A few months later, I decided to challenge my practice; I didn’t have the exact words to explain the ideas. I established my goals through the breakdown of the audiovisual. AUDIO + VISUAL. By Audio, it meant the use of sound; it didn’t have to be through audio. By Visual, it could mean any art form that relies on sight – sculpture, painting, or photography. The + meant all the possible merges sound can have with the above-mentioned formats.
Michel Chion is the perfect person to quote regarding this relationship between sound and image. Much of his writing is a fundamental understanding between sound art, visual art, and their crossovers. Chion was a Pierre Schaffer “follower” – composer of musique concrete, part of the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) – and also a nouvelle vague “influencer”- part of Cahiers du Cinéma, a french magazine dedicated to the curation of film, where mostly all the french new wave wrote (Goddard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette, Bazin, Daniel-Volcroze, Chabrol, and Lo Duca). His most famous publishing was:
- Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1993)
- The Voice in Cinema (1982)
- Music in Cinema (1995)
- Film: a Sound Art (2009)
His books probably catapulted Film Sound Studies to where it is nowadays. Interestingly, his figure stands at the same level as Walter Murch. However, both come from really different backgrounds. Walter Murch trusts in sound design as a vessel for dimensionality, and Michel Chion trusts in sound as a way of haptic perception. Walter Murch is an American affiliated with the Oscar Academy. Michel Chion is a European attached to arthouse cinema and experimental practices. I tend to understand their perspective by where they came from
In the post, I’m determined to find possible relations between sound/music and paintings and photography. The best way to do so is by analysing a term coined by Michel Chion:
Synchresis: The forging of an immediate and necessary relationship between something one sees and something one hears at the same time (from synchronism and synthesis). The psychological phenomenon of synchresis is what makes dubbing and much other postproduction sound mixing possible.
Michel Chion
This phenomenon can even happen with sounds and images that do not relate to each other, according to Chion. Synchresis doesn’t need to be obvious, but film directors rely on this characteristic of the audiovisual to build intricate experiences. Chion suggests the following exercise:
Play a strem of random audio and visual events, and you will find that certain ones will come together through synchresis and other combinations will not.
Michel Chion
This phenomenon could also be explained psychologically as apophenia, which is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. Another neuropsychological phenomenon that could be related is the filling-in phenomenon: a completion of missing information. In other words – expectation. The scholar Gillian McIver wrote an interesting essay about the relationship between sound and paintings. She coined the term cinematic painting to describe those paintings that induce our brains to think of sound.
The cinematic picture is the picture which through the above-mentioned manipulation of lighting, colour and tone, the suggestion or illusion of movement, the mise en scène, including the gestures demonstrated by the subjects and the suggestion or illusion of movement, manages to persuade the viewer to a similar kind of emotional engagement as cinema.
Gillian McIver in Sound and Image: diegetic sound in film and painting (2016)
McIver’s article exemplifies well-known paintings and how we can interpret sound from them. For instance, in Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819) by Theodore Gericault, McIver describes:
We can almost hear the creaking, salt-choked voices of the shipwrecked and desperate calling out in husky tones, excited at seeing on the far distant horizon a tiny dot, which is the ship which will eventually rescue them. We can imagine the crash of the waves which we see fall upon the disintegrating timbers of the raft. We know that after days and days lost at sea without fresh water how the men’s voices would sound. Gericault shows them shouting and talking to each other
Gillian McIver in Sound and Image: diegetic sound in film and painting (2016)
However, I disagree with McIver when she says that some paintings are “sonic” and others aren’t. I do think any image is sufficiently sonic, whether they are pictorial or not, filled with human presence or not. McIver kept referring to the implicit movement of characters or the environment, but the perception of movement doesn’t need to stem from realism. Even stillness has an implicit sound. This was trialled by Heather Gibson Moqtaderi, art collections manager and associate curator of the Penn Art Collection, and Eugene Lew, director of sound and music technology in the Department of Music in the School of Arts & Sciences of the University of Pennsylvania (USA), when they decided to “combine landscape photographs and sound art”. For every 10 photographs it was assigned a sound artist: Sarah Angliss, Michael Roy Barker, Olivia Block, Nadia Botello, La Cosa Preziosa, Marinna Guzy, Eugene Lew, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Christopher Sean Powell, and
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith.
I also read an article that wasn’t as optimistic as McIver and Chion towards the relation between sound and image. Maurício Dottori, the PhD composer from the University of Whales, states that “explaining music or sound using the idea of language was more than a metaphor” for eighteenth-century thinkers. Romantic thinkers wanted to link art with reasoning. Therefore there is no linkage between different forms of expression.
Music is not a language
Maurício Dottori in Translatting painting and sculpture into Sound (2008)
I disagree.