Abstract
It was like a symphony and the mountain was a lullaby. In nature wind can caress your skin, water can bubble between your toes, pine can fill your nostrils. Within all of this lie the emotional aspects of perception. Often when we take in a landscape we focus on the visual, but truly seeing is about more than just vision itself. Using sound, I aimed to decenter vision as essential to experiencing visual art. In Christine Sun Kim’s Ted Talk “The enchanting music of sign language”, Kim notes how rich and musical American sign language is as a form of expression. My representation in this work will take this analogy literally and invert it by capturing the richness of vision with the equally rich complexity of music. Indeed in, Poor & Parkin’s video “How deaf researchers are reinventing science communication,” Lorne Farovitch’s sign for DNA captures aspects of DNA’s helix that spoken language does not. In Schlenker’s “visible meaning” he notes that the logical form of sentences can be more obvious in sign language than in spoken. In the same way, by isolating sounds and emotions, I hope to create a richer, more informative interpretation of visual art. I first created a landscape scene with various layer of mountains, trees, and a river. I then used a production software called FL studio to create a musical representation of my landscape. I experimented with Major7 chord progressions to achieve a sense of serenity within the whole piece. Then, using violins with reverb, I represented the distant mountains. The mountains in the foreground were represented by bells filtered to remove the sharper frequencies. The peaks of the mountains were represented by high notes, while the troughs were represented with low notes. Hence, I attempted to make visual art accessible to the blind community by prioritizing the sensations surrounding, but excluding, sight.
Landscape
FL studio
Audio
Works Cited
- Kim, C. S. The enchanting music of sign language. (2015). https://www.ted.com/talks/christine_sun_kim_the_enchanting_music_of_sign_language
- Poor, W. & Parkin, A. How deaf researchers are reinventing science communication. (2018). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsBCHknyqH8
- Schlenker, Philippe. “Visible Meaning: Sign language and the foundations of semantics ” Theoretical Linguistics 44, no. 3-4 (2018): 123-208. https://doi.org/10.1515/tl-2018-0012