Seeing Sound
Is it
possible to smell colors, see sound, and remotely feel shapes? It is if you’ve got an artist’s sense. And art doesn’t limit itself to simply
paintings, but any creative work, view, or innovative recreation at all. Sure, everyone can see people making dinner,
but can you see the story in it? Do you see the characters, the conflict, and
the plot? How would you write the senses
that your nose is giving off? How could you show that to a nose-less audience? Mute the TV: can your audience still imagine
the sizzling of the bacon or the tossing of the salad? Once we start looking we can find the stories
all around us, at both macro and micro levels.
Turn off one sense at a time and see what you’re left with.
Play your
favorite movie on your laptop and turn off the display on your screen. Are the sounds so good that you can still see Aragorn clanging his sword against
the spears of his rallied troops? Can you feel
the tie fighters closing in on Luke and his best friend? Of course you can’t: it’s just a black
screen. And then you realize something:
sound itself shows and tells a painted story, with or without words. Watch an old home video on mute, one of you
and a loved one baking during the holidays.
Can’t you still smell the pine
tree in the living room; smell the pumpkin pie baking in the oven? It just happens. Our six senses (the sixth being any sense of
premonition) are all building blocks that can make up an experience.
Jack White,
taking out visual limitations, manages to replicate a guitar sound almost to
perfection. Now look at what he’s
playing: it’s a glass Coke bottle McGyver’d to a plank of wood. Mr. White has created an experience, without
being limited by the building blocks of sight.
He heard the sound in his head
and replicated that through creativity.
Guess what? I bet you could have
gotten the same sound results from someone who had never even see a
guitar.
And that’s
the trick: to make sure that the orthodox building blocks of our senses do not block out original innovation.
For Nick
Ritter and I, seeing someone pee (let alone a pack of burly men or orcs) was
hardly something we wanted to see.
Audibly however, there was a creative story involved, with limitless
potential for comedy: the last thing someone would expect from the dark
characters of Tolkein’s world. So what? We took that wall and broke it down:
blew it up in an explosion of extenuating zipper sounds and grunts of relief.
Sound became a building block for us: not just a….”block”. As far as seeing
sound goes…try not to think too hard about this one.
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