As Jeremy’s advice on my incredible word length of a single post (once reached 900 words), I had separated my Reading post this week from the Lectorial one (Huh… How crazy I am interested in Sound). Where here comes an appropriate place of showing my sound art assignment from the Sound Design elective to you guys… (How self-satisfied this media student could be…)
Better listening experience when wearing your earphone
Perspective, Social Distance and Immersion
From the reading ‘Perspective‘, we had finally dived a slightly deeper into Sound, the terminology of it. Starting with the word ‘perspective’ (yeah, as same as the chapter title), which sharing a similar concept as the visual world: Foreground, middle-ground and background, as well as, these could be replaced by several proper noun groups, such as ‘Immediate, Support, Background’, or, ‘Figure, Ground, Field’, which mean the most important sound, the less involved, and sounds which meaningless, only existed in that physical space.
Let say we’re having an informal interview with a Uni student about her campus life in a classroom. Interviewee’s voice would be the ‘Figure’, sounds of what she is currently involved would be the ‘Ground’, such as typing or chatting with friends, where could show that she is a student, the construction sound outside the building would be the ‘Field’, which shows this interview is happing in a room.
Interestingly, a ‘Figure’ could gradually exchange the position with ‘Ground’ when it becomes less important to the listener, like the break between interviewing another student, a ‘Field’ could turn to a ‘Figure’ as well if the editor wants to emphasise the construction sound for the above situation.
cr. geoffmcdonald.com
Social Distance, quite a simple theory that we may have heard more than once, which indicating the relation between the listener and how far the voice came from, could be sorted from the nearest to the farthest as
Intimate (whisper~)
Personal chatting …with fds
Informal group meeting
Formal presentation in class
Public shouting! on street
Immersion, like ambient sound surrounding when you are standing in the middle of the street, or sounds you have heard in cinemas that hardly figuring out which directions they came from. For me, one of the reasons why a movie ticket worth its price, as well as the biggest difference between watching a film on my own laptop and in the cinema, would be their amazing sound system, from Dolby 5.1, 7.1 to Dolby Atmos which released in 2012 (unfortunately, nowadays there’re only 3 cinemas in Melbourne are providing it, where nearly 10 cinemas in HK had), that made me being more ‘immersed’ while watching movies.