Thesis Premise: The Threshold of Common Media

In thinking about my past works that have dealt with how sound interacts with the world, but more importantly, how the world is transformed by sound, I have yet to play with the interaction of the common visual medium, namely film and animation, and how we associate audio with a given visual.

In my piece "Paranous," I enjoyed experimenting with sound that is developed in the space somewhere beyond the listener and within the listener using bone conduction headphones and an ambisonic speaker array. The one aspect of this piece I enjoyed was how the audio physically interacted with a listener. Music was going on literally both inside and outside them.

Another inspiration for this piece is Steve Reich's "Come Out." What would "Come Out" look like? How could this theory of phase be extrapolated to an audio/visual combination?

With the piece in development, I am wishing to deal with the audio/visual associative properties defined by our everyday existence. What common social interactions and mediums that we utilize everyday can be used as means of creation and destruction of this audio/visual associative property?

The initial idea is to create a piece that involves having a small assortment of animated forms that one would commonly associate with given audio. Each source would be rich in active forms, where some may have quick punchy animations and associated audio, and others slow sweeping, long drawn out motion. The piece would use this material to explore motion and our understanding of it, quickly cutting from the visual realm back to the audio realm and vice versa, jumbling the audio and video and testing how one may sound with another, etc.

The various streams of interaction could then begin to move slowly forward, pushing the presented audio and video beyond what has already been seen. If successful, it is my hopes that the observer would begin to formulate an experience that may or may not be physically present, with their ears filling in the gaps to the piece where there is silence, and their eyes filling in gaps where the video is a void, defining the experience in a different manner each time the piece is experienced.