Dominic Pinney

European Review

Animation and live-action are two closely related media, which are foremost distinguished by the ideas and conventions surrounding them. The diverging discourses around animation and live action have tended to focus on animation as something constructed to represent characters and settings and on live action as something capturing actors and sets representing characters and settings. This difference between constructing and capturing, along with the perceived indexicality of the photo, is what seems to suggest live action as the preferred medium for documenting real events. Sound effects, in the form of recorded and edited sounds of objects, actions and environments, are of particular interest here, as they can be considered to balance somewhere between these poles of construction and capture, between the non-indexical and indexical, and ultimately between representation and reproduction. In this article, I will focus on aspects of ‘truth’ (understood as corresponding to some extern...

Consider driving a car without sound, no engine noise, no music or voices, no honking of horns, no whoosh of passing traffic or splash of tyres on wet tarmac. Without sound, much of the meaning and texture of driving becomes lost. In this paper we suggest that a careful attention to sound, not just music, can give insights into how affect moves between and through human and non-human bodies. We argue that the affective and emotional experiences and relations that arise through car driving practices are significant to how people understand themselves, others and place and is part of the reason people continue to drive their cars given we know the environmental impact they have.

REVELAR Journal of Photography and Image Studies, 2022

CALL FOR PAPERS (submission deadline June 30, 2022) When addressing the relationship between photography and sound, Angus Carlyle (2016) drew affinities between field recording practices and those of the New Topographics movement, given that both regard stillness and immersion within the landscape. In his work 'America', Baudrillard (1988, 6) offers a reading on silence, juxtaposed to the sonorities the contours of an image can evoke: «the silence of the desert is a visual thing». Framing our spatial surroundings can indeed allow us to map the silences and noises that shape them, where the presence/absence of the human figure can act as a mirror of intimacy and a scale that accentuates the dimension of the place, whether natural or constructed. In fact, numerous photographers, videographers, filmmakers and visual – and sound! – artists have explored this concept. However, the relationship between sound and image, in photography, entails values beyond the fruition of the place and the landscape. The sound-image synchrony can be understood as an exercise on the visualisation of sound – as well as the ‘sonority’ of the image – that substantiates the approach on the medium as a document indissoluble from its cultural context. It is the object itself, subjected to ‘loss and erasure’ and preservation of the material ‘noise’, that Christoph Cox (2001) establishes as the key-element to the relationship between photography and sound. Therefore, it is relevant to also consider the haptic qualities, as well as the questions on materiality and synaesthesia that the axis photography-sound confines. It become s pertinent to question: what is an image? In what way do photographs act as visual instructions to the sonic experience? Can we discuss synaesthesia when the sight-sound relationship renders meaning? In what manner is meaning dependent on visual literacy and the transmission of references? And what approaches can be devised when the scope is amplified to the discourse between photography and music? We thus invite Photographers and Visual Studies scholars, but also researchers in fields such as Art History, Musicology and Architecture, to offer an interdisciplinary approach to photography and visual sound: on the one hand, as the fruition of the soundscape/landscape as an audiovisual document; on the other, as an exercise on the visualisation of sound and its role in contemporary visual culture and its transmedial manifestations. The key topics we wish to propose for discussion are: — The relationship between photography and sound: transmedial capture of sound and light. — Reframing the New Topographics Movement: capturing soundscapes, atmospheres, and sense of place in man altered environments. — Architectures of Sound: representations and perceptions of space and sound. — Photography as a sonic texture: metaphors, materiality and meaning . — The luminal space and the capture of time, rhythms, and transferences. — Framing visual sound: from oscilloscopes to synaesthesia. — The role of photography in publishing music: visual literacy and the orchestration of an image via album covers. — Visualisation of music: aesthetic, photographic image, and music videos. — Visual identity and musical idioms .

Stuart Jones space-displace: how sound and interactivity can reconfigure our apprehension of space Abstract The author examines the plasticity of the perceptual spaces generated by sound and interactivity, and how their dynamic relationships to other perceptual spaces, both mediated and physical, affect our overall perception of the space we are in. He does this by analysing some of his own work, in the wider context of architecture and time-based art and design, referencing work by other makers.-When the video artist Irit Batsry and I were making the linear video piece These Are Not My Images (neither there nor here) 1 (2000) there was one scene which posed a particular problem. In it a woman was lying on a narrow sidewalk, hemmed in behind by shop fronts, with the camera looking at her from the other side of the road. Pedestrians and vehicles crossed the scene in the foreground, briefly obscuring her as they passed. Fig. 1: still from These Are Not My Images (neither there nor here), 80 min. © Irit Batsry 2000 The problem was a paradox: how to bring the audience into a position of closeness and intimacy in their contemplation of the woman, while at the same time holding them at a distance from her? The second part of the task was easy: throughout the movie, although there was no actual sync sound, I would construct fake 'sync' sound at certain points, for strategic reasons. In this case I used the sound of passing vehicles and voices, synched to the image, to reinforce this traffic as a barrier between the audience and the woman. The first part of the problem was harder. To solve this I created a continuous whining ambience, oppressive but seemingly distant. This had to have the effect of both supporting the claustrophobic 'hemming in' of the background and opening up a deep aural space behind the image, thus bringing it relatively much closer to the audience within the overall perceptual field. I did not provide the audience with any sound to associate with the woman, allowing them to participate in placing her in the perceptual field, which reinforced their intimacy with her. At the same time, when there was no passing traffic, the audience would be drawn closer to her, and then thrust back by something passing, giving an uneasy feeling of voyeurism and transgression. All in all, ostensibly simple sound-spatial devices worked with the image to create a complex relational space of anxious, uneasy, alienated, voyeuristic and contemplative intimacy. In another scene, with figures in long shot at night, I had the sound of voices alternating abruptly between loud and soft, as if a door was being opened and shut on them, catapulting the audience backwards and forwards in relation to the image. In yet another, of a boy hammering nails in various extremes of close up, I had a hammer sound tightly synched to his action, and a background ambience of a workshop, which itself contained a lot of hammering sounds. I continually shifted the balance between the 'sync' sound and the ambience, obliging the audience to readjust

Working Papers, 2008

The widespread use of personal stereos has created large numbers of listeners navigating the city in reverie, enjoying a synaesthetic relationship between what they see and the music they hear. Such sonic mediation to the body's experience has been described, and analyzed, ...

Streetnotes, 2022

These selected entries are from a diary that I have been keeping since the beginning of the pandemic; they document the ways in which sounds have occupied my dreams, and my reflections about a new, perhaps quieter, perhaps sinister, soundscape experience.

The Soundtrack (Journal), 2019

This article is a discussion piece that reflects on the authors' video article 'Obsession: Redux-Sounds from a Garage-Film' (Cumming and Potter 2019) and the digitized soundtrack of co-author John Cumming's film Obsession (1985). The authors explore the processes of, and concepts behind, creating the original multi-layered analogue soundtrack for Obsession, an artefact of creative practice from a specific moment on film culture and of filmmaking within Melbourne 'post-punk' culture of the early 1980s. As a personal and self-reflexive work, the Obsession soundtrack is replete with memory, both personal and popular, local and global. It is a collection of oral objects-an audio archive of live recordings and media samples made in Melbourne, Australia, between 1978 and 1985. The discussion piece revisits the Obsession soundtrack, alongside the redux of this film, in the context of contemporary literature and practice in sonic thinking. The representation of the self and relationships in sound is underpinned by Michel Chion's (1994) understanding of palimpsest and Raul Ruiz's (1995) ideas on poetic objects and shamanic films. The purpose of this investigation is to link sonic memories and subjective self-representation to specific practices of soundtrack composition and specific sites and moments of cultural history. The synthesis of concepts, methods and works that we examine here contributes to an emerging discourse around embodied and reflexive sound.

2014

This paper aims to discuss sound and space conversational relationship, combining theoretical research and the practice “Urban Reverberation”, a sound intervention held in public space. First, the paper introduces the context of the intervention briefly and after presents its theoretical framework concerning space, interfaces and sound interventions. Then, the article presents the sound intervention discussing its concepts, methods, the interface role and the reactions and comments of the audience, gathered by video recording, photos, and semi-structured interviews. At last, the paper presents its findings and theoretical reflection about the sound intervention.

Complete online text of Sound Scripts journal, which evolved out of the second Totally Huge New Music Festival. TOC includes:- 1. Editorial: Cat Hope 5 The Nth Art: The State of the Sonic Image at the 2007 Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference 2. Keynote 1: Philip Brophy 9 Pseudo Soundtracks: The myth of inventive audiovision in contemporary cinema 3. Keynote 2: Jonathan W. Marshall 16 Freezing the Music and Fetishising the Subject: The audiovisual dramaturgy of Michel van der Aa 4. Paul Thomas 26 Audionano—Vibrating Matter 5. Bruce Mowson 32 Being Within Sound: Immanence and listening 6. Clare Nina Norelli 38 Suburban Dread: The music of Angelo Badalamenti in the films of David Lynch 7. Darren Jorgenson 44 The Marvellous Surrealism of Nurse With Wound and The Sylvie and Babs Hi-Fi Companion 8. Christoph Herndler 51 Im Schnitt, der Punkt [At Interface, the Point] (2003) 9. Jonathan W. Marshall 55 Flatness, Ornamentality and the Sonic Image: Puncturing flânerie and postcolonial memorialisation in the work of David Chesworth and Sonia Leber 10. Cat Hope 74 The Bottom End of Cinema: Low frequency effects in soundtrack composition 11. Patrick Shepherd 79 From Ice to Music: The challenges of translating the sights and sounds of Antarctica into music 12. Ross Bolleter 89 The Well Weathered Piano: A study in ruin