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- Volume 9, Issue 1, 2016
Soundtrack, The - Volume 9, Issue 1-2, 2016
Volume 9, Issue 1-2, 2016
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‘Unmute This’: Captioning an (audio)visual microgenre
By Paula HarperAbstractI argue that ‘Unmute This’ videos constitute an Internet video microgenre, and as particular intersections of behaviour, devices and content, these videos function as an entry point into a number of broader issues within twenty-first–century audio-visual media and participatory behaviour. First, the moment of encounter with an ‘Unmute This’ video post elucidates a reframing of the digital sensorium: how ears and eyes, watching and listening, are configured and reconfigured in tandem with ubiquitous devices like smartphones and earbuds, and via the affordances and behaviours of various digital and social media platforms. Secondly, directives to ‘Unmute This’ point to a distinct mode of online socialization, a particular ‘sociality’ of social media. In collaboration with the devices and platforms of their everyday experience, users build a vernacular theory of media use based on their own behaviours and practices. They then implement that theory while seeking to impart an ideal content experience for others, platform users potentially far removed from the poster/commenter’s own acquaintances. In this article, then, I begin by unpacking the implementation of autoplaying video and the assemblage of the ubiquitous digital sensorium – that is, what sensory behaviours and practices map on to dealing with autoplaying video, at least as suggested by ‘Unmute This’ directives. I then consider ‘Unmute This’ videos as a genre, sketching out some patterns in the form and content of videos that one might be most likely directed to ‘UNMUTE IMMEDIATELY’, and interrogating how such stylistic and formal details might be emergent in response to platform affordances, ubiquitous devices and norms of Internet-mediated sociality. Finally, I suggest a theorization of vernacular media theory, drawn from the particulars of ‘Unmute This’ videos and their creators and disseminators, and I unpack some implications for the kinds of assumptions about sociality, behaviour and trust that are built into such theorizing and user responses to it.
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What you hear is what you (don’t) see. Mario Wienerroither’s Foley art in Musicless Musicvideos
By Simone DottoAbstractMario Wienerrother’s Musicless Musicvideos series have recently surfaced on the Internet and since 2006, they have gained millions of views as a humorous YouTube sensation. As a professional sound designer, he re-edits already released and often widely known music videos by depriving them of music and adding a different, entirely sonic audio track that he records himself. All of these reworkings seem to raise the same hypothetical question: what if these audio-visual excerpts were deprived of their most signifying aural expression, namely music? Would they still have the same meaning? Would they tell the same ‘story’? This article aims to explore Wienerroither’s practices and the effects they provoke on our understanding of the aesthetic conventions of the music video. As a first step, I will provide a detailed account of the process for realizing the Musicless Musicvideos by drawing on an interview I carried out with the author. Secondly, I will investigate a number of Wienerroither’s productions in relation to (1) the aesthetic conventions of music video and (2) the practical realm of Foley artistry. Through these comparisons, I will explore how the renewed sonic dimension in these videos matches the settings, objects and human figures we see on-screen and the extent to which this can change our understanding of the images themselves, through the production of a humorous effect and the construction of a sonic diegesis superimposed to the re-edited materials. The objective of the article is to demonstrate how, by relying on a sound-centred practice, Musicless Musicvideos undermine the overall balance between the visual and the aural elements in a typical music video.
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‘Formation’ of the female author in the hip hop visual album: Beyoncé and FKA twigs
More LessAbstractThis article explores how and why, from a feminist standpoint, two black female hip hop artists – Beyoncé and FKA twigs – have turned in recent years to the emerging audio-visual format of the visual album towards a radical expression of female authorship. This is ‘radical’, specifically, in two contexts: firstly hip hop, the genre with which these artists are traditionally associated and which has been associated, historically, with a repressive politics of gender and race representation through music videos and secondly, that of the classical paradigm of film style and narration, which the visual album as long-form video implicitly confronts. Synthesizing traditional feminist film theory with more recent theorization of music video aesthetics and representational trends, this article considers how Beyoncé and FKA twigs have remediated certain formal and narrative paradigms of film and music video to create a uniquely hybrid form. Beyoncé’s self-titled visual album from 2013 will be considered as an initial interrogation-cum-problematization of the sexist representational paradigms endemic to hip hop music videos and classical cinema from the inside out, while her more recent Lemonade and twigs’s M3ll155X will be analysed as radically formally innovative and assertive of a subjective, female authorial voice. These two artists will be seen to have self-consciously invoked a filmic mode of representation and spectatorship across the formally experimental audio-visual format of the video album to exert a remarkable degree of control over their audio-self-images’ narrativization and signification.
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High-octave soprano to auto-tuned rapper: Item numbers and technologies of sonic eroticism
More LessAbstractThe item number, a microfilmic musical form, has been shaped by a wide range of intersecting influences: the fashion industry, music video culture and the 24/7 music television format introduced with globalization in India. The name item number (a special song and dance sequence) is probably derived from the term ‘item’ (nowadays used for petite gay men as well), the Bombaiya equivalent of the slang ‘looker’, the worst way of objectifying a human body by disintegrating it into individual units (items). Item numbers tend to be big budget productions, like stand-alone attractions that are staged to have a life independent of the narrative. The production economy for these dances is intricately designed with a special focus on sets, costumes, make-up, digital technologies for lighting, music, cinematography and editing. The identifying marker of an item number is the way in which it foregrounds the body as a sexualized force. In this article, I locate the sensual affect of the item number in its sonic template. DJs, rappers, playback sopranos and mixing engineers are the assembling figures of this article. While questions of new media technologies, in terms of lip-syncing and digital mixing battles, form the vortex of enquiry here, cultural references to the gender and sexual charge of the voices are equally significant. I argue that the technical matrices of its circulation, sound amplification and the performative force of the item number conjure a new sonic ecology that heightens the wildness that is associated with its loud sound. The article also enquires into censorship debates that frame this sonic eroticism.
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Finding meaning in data: Using data elements to sonify and visualize the found environment
By Cissi TsangAbstractVisiting a natural setting can be a deeply visceral experience. Experiencing a landscape is a two-part process: firstly, the senses take in information from a three-dimensional world – for most of us, these take the forms of sights and sounds. Secondly, this information is translated into a mental landscape flecked with the nuances of personal meaning. How one interprets a landscape cannot be separated from the observer; our personal experiences (and biases) filter and colour our observations. Arguably, the use of landscapes in the creation of artefacts is a form of communicative expression, both between the artist and the landscape and between the artist and their own experiences. These considerations then raise the question of how an artist can then depict these visual and aural experiences, and the impact they have on the artist, as tangible artefacts that can be shared with others? One answer is through the creation of audio-visual works that combine the visual and aural aspects of a setting, and which then leads to another question: how do you create – or re-create – representations of a landscape? How does one establish relationships and associations between visual and aural information drawn from the found environment (i.e. the environment in situ as seen and heard through the eyes and ears of an observer) and place these into audio-visual compositions? This article explores the creation of audio-visual representations of the found environment using elements of data as methods of sonification, the compositional processes involved with organizing these data elements, using data as a structural process that informs the parameters of a composition and the use of music visualization. Multiple data elements such as hexadecimal data, field footage, field recordings and contours of a landscape can be used to sonify the found environment by creating multiple perspectives of the environment into the work. It also strengthens the connection between the aural and the visual by creating links between both mediums. This article will discuss these points through analysis of the creation of Civil Eyes // The Wild, an audio-visual performance that was commissioned by the You Are Here Festival in 2016 – using the performance as an example of how the found environment can be used as parameters for sonification and visualization.
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Figure and ground, image and sound: The digital medium in Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon
By Godfre LeungAbstractThis article analyses the discrepancy between the medium-specificity of Brian Eno’s 1985 compact disc (CD) Thursday Afternoon and the intermediality of its precursor, Eno’s 1984 video artwork of the same name. I historicize these seemingly contrasting aesthetic strategies vis-à-vis medium alongside an epistemological shift in our conception of the musical recording during the rise of the CD in the early-to-mid-1980s. I argue the counter-intuitive point that the home video version of Thursday Afternoon represents the fullest realization of Eno’s medium-specific inquiry into the emergent CD technology.
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