When it comes to media, all of our human senses are related to the perception of frequency: the visible spectrum is that which we sense via sight, and the audio spectrum we sense via hearing. Taken together, they represent only two tiny patches of the total frequency spectrum, and yet it's remarkable to consider that it's actually sound waves which we can hear with the greatest precision, distinguishing a wide variety of characteristics beyond frequency itself; the difficulty of programming a computer to recognize human voices using natural language is testimony to that (though software such as Dragon offers to change that soon).
Sound is also the very first medium to become technically recordable, as well as the first medium to be broadcast. Sound recordings had been around for nearly 50 years before the first sound films were released, and voice radio predates television broadcasts by twenty years or more (twenty if you count any broadcast, nearly forty if you count only commercial, regular broadcasts).
Sound has been a pioneer in the digital and Internet revolutions as well, and that's easily understandable. If you take the CD audio standard of 44.1 kHz, this is only about 7% as much data as the NTSC television standard of 5.75 MHz, so it's no wonder that audio was compressed, stored, and shared long before even standard-res video (HD has more than 3 times the data density of the old NTSC standard).
Sound, of course, was originally free and totally ephemeral; once spoken, sung, or plucked, it was gone. It then became a physical object, the cylinder and then the disc, sold to a mass public, and channeled through later forms such as the 8-track tape, cassette, and digital CD. But then, thanks to compression paradigms such as MPEG-2 audio layer 3 (originally designed to compress the sound elements of a video signal), sound became the first thing to fit through the narrow tube that was the pre-highspeed Internet; the rest, as they say, is history.
And yet, in most Media Studies programs and New Media books, sound seems relegated to a very small, supporting role. It's been naturalized, made invisible, save in its absence, as when talking about "silent" movies (which of course were never silent; before soundtracks they were nearly always accompanied by music). And so I ask (dropping into a KRS-One tone), "Why is that?" And what should we do about it?
p.s. for a brief history of sound recording technology, see this page on the Media Culture I blog.
p.p.s. and have a look here at the history of synthesized voice.
And yet, in most Media Studies programs and New Media books, sound seems relegated to a very small, supporting role. It's been naturalized, made invisible, save in its absence, as when talking about "silent" movies (which of course were never silent; before soundtracks they were nearly always accompanied by music). And so I ask (dropping into a KRS-One tone), "Why is that?" And what should we do about it?
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p.s. for a brief history of sound recording technology, see this page on the Media Culture I blog.
p.p.s. and have a look here at the history of synthesized voice.
Tony Ricci • Sound
ReplyDeleteA picture may be worth a thousand words, but words, especially the audio kind, the sound, has always led the pack in terms of communication, and artistic expression in new formats of media technology. Sound can define, clarify, distract, counterpoint, inspire, transport and create myriad emotional responses without any other senses involved. Except in unusual circumstances, moving picture and even many still pictures require sound for context. Sound impacts the emotional experience of the viewer in deep ways the viewer is often unaware of. This is why “subliminal” sound is not legal to include in media without a warning. The real reason sound media became widespread before video is that is has only two dimensions to encode and transmit, frequency and amplitude. Picture has contrast, color, and motion to refresh many times a second. The required bandwidth for picture is so much higher that sound is just easier to capture, store transmit and archive. Also, “virtual assistants” in the form of Siri and it’s audio-only counterparts may be the precursor to holographic VR and AR assistants which will certainly show up in the not too distant future. Without sound what would virtual assistants do? Holographic pantomime? Only if you buy Charlie Chaplin as an in-app purchase.
It has always been intriquing to me that sound as a medium, has not been given its true justice in the history of recorded mediums, film, artwork, music, and more. Sound has a symbiotic relationship with anything and everything we create, produce, engage, or view. Even silent films, were never truly silent. They were usually accompanied by an orchestra or at minimum a piano. Sound completes the experience for a viewer of any viewed medium. It is the reason we “feel” we are being chased in a movie, it is the reason we jump when something scary appears on film, and it is the reason we can focus on the film at all. Have you ever tried to watch a movie on mute? How long did it take before you lost interest or completely zoned out and forgot you were watching the movie. For most of us, we cannot handle complete silence, in fact, complete silence does not exist in the natural world. Which is why there are “white noise” soundtracks that are added into films and animations as filler, since the absence of sound is so rare. Sound truly is a crucial part of anything we encounter in our daily lives, and truly deserves more research and study in general.
ReplyDeleteAs humans we produce sounds, wether it be from speech or from the creation of sound effects with our mouths or with objects. If we consider how sounds surrounds us on a daily basis: people, pets, transportation, television, radio, foot steps, weather and so on. We cannot live in a world without sound. Each person, living thing, or object that is created, creates sound in some way. Life is not the same as a silent film, in which most were accompanied by music in order to affect the viewer. If we consider music accompanying a silent film, is the film then really silent? Or is the film more similar to our daily lives than one may think. Every second of every day we hear sound and noise, and we will continue to do so until the end of time. My question would be, how has sound changed and how has the way we interpret sound changed? Can we link sounds to specific experiences as we see in the movies, or is sound interpretation an individual adventure and study?
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