Eve White
Paula Mann
Stephen Parks
Sonia Litkinsky
Thoughts on Sound and/or Image
Our brains seem capable of effortlessly constructing connections between sound and image. The art of Foley in filmmaking is the best evidence of this: we are adept at establishing a correspondence between the scene before our eyes and simultaneous—yet merely plausible—sounds. This ability allows us to integrate information from different senses into a complete perceptual experience.
If field recording and synchronous sound—acts of presence and embodiment—reinforce the unity of the on-site audio-visual experience, then in the era of "schizophonia," (R. Murray Schafer) when sound is separated from its original environment, we are often compelled to perform a kind of subjective mental reconstruction (whether passive or active) of the relationship between what we hear and what we see.
As technological progress makes audio post-production increasingly easy, and as audio tracks can be effortlessly dragged and edited on a timeline, has sonic artifice become a habit, while "authentic listening" has become a luxury?
When we walk down the street wearing headphones, the sounds inside and outside mix together to form a new soundscape. Which part constitutes the real sound event, the true sonic site?
When watching online videos, frame rate issues sometimes cause audio-visual desynchronization. With a slight sense of dissonance, our brains begin to fill that tiny temporal gap until the discrepancy between sound and image is ignored and eliminated.
In all the above cases, our brains are eager to reconstruct relationships between sound and image based on experience and imagination—yet the truth and accuracy of these relationships remain open to question.
I am not here to advocate for a pursuit of "truth" or "accuracy."
For those fortunate enough to both hear and see the world, we face two distinct audio-visual relationships: When listening on-site, sound is concretized by what is seen; everything is precise, inevitable, and one-to-one. When listening to a recording, sound contains vast amounts of memory, imagination, and conjecture, forming blurry images in the mind.
Just as foley in film supplements a fixed image with specious sound, if we supplement fixed sound with a plausible imagery (let’s tentatively call this act "Visual Foley"), can we deceive our brains? Can we assign concrete visual symbols to sound, forcibly yet unobtrusively constructing a fictional audio-visual relationship?
In this project, I recorded the soundscape of New York’s Times Square and scraped YouTube for walking tour videos from city centers around the world to correspond with this audio. Every time the page is refreshed, a new video is grabbed to pair with these sounds.
Perhaps, in the context of globalization, these scenes upon which people rely for survival are becoming increasingly convergent. Consequently, our fictional audio-visual relationship approaches plausibility, failing to even arouse the viewer's suspicion.
But at what degree of contradiction is this fictional relationship exposed? Do those moments of exposure—where the language, scenery, or density of the sound differs distinctively from the image—reveal to us the unique soundscape of a specific place?
When the same segment of audio is endowed with different images, do the seemingly reasonable pairings slide by unnoticed, as if sound is tamely subservient to vision? Meanwhile, do the conflicting pairings leap abruptly from background to foreground—appearing bizarre, chaotic, and illogical—allowing our hearing to briefly wrest hegemony away from the dominance of vision?
Visual Foley
Egbert
Eve White
Drew Sisk