Emotional Attachment with Sound, and without it

After attending the Haggerty Art Musuem's current exhibition entitled stop.look.listen, I became aware of two work's contrasting uses of sound, and the emotion's that the convention's of sound stir for a viewer. In regard's to Glenn Bach's lecture on sound artist Aaron Ximm, the two video's entitled Cave Trilogy by Salla Tykka and Deeparture by Mircea Cantor both relate in different ways. Of course, Deeparture is silent, but through it's silence, it convey's quite a strong message.

First, Tykka's trilogy uses three conventional soundtrack's without any dialogue to convey messages about what music viewers relate to what types of films. The first film of the trilogy is entitled "Lasso," in which a young woman spies on a man performing lasso tricks, and the music is quite like a "Old Western" with abrupt horns and an epic feel to the music. The lasso trick's are performed in slow motion, adding to the epic tone of the work. The second piece, entitled "Thriller," would apply more to Aaron Ximm's work, in that it uses only a repetitive piano line and numerous atmospheric sounds to convey a horror story about three very odd characters, and the murder of a sheep. Although the characters interact, the lack of dialogue forces an assumed conversation that is individual for each viewer, although the music usually directs the assumed conversation to something disturbing or even evil. The final piece has a soundtrack that could almost be taken from Aaron Ximm's database of sound. The music uses atmospheric tones that invoke a scifi or futuristic plot line that contains electronic long-tones, heavy bass, and lack of acoustic instruments. Again, the lack of dialogue in combination with the soundtrack evokes a whole new emotion, as the protagonist stumbles upon three uniformed miners, forcing a feeling of not belonging to the group, therefore the uniformed antagonists are the enemy. Overall, the soundtrack is a combination of conventional music and natural sound captured and repurposed, which in relation to Ximm, inspires the same in the viewer or listener: that sound alone can not only evoke emotion, but also guide a narrative where one normally wouldn't exist.

However, narrative can also be derived by a lack of sound. In Cantor's piece, the viewer comes across a plain white room with only two character's, a wolf and a deer, setting up an obviously twisted plot line. Thankfully, after watching the video loop, the wolf wasn't very hungry, or had befriended the deer, because they both looked very alive as the video continued to play over again. At first I though the lack of sound was detrimental, and that Ximm could have swept into the room and placed microphones everywhere to capture intimate sounds of the deer's hooves on the cement floor, the heavy breathing of the deer as it watches the wolf. The wolf's sounds could have stirred a sense of impending violence, as he lick's his teeth and the viewer could hear the slobber of the wolf's long tongue, or the heavy panting not unlike a dog as the wolf circles its prey. Instead however, Cantor chose to leave out sound of inevitable violence, and instead gave us silence. This silence creates a paranoia, as if the deer has lost it's ability to hear as death comes closer. The loss of sound causes confusion, and I imagined that instead of a cement room, the deer and wolf were in a forest during a winter snowstorm, where the heavy breathing and click of a deer's hooves would be silent. In hindsight, the idea of a snowstorm paranoia seemed to drive the video forward, and as the video began a new loop, the awkward situation began again, would the wolf ever be hungry enough to kill the deer?