Dear all,
Well here I am, finally getting around to being a Sunday-night blogger. (Gosh we old guys are slow!)
Just a couple of things, the first one short.
It's been a strenuous pleasure returning to DMAC and encountering folks who are in the same situation I was in last year (well, okay, not quite the same--I have yet to meet anyone in DMAC [or, for that matter K-Mart] who knows less than I do about technology). But one thing I can assure you: for all that you are conscious of learning, you'll soon discover that you've unconsciously learned even more. Sitting at that computer screen, in any of the Denney Hall rooms, you are deeply imprinting things you know and things you don't yet know you know. But this will all kick in this week--and you'll likely be both surprised and delighted (not to mention inspired and energized [yes, ye"s, I know what you're thinking--"Just what does a guy that old mean by 'energized'; we're not exactly talking the battery bunny here..."]).
The second comment is a little bit longer, so please feel free to scroll down to something more interesting. This is about "French Manicure," something I thought to bring up after our communal hearing, but which seemed to take the lively and thoughtful discussion in a too-different direction. The room's first response was properly emotional and formal (how we all responded immediately to what we had heard, and how we began to think about its construction). But I was also struck by the "technical" (for want of a better word, since I'm sure I lack the right vocabulary for all this) issues I suddenly felt during my own hearing of the piece. Cindy mentioned that we lack "ear-lids," but "French Manicure" has convinced me that we don't lack "ear-pupils." As I listened as carefully as I could to the piece (and thanks to Trauman for reminding us of the inevitable "interferences" [my quote marks] of the actual speakers and sound quality we were confronted with), I found my hearing constantly re-adjusting to the range of sounds it was encountering. For example, the accents of the Vietnamese women were all so very varied that I could not just "decide," when the documentary shifted to Vietnamese voices, to now "hear" Vietnamese. As we moved from speaker to speaker, I found that my hearing took about four or five seconds to inform me "Oh, that's 'n' for her, even though it was 'm' for the previous speaker." No credit here to the hearer--I think our brain+hearing might just be ready to parse out the nature of hearing, especially if we're really trying to listen.
And this raised a completely new issue for me in terms of the making of multi-modal pieces (though I am not yet nearly sophisticated enough as a technical maker of multi-modal pieces to begin to understand or exploit it): it's not just about "I think some music here will be good and make them pay attention" or "Having a voice over-ride the images here will be vivid." The "French Manicure" piece made me think that it might help to think about the audio layer of multi-modal creativity as imagining the "listening work" we hope to prompt our audiences to. That phrase--"listening work"--strikes me as a helpful way into what we're trying to achieve with the sense of hearing as we create our pieces. What audio-interpretive collaboration we're inviting the hearers of our pieces to do...
Enough! This is too speculative and too amorphous to be useful right now, but I hope that it hasn't (wait a second--it's late on a Sunday night, and if you're actually reading this I DO hope it has) inspired you to sleep.
So, do sleep well.
Tony