Thursday, January 8, 2009

A Sight for Sore Ears

I asked Steve Wolloshen, the experimental filmmaker from Montreal and producer of a hand-made animated film to Brubeck's Take 5, if he ever played back the animation without the music track. He answered that there was no point to it as the visual and the audio worked in tandem. Having asked it, I kinda felt stupid about the Duh! dud but being a firm believer in the "No such thing as a stupid question" (for obvious reasons), I strove to find the silver lining to the sow's ear and came up with the corollary that a question may be stupidly posed.

With hindsight I guess what I was trying to ask was, "If the visuals are super tight with the music, when you turn off the music does the eye respond to the visuals the same way that the ear responds to sound? Can sight acquire the sensorial specificity of hearing when the visual stimuli requires it to do so? Do we see differently when we ask sight to perform the task of hearing visually?" The question comes from reading Bergson's Matter & Memory p. 50 "[As per Lotze,] 'sound waves which should give to the eye the sensation of light or luminous vibrations which should give to the ear a sound.' The truth is that all the facts alleged can be brought back to a single type: the one stymulus capable of inducing the same sensation, are either an electric current or a mechanical cause capable of determining in the organ a modification of electrical equilibrium." I kinda feel that the aural circuit is different, from the visual circuit, or the olfactory circuit... but can they be made to "perceive" in the mode of the other's specificity?

Another thing that didn't come up (but should've) in reading Bergson was the translated term "sensitive nerve" in Deleuze is nowhere to be found (up to the end of Chap.1), what did come up was sensorial nerve. I don't have Cinema 1 & 2 in French so I've never checked it... Does Deleuze say nerf sensible?

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