Essays on Sound & Vision (co-edited with John Richardson) (2007)

REVELAR Journal of Photography and Image Studies, 2022

CALL FOR PAPERS (submission deadline June 30, 2022) When addressing the relationship between photography and sound, Angus Carlyle (2016) drew affinities between field recording practices and those of the New Topographics movement, given that both regard stillness and immersion within the landscape. In his work 'America', Baudrillard (1988, 6) offers a reading on silence, juxtaposed to the sonorities the contours of an image can evoke: «the silence of the desert is a visual thing». Framing our spatial surroundings can indeed allow us to map the silences and noises that shape them, where the presence/absence of the human figure can act as a mirror of intimacy and a scale that accentuates the dimension of the place, whether natural or constructed. In fact, numerous photographers, videographers, filmmakers and visual – and sound! – artists have explored this concept. However, the relationship between sound and image, in photography, entails values beyond the fruition of the place and the landscape. The sound-image synchrony can be understood as an exercise on the visualisation of sound – as well as the ‘sonority’ of the image – that substantiates the approach on the medium as a document indissoluble from its cultural context. It is the object itself, subjected to ‘loss and erasure’ and preservation of the material ‘noise’, that Christoph Cox (2001) establishes as the key-element to the relationship between photography and sound. Therefore, it is relevant to also consider the haptic qualities, as well as the questions on materiality and synaesthesia that the axis photography-sound confines. It become s pertinent to question: what is an image? In what way do photographs act as visual instructions to the sonic experience? Can we discuss synaesthesia when the sight-sound relationship renders meaning? In what manner is meaning dependent on visual literacy and the transmission of references? And what approaches can be devised when the scope is amplified to the discourse between photography and music? We thus invite Photographers and Visual Studies scholars, but also researchers in fields such as Art History, Musicology and Architecture, to offer an interdisciplinary approach to photography and visual sound: on the one hand, as the fruition of the soundscape/landscape as an audiovisual document; on the other, as an exercise on the visualisation of sound and its role in contemporary visual culture and its transmedial manifestations. The key topics we wish to propose for discussion are: — The relationship between photography and sound: transmedial capture of sound and light. — Reframing the New Topographics Movement: capturing soundscapes, atmospheres, and sense of place in man altered environments. — Architectures of Sound: representations and perceptions of space and sound. — Photography as a sonic texture: metaphors, materiality and meaning . — The luminal space and the capture of time, rhythms, and transferences. — Framing visual sound: from oscilloscopes to synaesthesia. — The role of photography in publishing music: visual literacy and the orchestration of an image via album covers. — Visualisation of music: aesthetic, photographic image, and music videos. — Visual identity and musical idioms .

Popular Music (Cambridge University Press)

Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico, 2019

Despite traditionally having been studied within the field of Musicology, the analysis of music in film should be approached as an aesthetic study of the relationship between «image» and «music» which is central to the cinematographic framework. From this interdisciplinary perspective numerous theoretical and methodologi-cal issues emerge. The aim of this article is to investigate, using both a synchronic and diachronic focus, some of the key issues arising from this joint music-image approach, in an attempt to develop a theoretical framework for a joint aesthetic of music and image: a study of «cinematographic expression» that brings together the visual and the sound dimensions and which we call the «musicalised image», a neologism of our own creation.

SET INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BROADCAST ENGINEERING, 2018

Reflecting on real-time imagery and sounds experiences is thinking about a wide range of possibilities and experiences for humanity, from the earliest times. Because the real-time audiovisual experiences are numerous in time and space, and already widely quoted in different studies, this presentation aims to make a more restricted cut off to real-time audiovisual experiences in the contemporary cinematographic field: an art, medium and an expanding process that culminates in the existence of a semiotic phenomenon, performed mainly through experimental modes, not necessarily with the presence of performers in front of the screen, but mainly with the presence of the author(s) directing the audiovisual experience in real-time, together with the technological apparatus, the cast, and the viewers, all participants in the editing and exhibition of the audiovisual work at the same time as it occurs, in direct transmission to the cinema screen, monitors, digital screens or architectural spaces. Based on audiovisual works carried out between 2007 and 2017 we will develop a reflection and analysis of the poetic and techniques of audiovisual experiences in real-time. In order to understand with a closer look the possibilities of creation in live cinema and contribute with reflection on these forms of the contemporary audiovisual, whose means and processes are in continuous expansion of its borders. In aesthetics of the cinema, this research follows in continuity to the studies and practices of the experimental cinema, and in its vertex to the expanded cinema.

This paper deals with the way additional sound elements can alter the specific characteristics of the audio-vision of music videos and therefore create types of more "realistic" audiovisual impressions compared to non-mediated audiovisual phenomena.

Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 2011

ABSTRACTThe electromagnetic basis of video technology allowed sound and image to be recorded simultaneously: as a result, composers could visualize their music and artists could sound their images. Many believed that such intermedial audio-visuality signalled a brand-new art form that was free from lineage. Using Nam June Paik as an example, this article suggests that this is inaccurate. During the twentieth century, composers were experimenting with spatializing their sounds, while artists were attempting to include time as a creative element in their visual work. The intermedial capabilities of video technology allowed these two disciplines to come together, acting as a conduit that facilitated the fusion and manipulation of pre-existing elements. Understood in this way, music and art in the twentieth century cannot coherently be discussed as individual disciplines, but rather encourage a more lateral history – or spatial sensibility – that moves fluidly through the space between ...

Display, Distribute, Disrupt: Contemporary Moving Image Practices, 2024

The essays in the present volume aim to describe and contextualize today's audiovisual media culture. They find their common basis in the changes to which our epigraph refers, al beit perhaps with a misleading choice of words: cinema, Noam Elcott writes, is not necessarily "tied to movie theaters and celluloid." 1 It strikes us that he would have made the matter easier for his readers if he had spoken of "film" rather than "cinema," because it is not easy to distinguish the cinema from the movie theater. In speaking of multiplying the manifestations of moving images, however, Elcott hits on something that all the following essays are about: their common subject is how different audiovisual media dispositifs appear in various, mostly everyday, contemporary cultural contexts, and how recent changes in the relations between production, publication, and reception affect contemporary lens-based image making. The essays address different contemporary innovations; their perspectives on them also differ. 2 They are united, however, by the

Over the course of the twentieth-century, both the ethereal material of sound and light (vision) converged through emerging technology and mediums – creating new audio-visual art practices and forms. Whilst artists past and present still use sound and vision in singular artistic practices, the emergence of The Internet is creating a conundrum for sonic artists. This is because The Internet is a multimedia medium, creating a need for sonic artists to explore the possibilities of audio-visual practices to utilize the full potential of the medium. Furthermore, prominent academic and sound artist Barry Truax posits in his key sound art text Acoustic Communication ‘we live in a visually centred culture’. The conundrum of sound only art practices like soundscaping, and how to transform such practices into audio-visual ones for broader viewing and dissemination on multimedia mediums is the question to be investigated in the thesis. The practical component of the thesis, through practice-led experimentation will demonstrate how to transform the sound only practice of soundscaping into an audio-visual form. To achieve both these aims, historical avant-garde film art or ‘film painting’ and sonic art will be explored, along with digital art theory.

2013

This collection of essays explores the relations between sound and image in a rapidly shifting landscape of audiovisual media in the digital age. Featuring contributions from scholars who bring with them an impressive array of disciplinary expertise, from film studies and philosophy to musicology, pornography, digital gaming, and media studies, the book charts new territory by analyzing what it calls the “media swirl” and the “audiovisual turn.” It draws on a range of media texts including blockbuster cinema, video art, music videos, video games, amateur video compilations, visualization technologies, documentaries, and immersive theater to address myriad subjects such as the transition of cinematic discourses to digital production and distribution, the relations between screens and public space, and the shifting nature of noise within digital ecosystems. It also examines noise, droning, and silence as recurring themes in New Extremist films of Europe, along with temporal and generi...

Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music, 2013

The audiovisual history charted in chapter two is here revoiced in terms of spatial expansion. It is argued that video technology did not initiate a new form of creative engagement with its performance spaces, but rather represented the peak of a spatial expansion that had been gathering pace throughout the twentieth century. As musicians explored their spatial parameters and artists included time in their work, attention was drawn to traditional viewing and listening procedures. Drawing on the theories of László Moholy-Nagy, Siegfried Giedion, Christopher Small and Brian O’Doherty, this chapter compares the conventions of gallery exhibition and display, viewing procedures and audience behaviour with the customs and aesthetics of listening in the traditional concert hall. Performance and installation art, aleatoric music and communal composition are used to propose a theory of spatialised creativity, audience activation and performativity.