This week our reading discussed the idea of
sound and listening. Sound is one of the senses that people don't always fully
pay attention to. You hear sound but you must listen to truly perceive it.
Acknowledging the importance of sound and utilizing it to create situation and
provoke emotion is an essential part of filmmaking. In one of this week’s
videos, David New used subjective interactivity to convey the importance of
listening. He showed how easy it is to disregard ambient noise in our everyday
lives and how important it is to just stop, listen and take everything in. In
the second video for this week Justin Boyd discussed his process of capturing
field recordings and mixing them with found objects to create original art
works. I was particularly interested in this technique because it pushed me to
think about how I could manipulate certain sounds to communicate my way of
perceiving in the films that I make. In the reading for this week we learned
about acoustic ecology from R. Murray Schafer, which he states aims to
accentuate the delicate balance between organisms and their sonic environment.
In this article I was intrigued by his term “sonic sewer”, to describe the
overpopulation of sound in cities, and I was shocked to find out that companies,
like Harley-Davidson, are copyrighting their sounds. I also would like to
participate in the listening activity that Schafer uses with some of his
students as I feel I need to learn to really step back and listen more than I
do. In the second article, the most notable aspect for me was the idea of
acoustic activism. I find it really interesting to think about and consider all
of the sounds in everyday life, from manmade to natural ones, and I had no idea
how extensive the research on sound interactions could be.
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