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Re: [microsound] Music DEAD? ALIVE! Music ALIVE!



> audio + visual are so much more powerful when carefully composed
> together.

Two thoughts:

(1)

My experience with close listening to field recordings (of my own and
others' making) is actually the opposite.  I find very little in the
visual realm that can transport me as totally and consistantly, as the
experience of listening to a good recording while lying in the dark with
headphones.

As many people have commented, deep listening to recordings seems to
trigger an almost cinematic confabulation ~ and an immersive,
participatory one.  The way my attention wanders the details of a
soundscape 'feels' very much like the way my body/senses wander a 'real'
space.

Recently I've been speculating that I may have this participatory
relationship with documentary sound, but not images, specifically because
my environment is so saturated with the latter.  Ie., it's the novelty of
documentary sound that allows me to engage them.  Not convinced of this,
just musing...

I do get immersed in movies (even abstract ones that are well structured),
but my own experience is much more passive in those cases.  Maybe it's the
amount of information that's coming in... or that films have a grammar
I've learned.

(2)

....but on the other hand, Christopher Willits and Scott Pagano showed some
killer work (guitar, two laptops, three projectors/screens) this past
Friday that supports exactly what you say ~ that when well composed, the
combination of sound and image is greater than the component parts.

I can think of other work that's had this effect on me ~ the local
projection group TEST: doing slide/video work combined with Scott Arford's
sound, and some of Scott's more recent solo work.  A commonality to all of
these being a tight and apparent interdependence (rather than
independence) of the visual and sonic elements...

Maybe we're heading towards a new opera...

 aaron

  ghede@xxxxxxxx
  http://www.quietamerican.org

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