Today’s lecture focused on Media Affordances and sound. This began by discussing what an affordance is which is something I had heard of but never really understood. So what is it? well when applied to media production it refers to the specific and unique functions that a medium may have. For example live television which differs from a magazine, it refers to what is different about each medium and how we communicate through each different medium.
Affordances of sound as a communication medium:
- physical/embodied (you feel it)
- precise spatial and directional
- can be intimate (revealing and personal information)
- often portable (multitasking)
SOUND AS A SENSE: we are continually absorbing information, sound is physical vibration in motion creating sound waves that ravel through the air. Sound is a complex interaction of physics, physiology, sensation, perception and cognition. Key terms we used and will be more familiar with over time include.
- Sound wave; compressions and rarefactions
- Wavelength, frequency and amplitude.
- Components of sound; pitch, timbre, harmonics, loudness , rhythm.
- Temporal aspects of sound; attack, sustain and decay.
Sound Perspective was another thing discussed the main components include . aural semiotics: semiotic codes of sound place the listener. perspective: ‘hierarchizes elements of what is represented’ where do you place a particular place of sound, music, your telling listener which info is more important than other. For example if a soundtrack becomes louder than a voice over it implies that the voice over holds little importance.
Something particularly interesting was differentiating listening and hearing, it is often something I do not think of as two different things but they have completely different functions.
- hearing just happens it cannot necessarily be stopped unlike other senses such as vision where we can close our eyes hearing is generally automatic
- It occurs via the ear and brain
As opposed to hearing listening is…
- listening is a distinctive attitude or approach e.g. blog on listening, tune into music, listening to conversation changing the perspective.
- We often listen is sounds is louder, you hear key words that interest you, recognise voices. this often is whats involved for someone to tune in/ tune out, for example a boring conversation may push someone not to listen.
- an active experience (intentional and requires concentration)
- Deep listening allows us to (attuning our ears, understanding dialog, investigation and interpretation) helps to (rethink meaning, relation to community, experiences, how we relate to others and ourselves, rethink our relationship to power)
An interesting component to understanding listening and hearing was listening to JOHN CAGE’S PIECE which was 4’33’ seconds (1952). This I will go over more thoroughly in a different blog post.
3 perspectives: figure (focus of interest) ground (setting context) and background. soundtrack: a community sound which is unique which make is specially regarded by people in community. To consolidate the how sounds are produced and combined to make a story richer and how the different sound mediums can create a strong structure, we did a quick listening exercise. We listened to a 3 minute audio piece and noted the Story Elements; which were reenactment, celebration, 1930’s. Speech which included voice over, narration of a story (american), lots of different voices all talking about the same thing but different perspectives, news reels. Finally music which we heard sound effect, digits etc. orchestral soundtrack in the background, behind each voice a different tone to the music, bagpipes sound effect (DIEGETIC), singing (choir/ a group of people) sound effect.
One of our class activities to practice noticing the sounds evident in all aspects of a shot or potential shot was to look at this image below and note the sounds in the figure, ground and field.
We though in the figure; explosion and fire crackles would be heard, the ground; screaming shuffling, running, voices, banging sounds and in the field; yelling, siren sounds, bottles breaking, fire.