First of all, every time I read the name of this assignment (do you hear what I hear) I hear the refrain of the Christmas song of the same title in my head.
This week I learned (or maybe relearned) how much fun it is to bang random objects together. Our first sound assignment and then the next class when we compared sound design to framing shots really made me think about what we hear in films. It's very true that we do take sound for granted sometimes. Most of the time while watching a film the sound tries to blend in, to bring dialogue to life or to highlight certain moments with a musical soundtrack. More often than not sound tries to mimic your ears by honing in on what sounds you would follow to understand the story.
So to think of sound as its own form (different from music and different from an auditory complement to a visual track) is kind of new for me. That's not to say that sound in narratives or documentaries isn't important. Now thinking back to different films I've seen, I guess that they've used sound to their advantage but never really drawn attention to it like certain visual edits do. Like making the ching-chang of a gun louder if it's more threatening, or making a creepy creaky floarboard in a ghost movie just loud enough so you lean in further to hear it.
While these techniques utilize the qualities of sound, they don't necessarily celebrate or focus on them, they merely serve to elevate the visual.
Maybe sound in experimental films can serve just like the visuals do, to make the viewer, or rather listener, experience things they hear all the time as something new.
Maybe sound is like this fish dude here, a great big beast whose mobility and freedom is being trapped by it's surroundings: the visual.
Other things I learned this week included how to set scratch disks and how to break and then fix a key on my keyboard. (the shift key)
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