I’ve been down a rabbit hole looking for insights into understanding the design of audio visual compositions. I may be some time.

Integrated approaches to audiovisual creation and analysis

So far, my study list on audiovisual as an integrated subject of study looks like so:

• See this Sound Audiovisuology Compendium : an Interdisciplinary Survey of Audiovisual Culture · Volume 1, which is partly available as a web archive. (There have been subsequent editions but I realised I couldn’t access them.). After reading this all the way through, I realised I needed to read Chion, as everyone kept citing him.
• Audio-vision – Sound on Screen by y Michel Chion · 1994
• Digital harmony – On the complementarity of music and visual art – John Whitney – I’ve popped a hot take on this up up on Goodreads

Visual aesthetics

These foundational works are mostly focussed on static composition but there’s more than enough here to be getting on with for the moment:

• Art as Experience – John Dewey
• Art and visual perception – Arnheim

I am so enjoying Dewey – makes me nostagic for the days when psychology and philosophy were not so far apart. Arnheim is interesting but sometimes his subtle phenomenological judgements about balance and tension etc etc in form leave me cold, rather than adding a new dimension of insight. So I introduce a lot of red pen marginanial which is all a variation on “sez him” vs “sez me”. I find myself wishing for an explanatory mechanism, or at least a theory or some kind. Which I find funny, as it’s not my usual ask.

Music

This is a big rabbit hole. Perhaps oddly, I’ve started with

• On Sonic Art 1997 Edited By Simon Emmerson, Trevor Wishart

I haven’t finished it yet but from making progress by little dips I think that it is designed to expand Western formal traditional conception of music – which is something I don’t actually have a great big pile of in my head, so the premises miss me a bit. It’s trying to dynamite something that isn’t there! Nonetheless, it’s stirring things around and I’m enjoying trying to reverse engineer the things it assumes I already know.

So, without letting go of my trail of bread crumbs, I think what I need to backfill afterwards is:

Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered question, a sxi part lecture series which is available as text and as a video, starting here.

My musical training – from a piano teacher I didn’t see eye to eye with – never touched on music theory, so there’s a fair old bit of catch up to do.