that mirror the elements of sound discussed in week 2, the syntactic and the semantic. When we discussed these elements, we also mentioned a third dimension of understanding sound “praxis”. This dimension was beyond decoding sound to render it intelligible but was about finding the sounds themselves to be aesthetically intelligible. Sound for sound sake. The dichotomy between Truax’s two processes and the idea of sound praxis is reflected in Schaefer’s description of the two Greek conceptions of sound. Truax’s conception is more in line with Dionysian music, coming directly from human emotion and experience, whereas sound praxis is more in line with Apollonian music, sound as an appreciation for the harmony of the universe. Truax goes on to discuss his own epistemological system for soundscapes featuring keynote sounds and soundmarks which is interesting but what is more fascinating is that sound art has to be consciously aware of the minute details of a space that render it intelligible and more often then not these details are grounded in personal memory and emotional resonance. If you want your film to take place in a school you shoot at a school. There are obviously many elements of costume design and set design that go into making that school believable, but the majority of the work of intelligibility is done instantly. If you want something to sound like a school, you can’t just record a school. If you place a microphone in a classroom, you won’t get the experience of being in a classroom. The art of sound art is in atomizing a particular scene and capturing the essence of those pieces to make them intelligible not as they are, but as they should be. As they exist to us in our memory