Blogs Round 3- listen up!

When I arrived at the Haggerty Museum of Art on the campus of Marquette University to see the stop.look.listen. exhibit there was a group of about 20-30 children sitting around tables at one of the displays. After they left there were about 10 adults making almost as much noise as the kids and then they finally dispersed. The whole thing took about an hour and during that time I wandered around among the different displays, some of which had the sound turned off as I found out later. Even after the large groups of people left it took a while for the guard to get the sound going on all the displays. I had a chance to sit through Salla Tykkas amazing Cave Trilogy once with no sound and once with sound. Even when the sound was finally turned on it was at a low volume.

Cave Trilogy is so strong visually that it made little difference to me whether the sound was on or off. Tykka chose to use music from well known films in all three parts of her trilogy and they all worked perfectly, mainly by staying out of the way of what's happening on screen. In part three ,Cave, we hear music taken from the 1984 David Lynch movie Dune which had a score written by Brian Eno and the band Toto. Eno's The Prophesy is combined with the Paich/Paich song The Box. Many people are fans of both the movie Dune and the sound track written for it but I thought the sound track and score simply ruined the movie which needed the expertise of someone like Jerry Goldsmith who has sc-fi films like Planet of The Apes and Alien in his long list of credits. The music written by Eno/Toto for Dune works well in Tykka's Cave though. It provides a suitable backdrop to the story of a woman who is searching for something, and it gives the film both a futuristic and a retro setting. Eno's ambient synthesizer sounds fit well with the main character who is wearing some kind of white jump-suit, for some reason.

Before leaving the museum I decided to listen again to Amy Globus' display Electric Sheep, this time with and without the use of the provided headphones. On screen is an octopus that is working it's way through a series of glass tubes, some of which are very thin. The background is solid black and the whole scene is eye-catching. Emmylou Harris's version of Neil Youngs' "Wrecking Ball" plays as the octopus moves. At one point in the song I heard a sort of flanging sound that affected only short segments of the song, and the soundscapes of Aaron Zimm immediately came to mind. Zimm likes to keep his amibient sounds intact and modifies only portions of them to enhance them, instead of using the more typical approach of chopping up the source file and rearranging the various parts. Zimm's aversion to looping also adds originality to his work. Globus uses the same approach as Zimm here in that she is adding to, but not cutting up the music in Electric Sheep. I found the use of music to be distracting overall and the display would have been better served by the use of ambient sounds and sound effects to enhance the video. Both Tykka and Globus use previously recorded music but the effect is quite different in that Tykka uses it for dramatic purposes to enhance a story and Globus uses it more in the context of a music video. Zimms approach of putting the listener in a particular place with ambient sounds could have worked well with Electric Sheep but overall it's still a very interesting display. There are many things to consider when adding sound to enhance visual images and many different roads to take.