Music

Sound vs. Image: 'Confrontation' or 'Coexistence'?

The Music Telegraph | Text 2019/07/08 [14:17]
Music

Sound vs. Image: 'Confrontation' or 'Coexistence'?

The Music Telegraph| 입력 : 2019/07/08 [14:17]

▲ (Left) Altamira Cave Wall painting (approximately 18,000 years ago) | (Right) Pipe produced during the Paleolithic period (approximately 35,000 years ago)

Based on the archaeological sources found so far, it is assumed that auditory art may have been older than visual art.

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Sound vs. Image: 'Confrontation' or 'Coexistence'?

 

A few years ago, in Germany, a pipe made of eagle bones approximately 35,000 years ago was discovered. It was made during the middle of the Paleolithic period. This is the oldest musical instrument ever produced by human beings so far. Meanwhile, the oldest painting is the Altamira cave paintings in Spain, a rock paintings drawn by people of the late Paleolithic period about 18,000 years ago. Based on these archaeological records, the hypothesis that music appeared before art in the history of human culture has gained its credibility among scholars recently. However, one thing to point out here is that the artifacts of visual art such as paintings and sculptures can be appreciated by later generations if they are preserved as art works, while musical instruments such as flute are not works of art but merely 'tools' produced as a means of auditory art, so there is no way to know what or what form of music was played by the flute at that time through the discovery of the flute produced in the Paleolithic period. As such, unlike visual arts, auditory arts were inevitably in the form of intangible, so performers only preserved their music for generations through their successors or passed on through music scores. The birth of a medium capable of recording sound was only a century ago, and music until Edison's phonograph was invented has existed as part of 'volatile' performance art that did not exceed the wall of time and space. Therefore, today, although sound can be stored by various media such as CD and USB, auditory art has more important meaning in live stage that communicates directly with audiences in a limited place. A typical example is the behavior of artists to play and sing directly to the audience through live concerts, apart from their record sales. On the other hand, visual arts have preferred the form of exhibition showing the already completed works to the audience in unilateral way rather than live performances. In the end, sound can not deliver its artistic value sufficiently in a way that is unilaterally delivered to audiences in a fixed form (such as recorded results) through media (CD, cassette tape, etc.). This is because the auditory art has been developed through real-time interactive communication between performers and audiences for a long time in human history, and this communication method has resulted in the fact that 'the sense of sound is created' as a component of auditory art.

 

 

If so, the sense of presence of auditory and visual arts will fuse with each other, and in what form will the performer communicate with the audience? As mentioned above, the sense of presence of the auditory art is formed by two-way communication between the audience and the performer in real time through the live performance of the performer. On the other hand, traditionally, the sense of presence in visual arts is a form of one-sided communication that takes place between already completed art works and visitors. This is because the artist does not appear in the communication process. For human beings, the two-way communication of auditory arts is more primitive than the one-sided communication of visual arts, assuming that auditory arts appeared earlier than visual arts. The reason for this is that auditory art is much more limited in terms of duplication and spreading of works than visual arts. In the art of hearing, the sense of presence of a work is very difficult to duplicate evenly, and it can only spread within the prescribed space and time because it presupposes communication in real time with audiences  only in limited space. On the other hand, works of visual arts are generally free from temporal and spatial constraints because 'physical copying' is essentially possible and the existence of the artist is not required in real time for appreciation of the work. Therefore, in the form of a fusion of music and visual arts, the audience will experience real-time communication of sound and 'one-sided display' of visual art at the same time. In this process, the audience actively appreciates the sound of the performer and passively immerses themselves into the visual world that is unfolded in the present, eventually limiting the infinite auditory imagination of the sound to the world of images. Thus, in an artwork in the form of a fusion of auditory and visual, the abstract meaning of sound is visualized by the concrete 'reality' of the image. These visualizations then bring auditory sense of reality back to the image, which allows viewers to interact with the image in real time. In other words, the sense of presence of the auditory art is transformed into an image and transformed into a more vibrant image.

 

 

 

 

 

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