Event Review 

The Sight of Sound: Intermedia

30 November 2007 

The second in the series of IRTN post graduate workshops, ‘The Sight of Sound: Intermedia’, was held on the 30th November at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH).  The workshop series aims to bring together practitioners from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds in conversation around a theme of common interest.  ‘The Sight of sound: Intermedia’ explored the interfaces between music , film, the body, and technology in two themed sessions.  

The morning began with a panel entitled ‘Film and (mostly) Opera’ chaired by Roger Parker (Kings College, London).   He began by discussing the relationship between sound and image, drawing on the example of Guiseppe Verdi’s ‘Aida’, and the screen adaptation of the opera directed by Clemente Fracassi in which Sophia Loren took the lead role with Renata Tebaldi singing the part.  He drew our attention to the disjunction of body and voice, and the elision of the sung performance of opera that is a consequence of the emphasis placed on the visual. 

Denice McMahon (Cambridge) gave the first presentation on the panel, exploring questions of intermediality arising from the Tristan Project, the theatrically innovative performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde by music director Esa-Pekka Salonen, director Peter Sellars, and the video artist Bill Viola.  Asking what might video add to the production, she suggested that the Tristan Project as complete multi-media experience brought together bodies present on stage and screen.  The collaborative production and use of technology thus presented a tension between the multiple performing body and the multiple performing space. 

 Carlos del Cueto (Cambridge) spoke on the ‘Magic Flute’ and the use of operatic sound tracks in film.  Carlos suggested that audiences were ‘trained’ to view performances in a certain way through exposure to the screen.  The focus on the visual led to an elision of the performance of opera. A similar negation, he argued, can be seen in the over-emphasis of the performer in the hyper-reality of televised operatic performance.  The television close ups of performers, neck muscle straining, faces contorting, are not what the opera-goer would see.  Francessca Britten (Cambridge) gave a fascinating account of the demonisation of Bach in the twentieth century through the use of his music in horror films in the 1931 production of ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ in association with psychosis.  She  went on to explore the link between music and class, between criminality and the conception of the well-educated mastermind that is evoked by the use of Bach in the portrayal of the serial killer Hannibal Lecter in the movie ‘Silence of the Lambs.’ 
 
Maureen Thomas (Digital Studio, Cambridge) opened the second panel of the day, ‘Music and Narrativity’, with an account of the interactive production, ‘Runecast’, in a presentation entitled ‘Narrativity and Indeterminacy: Music/Image/Explorable Environment’.  Runecast, an interactive audiovisual narration based upon the Viking poem ‘Songs of the Seeress’.  Through a focus on navigability in design the person interacting with the programme has control of the rhythm and pace of the story.  The ways in which one might journey through the world of Runecast in non-linear fashion introduces indeterminacy into the experience.  While ultimately structured, there is an attempt to introduce chance as a counter to ‘rule driven play out’.  

Sergio Lopez Figueroa, a composer, spoke next on the potential of ‘pure’ visual narrative in silent film as an aural space in which relationships might be forged.  In his work Sergio sets live music to film, substituting the original sound tracks with his own compositional explorations of the film imagery.  ‘Clonic Mutations’, a string composition accompanying Buñuel’s and Dali’s Spanish surrealist classic ‘Un Chien Andalou’, provides an ironic narrative framework for the lurid imagery,  implying a connectivity between scenes that is stringently avoided by Buñuel and Dali.

The first of the panels in the afternoon, ‘Technology and Mediation’, explored the interplay between the body and technology.  Richard Hoadley (Anglia Ruskin)  on ‘Judge Proulx’s ruling: the Law, Music and Computers’, took his title from a recent ruling in Canada that a computer should be considered to be a musical instrument for the purposes of tax deduction--the point being that technologically a computer is far more than just a ‘computer’.  The presentation explored the sensor interfaces between computers and human physicality, and the ways in which they can be utilised to produce synthesised music.  He gave an excellent demonstration of the use of a data glove to produce sound, showing how the production of sound using the glove was affected by the handedness and coordination of the performer.  Alejandro Viñao, a composer, and Chris Nash (Cambridge), talking on ‘Real-time Representation and Control of Polytempi’ showed how in the project they have been working on technology has been used to overcome the limitations of human performance.  Technology was used to create the perception of hard-to-play polytempi, but in pieces far easier to play by performers.

Ian Cross (Cambridge) and Satinder Gill (Middlesex) spoke together on ‘Technology and (Dis)embodying music’, and scientific approaches to the study of musical experience.  Their presentation explored the relationship between musical technologies and technologies of production, arguing that in ‘traditional’ societies the distinction between the performer and audience was less distinct, and that in these societies it was often difficult to distinguish between activities that are ‘musical’ and ‘linguistic’. The commercial production of music of music as a sonic commodity excludes music as embodied social interaction. Georgina Born (Cambridge) followed, arguing in a paper entitled ‘Music, Mediation, Ontology’ that when considering the musical experience one must take into musical sound/form and its exegesis. Musical experience could then be considered to be a discursive mediation, multiple mediations might be thought of as assemblages. The relations between subjects and object, human and non-human actors in assemblages define particular ontologies.  In electronic and digital music assemblages facilitate dispersed collaborative creativity.  Digital media supersede the capacity of material artefacts to stop the flow of re-creation, an argument at odds with that put forward by the previous presentation. 

In the final panel, ‘Body and Performance’, Hettie Malcomson (SPS, Cambridge) gave a wonderfully visual account of Danzón, a dance style originating in Cuba, popular throughout the Gulf Coast of Mexico.  The day culminated with Martin Clayton (OU) and Laura Leantes’ (OU) intriguing account of imagery and embodied performance in Indian Raga performance.  Tarun Kumar Nayak captivated us all with his closing raga performance, a fitting finale to a wide ranging, stimulating and at times challenging exploration of the interfaces between technology, the body and sound in a variety of cultural contexts and settings.
 
Lee Wilson (CRASSH) 

 

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