Hollywood Sound July 8, 2008
• How does music seduce the audience and change the meaning of a film?
Music in film helps forcing attention, setting a tone/mood, and evoking particular feelings such as suspense or happiness towards a specific scene. It also helps to enforce the themes and helps to portray a better image in the viewer’s head.
• What role does sound play in remembering a picture? Give an example from the film or from your own memory.
Unique sounds help to identify a picture, a scene, etc. Sounds that are heard in a movie and only in that movie, makes the audience reference immediately every time that particular sound is played. A good example is the whistle of Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) from the movie Kill Bill vol 1 and 2, whenever that sound is played scenes such as her attempted murder of The Bride (Uma Thurman) pops out in whoever saw that movie.
• What material were composers given in order to compose the score? How did this process take place?
Composers were given several things in order to create what directors where looking for. They got specific scenes in which they have to create certain feelings, they also got orchestra musicians, a time indicator for the film, etc.
• How did the Music Editor “spot” the picture? What is the difference between a ’streamer’ and a ‘punch’ and how did they help the conductor to create the musical score?
The music editor “spotted” the picture by punching a hole on the film and then marking it with a white X. The punches are used when a new key has to begin with a scene, and the streamer is used to make sure the tempo of the piece in the film is synchronized.
John Cage, Silence July 3, 2008
1. How have poetry, dada, and zen influenced the work of John Cage?
His work is influenced by them in that Cage wants his work to have the characterisics that poetry, dada, and zen have, of being impalpables, versatile, and energizing.
2. How does Cage view and define “the future of music” and the role of the composer? Why was this so groundbreaking and still relatively so?
He says that modern times bring new sounds that have a technological quality, and in order for them to be pleasant and harmonic a composer must be involved to organize the sounds.
3. What commentary does Cage make regarding the invention of electrical musical instruments?
He says that electrical musical instruments are created to imitate eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments rather than evolve, however, they do make music processes more simplistic and convenient for composers and musicians.
4. How does Cage perceive silence?
Cage perceives silence as an opportunity in music which allows other sounds in the surroundings to emerge, such as the sounds of modern sculpture and architecture. He says that sounds that are not notated are called silences, but that there is no such thing as an empty space or time in music and that in those moments in which sounds are not notated there is always something else to listen to.
5. What does Cage consider the five determinants of sound to be?
The determinants of sounds are frequency or pitch, amplitude or loudness, overtone structure or timbre, duration, and morphology.
6. How does Cage feel we should change our musical habits (from more mathematical to more natural)?
He thinks that people have musical habits that are too rational and rigid. He believes that in order for music to be fully enjoyed people should let go and rejoice music more freely.
Telescoping the Microscopic Object: Benjamin the Collector July 1, 2008
1. How did Benjamin view the importance and role of ‘the collector’? How do objects and the spaces they inhabit help us to see more closely and anew?
Benjamin thought that the collector’s role was to resuscitate the past by using objects which are collected only for their antiquarian and/or sentimental value. He believed that objects surpassed their functions to become part of a more intricate process in which they tell the story of a specific period of time, culture, society and are “free from the bondage of being useful”.
2. In what ways did Benjamin identify with the Surrealists and their anti-commodity, poetical strategy of data collection from everyday life, dreams, street life, and from the banalest environments?
Benjamin was identified by the surrealists in that both collected data in order to rediscover even the most monotone activities to reinvision a new world in which they both see dreams, myths, and memories of childhood as a conductor for evoking feelings and resurecting the past.
3. When photography and film were emerging visual technologies, Benjamin introduced the term ‘optical unconscious.’ What did he mean by this? How does photography and film both reflect and construct the world around us?
“Optical unconscious” allude to the premise that “bric-a-brac” objects bring out the past and connect different time periods and memories overlapping them, this is what Benjamin calls “interpolations” and this are expressed throughout film and photography transforming them into unconscious images that freeze time.
