Though feeling perhaps a bit like the walking dead at this point. The sheer number of hours I have been working is nothing less than mind-bending. Though, for one who hasn’t really been employed full time in any real sense for quite a while, perhaps my perspective is skewed. We even got called in to work on Saturday (only an 8 hour day!) and that after working from 7am Friday until 3:30am Saturday. Good god. To tell the truth though, there is quite a bit of standing around. I think the sound crew may be the most envied/detested because we sit around while waiting for the shot to be set up and we get there last and leave first. Yes, indeed. A Sweet Gig.
Working with a crew of folks so utterly wrapped up in the perfecting the visual image, the whole contrast of aural perspective really comes into relief. For starters it is simply up to the sound crew to negotiate working around the camera, lights, shadows, blocking, costumes etc. in order to capture quality levels. This happens after everything has been set up. For this shoot we have out of necessity been required to use wireless lapel mics because there simply was no way for the boom to get close enough. Meanwhile, the entire rest of the crew negotiates and perfects the visual diorama. Those of us on the sound crew are like priests or mediums in touch with subtle energies beyond the realm of normal perception.
Well, that may be a bit of a stretch. Culturally, sound is such an afterthought. As McLuhan pointed out numerous times, the visual orientation has some self-contained blind spots (!). Primarily, he pointed out the visual orientation tends to influence rational thinking.
Groping for models of contemporary space that evade or pervert the Cartesian coordinate system, we would do well to recall Marshall McLuhan’s distinction between visual and acoustic space. For McLuhan, “visual space” did not refer to the sensual dimension encountered through human vision, but specifically to the linear, logical, and sequential perceptual and cognitive array constructed by Western Renaissance perspective, linear type, and ultimately alphanumeric characters. We know it from Descartes and from William Gibson: a homogenous space organized by an objective coordinate grid that simultaneously produces an apparently coherent individual subject who maintains control over his or her unique point of view. Not only do we “naturally” overlay this panoptic grid onto the far more ambiguous field of actual vision, but we have embraced it as the dominant conceptual image of space itself.
-Erik Davis
So enmeshed are we in the spacial paradigm that the above quote might seem too far out to even grasp. But think, McLuhan made the point that when Plato first came up with the idea of an abstract visual space it probably was as foreign then as it is all pervasive now. A few hundred years ago the amount of visual stimuli was negligible. The number of paintings an average person might see in his/her lifetime could probably be counted. Thus, the soundsand tactile information coming from the environment was probably more important in daily life. Compare that with today, when most people probably couldn’t keep track of how many images they see in one day. When asked to describe what he meant by ‘acoustic space’ Mcluhan replied:
MCLUHAN: I mean space that has no center and no margin, unlike strictly visual space, which is an extension and intensification of the eye. Acoustic space is organic and integral, perceived through the simultaneous interplay of all the senses; whereas “rational” or pictorial space is uniform, sequential and continuous and creates a closed world with none of the rich resonance of the tribal echoland. Our own Western time-space concepts derive from the environment created by the discovery of phonetic writing, as does our entire concept of Western civilization. The man of the tribal world led a complex, kaleidoscopic life precisely because the ear, unlike the eye, cannot be focused and is synaesthetic rather than analytical and linear. Speech is an utterance, or more precisely, an outering, of all our senses at once; the auditory field is simultaneous, the visual successive. The models of life of nonliterate people were implicit, simultaneous and discontinuous, and also far richer than those of literate man. By their dependence on the spoken word for information, people were drawn together into a tribal mesh; and since the spoken word is more emotionally laden than the written–conveying by intonation such rich emotions as anger, joy, sorrow, fear–tribal man was more spontaneous and passionately volatile. Audile-tactile tribal man partook of the collective unconscious, lived in a magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual, its values divine and unchallenged, whereas literate or visual man creates an environment that is strongly fragmented, individualistic, explicit, logical, specialized and detached.
– Marshal Mcluhan
Entries (RSS)