I listened to three of them: Voices in the Sea, The Whalesong Project and Singing Lake. All three were amazing, with just one difference. While the first offered the audio along with a video clip as well, making it a well-rounded experience — as if taking me out to the ocean and giving me a real feel of life in the deep — the other two relied on just the audio clips accompanied by static pictures. No doubt the experience was different, but when you are forced to just listen, and not have your attention diverted to visuals, it turns out to be a different story altogether. Much of the picturization happens in the mind, fired by the natural, undoctored sounds, in these cases by a lakeside in France and in the Pacific, off the coast of Hawaii.
It was Lac de Pierre Percée on January 16, 2006. The aural experience begins with frost falling on the vegetation accompanied by birds in the distance. Brief percussive sounds tell you that ice has begun its work under the first sunrays. Then it starts to crackle and the sounds become intense. Finally, ice breaks everywhere, and the lake seems to be singing. The wonderful acoustic phenomenon was captured by Marc Namblard, sound artist and naturalist living in the northeast of France.
On the other hand, the whale vocalizations in Voices in the Sea come with spectograms and short interviews with scientists, making it an educative experience. The Whalewsong tells you that the US Navy has agreed to restict loud sonar to minimize trauma to the Humpback whale. While muti-modal presentations can capture life the way it is, using fewer modes has its beauty and advantages too. It helps converge your attention to a single or few areas, and guides you deeper into the experience while opening up new worlds within it.
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I love that you are seeing the difference in sound-only and sound-text compositions. It sort of reminds me of reading a book as a child and letting my imagination wander when picturing Scarlett O'Hara or Nancy Drew. It seems that sound-only pieces offer hearers a bit more agency. It makes you do some of the work.
It's funny. Since class last week I have been paying more attention to the little sounds around me. In fact I had trouble falling asleep the other night due to the sound of what I think was blood pulsing through my veins. Anyway...I like what you said about the use of sound only, and how it, "guides you deeper into the experience while opening up new worlds within it." I think this gets at the very reason that I don't like to see a movie based on a book that I love. I hate it when they take a character that I have pictured in my mind to look and sound a certain way and they cast somebody all wrong for the part. The mind can create wonderful things when guided by sound or text only. When the visual is brought into play, we lose creative/imaginative control and are told what to visualize.
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