Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen 

(1994) 

by Michel Chion reassesses audiovisual media since the revolutionary 1927 debut of recorded sound in cinema, shedding crucial light on the mutual relationship between sound and image in audiovisual perception.

Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, *****, 1st generation, editing

Edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman, with foreword by Walter Murch.

 

Michel Chion argues that sound film qualitatively produces a new form of perception: we don't see images and hear sounds as separate channels, we audio-view a trans-sensory whole. Expanding on arguments made in his influential books The Voice in Cinema and Sound in Cinema, Chion provides lapidary insight into the functions and aesthetics of sound in film and television. He considers the effects of such evolving technologies as widescreen, multitrack, and Dolby; the influences of sound on the perception of space and time; and the impact of such contemporary forms of audio-vision as music videos, video art, and commercial television. Chion concludes with an original and useful model for the audiovisual analysis of film.

 

Michel Chion is a composer of musique concrète, a filmmaker, an associate professor at the Université de Paris, and a prolific writer on film, sound, and music. His other books with Columbia University Press are Film, A Sound Art and The Voice in Cinema.

Claudia Gorbman is a film studies professor at the University of Washington, Tacoma. She is the author of Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (1987), the editor of several books, and the author of many articles on film sound and film music. She is also the translator of Michel Chion's Film, A Sound Art, The Voice in Cinema, and 2001: Kubrick's Cinema Odyssey.

Walter Murch has been repeatedly honored by both the British and American Motion Picture Academies for his sound design and picture editing. He has received special recognition for his work in The Godfather, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, and The English Patient.

 

Source: Colombia University Press

 

 

ISBN-10: 0231078994

ISBN-13: 978-0231078993

 

 

Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, *****, 1st generation, editingAudio-Vision: Sound on Screen, *****, 1st generation, editing

Reading

Sons et Lumières (2004) – A History of Sound in the Art of the 20th Century (in French) by Marcella Lista and Sophie Duplaix published by the Centre Pompidou for the excellent Paris exhibition in September 2004 until January 2005.


Curated by the Pompidou’s Sophie Duplaix with the Louvre’s Marcella Lista, the show required a good three or four hours to absorb, with its bombardment of sensory and intellectual input, including painting, sound sculpture, sound/light automata, film and video, and room-size installations. (Frieze Magazine)

Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film 1910-1975 (1979) is a catalogue of an exhibition held at the Hayward Gallery in London from 3 May until 17 June 1979 on rare, essential and controversial avant-garde film history.

Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses (2002) by Richard E. Cytowic disposes of earlier criticisms that the phenomenon cannot be real, demonstrating that it is indeed brain-based. Following a historical introduction, Cytowic lays out the phenomenology of synesthesia in detail and gives criteria for clinical diagnosis and an objective test of genuineness. (MIT Press)

 

SEE ALSO

See this Sound (2009) by Liz Kotz (Author), Cosima Rainer (Editor), Stella Rollig (Editor), Dieter Daniels (Editor), Manuela Ammer (Editor) compiles a huge number of artists, filmmakers, composers and performers, reaching back into the early twentieth century and into the present to survey overlaps between not only sound and art, sound and film, and the metaphor of cinema as rhythm or symphony. Proceeding chronologically, the book takes the early cinematic eye music of Hans Richter as a starting point, noting parallel works by Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger; moving into the postwar period, the art/cinema/ music experiments of Peter Kubelka, Valie Export and Michael Snow are discussed, establishing precedents to similar work by Rodney Graham, Carsten Nicolai, Jeremy Deller and many others. (Artbook)

Len Lye (2009) co-edited by the curator Tyler Cann and the writer, critic and poet Prof. Wystan Curnow is a tribute to one of New Zealand’s most internationally acclaimed artists is the most comprehensive visual presentation of Len Lye’s art to date.

Over 1,000 new photographs were created and hundreds of them selected for this image-rich publication, presenting the full range of Len Lye’s work, from drawings and paintings right through to his photograms and kinetic experimentations. (Govett-Brewster)

Autechre: Gantz Graf (2002) received widespread attention - perhaps more so than any previous output from Autechre; in interviews, Alex Rutterford stated that it achieved cult status in underground computer-generated imagery art circles. The video features an abstract object (or an agglomeration of objects) synchronized to the sounds in the music as it morphs, pulsates, shakes, and finally dissolves. (Wikipedia)

Computer Music Journal: Visual Music (2005) - The articles in this issue are all devoted to the topic of Visual Music: audiovisual creations in which the artist strives to endow the video component with formal and abstract qualities that mimic those of musical composition. (Computer Music Journal)

Alex Rutterford is a British director and graphic designer working mostly on music videos. He studied graphic design at the Croydon School of Art and graduated in 1991. His most well-known works include the videos for Gantz Graf by Autechre, Verbal by Amon Tobin and Go to Sleep by Radiohead. (Wikipedia)