Silence is white, not golden.
Sight and hearing are arguably the two most powerful human senses with which we understand and navigate through our world – whether it is the simple relationship between a green flashing man, and an audio beeping at a pedestrian crossing or the more complex emotions we might feel when watching a movie – where the ‘tragic’ break-up is accompanied by a symphonic cascade of violin strings. Sound and image when harnessed by design becomes a powerful partnership which, either can impart life saving information, manipulate emotions or be empathetic to any given experience – concert lighting, movie soundtracks, audio navigation systems all draw upon long held traditions or relationships to how we see and how we hear.
In the West, at least, the relationship between sound, image and design have had distinctly different trajectories – although seen under the rubric of creative activity – all have occupied independent areas in the world of art. Music and image, outside of the West, have more inter-dependent histories. Whilst, within the West, they are, in-part, separated because of long held philosophical beliefs that each artistic form - Music, Painting, Sculpture, etc - have separate effects on an audience. Thus, it was believed, each art form addressed a specific part of man’s psyche. In the hierarchy of the senses, as mentioned in the Limited Language blog ‘On not reflecting but sensing’, the visual has had a dominant role in the representation and understanding of our world This is no more so than in the development in understanding of colour; here, the established relationship of Harmony in music is appropriated into the visual field as an analogy for understanding the relationships of colour. It is only when art reacts against its classical traditions we see the more investigative relationships between the fields of sound image and design; relationships we would recognise in contemporary work today.
One area which has a long history in the use of sound and image are the ceremonial spaces of Western religion, the Churches, Cathedrals etc of the Christian faith are spaces where you can see an early affiliation between image and sound – the use of choral works, chants in the presence of Religious Icons, stained glass windows, painted alters; provide a powerful fusion of sound and image which was used to infuse the spiritual experience of church going. The Cistine Chapel is an excellent example of this relationship; it is a place of visual and acoustic brilliance. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has described the Catholic pulpit as a ‘mass medium’ – in a sense you can see the church synthesising much of what we use today in a digital multi-media world. Eventually we see this happening in developments outside of religious ceremony - places where the visual / aural relationship remains an important element of the performance – not least, in a modern cinema.
The 18th Century movement, Romanticism, is one example of the shared philosophies between music and image. The Romantics wanted to introduce a more experiential world of sensations rather than classical representations. Beethoven say, in the 6th Symphony op.68, in F; the Pastoral Symphony and Casper Friedrich’s art can be seen to reflect the experience of man in Nature – whilst using the methodology of their specific art form. But later, it is Modernism that made clear, more self-conscious, experiments in the relationship between sound and image. Artists like Kandinsky, Klee and later, Miro; explored how to capture music, and the experience of sound, in their painting. Through the use of shape and colour they create a visual notation to represent the resonance of the sonic world. Kandinsky wrote in On the Spiritual in Art (1911-12) about the colour blue:
‘The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white. Represented in musical terms, light blue resembles the flute, dark blue the ‘cello, darker still the wonderful sounds of the double bass; while in a deep, solemn form the sound of blue can be compared to that of the deep tones of the organ’
What is striking about this passage is how familiar the analogy is – dark colours are commonly associated with bass tones, or states of mood in contemporary design culture; just think of the sophistication of Blue Note records sleeves in the 1950s and the Retro incarnations since.
What we can see is how, historically, a relationship has been built-up between the worlds of sound and image and this influences modern design today – back to Kandinsky’s analogy, it would make sense for the ipod to be white – it is, after all, the ‘silent’ element of the musical experience.
The final element to look at in the relationship between sound, image and design is hardware – this coming together of associations reached its climax with the production of the first Sony Walkman in 1987. This simple invention, at the bridge to the digital age, has had a profound influence on how music is consumed; from packaging to listening habits, it has brought influence upon and altered the experience of music. For many years the walkman became the generic term for listening to music while on the move. It managed to reconfirm music as a personal experience but also, walking around with music playing in your ears gave you a soundtrack to punctuate (visual) experience in a filmic way, here not only a personalised soundscape but editorial control at your fingertips too. This phenomena which has been taken up by the digital age – in both the growth in miniaturization of technology; from digital radios to DVD players, all follow the walkman format, can now be experienced - one on one – and on the move. Of course, a more obvious descendent of the Walkman phenomena is the Apple ipod. With each generation of the ipod you see a further amalgamation between sound, image and design.
Colin + Monika 2006
Sorry, pasting the comment from Word into here messed up the formatting and deleted a quote. I hope you can delete the previous post, thanks.
An interesting article. As I began reading the second paragraph about the separation of the visual and aural arts/media, I realised that I had iTunes playing, and I was listening to my iPod most of the day, but I didn’t remember switching them on for the purpose of listening to music; it’s as if Steve Jobs’ “digital hub” really does change your behaviour of how you consume and value media. It’s a good point to make that the development of the iPod shows an integration of sound and image - that first began with music alone. What amazes me is that Jobs’ vision for starting his company in the ’70s is beginning to be realised, 30 years later. (From google): “In the TNT docudrama Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999), Apple founder Steve Jobs is depicted on an acid trip in which he conceives himself the conductor of his own cosmic symphony.” Maybe the digital hub based around the iPod isn’t quite a cosmic symphony, but it does seem like Apple is orchestrating a global phenomenon.
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Although we need to understand the history of the relationship of image and sound to know how we’ve got to where we are today, I’m much more interested in current developments. I have no faith in the long-term future of the creative industry (as I will make known in a more relevant discussion here), but I do believe it is nearly at it’s zenith, and there are certain trends that are becoming obvious; case in point, the transition from a world of parallel developments in image and sound to an environment in which their convergence is bringing about inter-dependency.
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What caught my eye in the article was this:
“The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white. Represented in musical terms, light blue resembles the flute, dark blue the ‘cello, darker still the wonderful sounds of the double bass; while in a deep, solemn form the sound of blue can be compared to that of the deep tones of the organ.” I’m not a synaesthete, but to me that makes perfect sense. The translation of the language of music and sound to visual language (and of course vice-versa) has always interested me; it’s such an important aspect of communication, yet I’ve had trouble explaining the idea even to English language students. All of us place more importance on a particular sense in the way we perceive and represent the world; as a student of graphic design I am frequently told that I’m a visual person, but this means more than that I like playing around with a bit of type and image.
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Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP - used by persuasive businesspeople and Derren Brown alike) theory presents an idea of modalities; this basically means that our experience and communication of the world is governed by the way we use our senses. If we go with the generalisations and suggest that us graphic designers are visual people, then according to NLP this means that we are first visual, then most likely either auditory or kinesthetic, then olfactory or gustatory. We will pay most attention to what we see, express ourselves using visual words and phrases, imagine and recall memories using the visual parts of our brain… some practitioners of NLP go even further and suggest common personality traits. All of these things can be easily observed, and practitioners like Derren Brown will change their own behaviour to better match a person’s modalities; an interesting technique is to help a group of people to communicate better by acting as a translator, e.g. repeating what a person says but changing all of the visual words and phrases. However, NLP is of course a psuedoscience, and my main criticism of this model is that there is no middle ground; you can’t be both visual and auditory.
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I would argue that this perception should be rethought in light of the way in which we are beginning to create, deliver and consume media today. There are some very relevant examples to us as visual communicators: Scott Hansen/Tycho works both as a web/graphic designer and as a musician http://www.iso50.com/iso50.html . Even though Hansen is in the minority as a visual and aural communicator, the trend is much more visible in collaborations between people of different disciplines to create one product, e.g. music videos. As much as I loathe the Designer of the Year award, The Gorillaz is an excellent example of this http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4598322.stm .
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To me however, a much more interesting collaboration would be Alex Rutterford’s video for Autechre’s Gantz Graf . I’m sure many people will have seen this video a few years ago, but it’s available here http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7120663614577611606&q=gantz+graf if you haven’t. Although Rutterford’s vision for the video came years before hearing the track (again, with the help of an LSD trip), to many Autechre fans Gantz Graf shouldn’t be just listened to; seeing the video as well is vital to enjoying the track. Autechre’s music is inaccessible anyway, but this track in particular just went over my head; after I’d watched the video, it was as if I was hearing it for the first time, and seeing all the layers of sound at once. The concept of the video is simple: visualise the music. However, doing this effectively was a difficult process, as he says, “I literally broke that track down into pages of numbers, like a wacky professor from the Muppet Show, Dr Bunsen. Sheets of paper with loads of numbers on them, (key frames). Although they weren’t random, they were related, indicative of certain parts of that scene, certain parts of that track. And I literally had to animate to those numbers, and keep rendering it off, and rechecking it and re-tweaking it to make sure everything worked in time, it’s that simple.”
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“It almost seems obvious when you see it - ‘Why hasn’t that been done before?’…because they can’t be bothered to put the work in. Everyone says ‘how long did it take you?’ How did you do it, they always want to ask me technical questions. I’d really love to be able to say to them, ‘I just wrote a computer algorhythym, and the computer did it all. I wrote a program and it all just intelligently works it out,’ but it doesn’t exist, it’s fools gold thinking that someone can sit there writing a piece of software that can make intelligent decisions about pace and animation, the closest I have seen is perhaps iTunes.”
/James Lefrere 25/01/2006