Audio-Visual Theory & Practice

This course explores the synesthetic potential of music and the moving image as it manifests itself throughout audio-visual practice: music video, film scoring, audio-visual performance and installation.

We'll begin with Michel Chion's seminal text Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen to explore how concepts such as acousmatic sound, synchresis, rendering, empathy/anempathy, temporalization, and added value enhance our understanding of how sound and the moving image interact, both in collaboration and opposition to one another. We'll continue with Carol Vernallis' Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context to explore the non-realist, non-narrative, nonsensical and musicalized nature of the moving image within music video.

Throughout the course, we will develop conceptual and practical strategies for manipulating sound and the moving image to create original works that explore this synesthetic potential to "see" music and "hear" the moving image. How can properties of sound and the moving image, such as tone/timbre, texture, noise, fidelity, rhythm, speed, repetition, and dynamics be manipulated and deployed correspondingly?

Basic practical workshops in video editing and post-production will enable us to develop audio-visual works that exist in a liminal space between music video and film score, where neither the music nor the moving image asserts complete authority, but where they interact and respond to each other in innovative and dynamic ways.

This course is intended for students in the Experimental Pop program, with the intention of developing their audio-visual practice towards the creation of both music videos and moving image accompaniment for live musical performances. However, anyone with prior skills in music production and an interest in expanding into audio-visual production is welcome.