“We don’t have earlids”

Deep.

Sound, sound, sound and more sound!! In today’s lectorial, the discussion centred on the importance of sound and sound based texts. Something that really got me thinking is the idea that we cannot close ourselves off to sound. It takes a lot of effort to stop yourself from hearing and yet you can close your eyes in quite literally the blink of an eye. Therefore, unpleasant sound is more obtrusive than an unpleasant sight.

Whilst Rachel was talking about sound affordances it got me thinking about sound realism. When I was preparing for a short film recently, I discovered that in certain locations, there are unpleasant sounds such as the fans of a computer that generally you might want to eliminate, and yet, they’re meant to be in the scene, you should hear them so should you remove them? This puzzled me for a long time because in a film, when there’s something in the scene that would usually make noise, it does make noise and yet somehow the computer noise in the back of my audio recordings was making the video feel less than professional. What then is the sweet spot between realism and technical quality?

Rachel suggested that sound is an internal medium as opposed to an external medium. Though at first I didn’t really understand that because after all, all media is processed in the brain anyway, the idea that you see outwards but you hear inwards does start to make sense to me now that I am more aware of it and actively listening which brings me to my next point,

LISTENING VS HEARING

I guess the key difference hear (pun intended… spelling mistake absolutely intentional) is the idea that hearing is persistent, it is a constant reality but we develop listening as a technique to cope with the fact that we have to constantly hear, we almost filter out noise. John Cage “Composed” if that’s what you can call it a piece called 4’33” which was just 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. As much as it is said to have had a profound influence on people, I really don’t understand that because it’s not as if anyone in the room was new to the whole silence thing. It was suggested that Cage’s intention was to encourage the audience to listen to the sound around them and this makes sense though, I am still kind of annoyed that people credit this as a brilliant composition, he was hardly the first to compose nothing.