- Library Home /
- Search Collections /
- Open Collections /
- Browse Collections /
- UBC Theses and Dissertations /
- The listening eye
Open Collections
UBC Theses and Dissertations
UBC Theses and Dissertations
The listening eye Hennell, Valerie Anne
Abstract
This is the sightless cinema. Here sound is both the medium and the message, the process and the product. Modem man is primarily a visually oriented animal. His perception is to a great extent governed by sight— "seeing is believing" —and he tends to translate what he hears into visual terms. But hearing is in itself a kind of seeing: a watchful ear becomes a listening eye as sound yields association and words evoke images. Whales, on the other hand, perceive the world in auditory terms. They translate objects into sound by echo location. The sightless cinema, then, might be considered the theatre of human echo location— a documentation and expression of life in purely aural translation. Words— whether spoken, sung, or read from the page— are the common denominator of man's aural communication. Alone, or combined with sound effects or music, they are capable of evoking and communicating images which are highly visual. Eisenstein’s theory of filmic montage applies here as readily as it does to the cinema of sight. It is the juxtaposition of sounds, the creating of texture within the acoustic space, that makes A + B equal more than the mere sum of the components. The documentaries and songs in this thesis attempt to portray fragments of life aurally by combining words, sounds and music in a way that is palatable to the listening eye.
Item Metadata
Title |
The listening eye
|
Creator | |
Publisher |
University of British Columbia
|
Date Issued |
1972
|
Description |
This is the sightless cinema. Here sound is both the medium and the message, the process and the product.
Modem man is primarily a visually oriented animal. His perception is to a great extent governed by sight— "seeing is believing" —and he tends to translate what he hears into visual terms. But hearing is in itself a kind of seeing: a watchful ear becomes a listening eye as sound yields association and words evoke images.
Whales, on the other hand, perceive the world in auditory terms. They translate objects into sound by echo location. The sightless cinema, then, might be considered the theatre of human echo location— a documentation and expression of life in purely aural translation.
Words— whether spoken, sung, or read from the page— are the common denominator of man's aural communication. Alone, or combined with sound effects or music, they are capable of evoking and communicating images which are highly visual. Eisenstein’s theory of filmic montage applies here as readily as it does to the cinema of sight. It is the juxtaposition of sounds, the creating of texture within the acoustic space, that makes A + B equal more than the mere sum of the components.
The documentaries and songs in this thesis attempt to portray fragments of life aurally by combining words, sounds and music in a way that is palatable to the listening eye.
|
Genre | |
Type | |
Language |
eng
|
Date Available |
2011-04-11
|
Provider |
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
|
Rights |
For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use.
|
DOI |
10.14288/1.0101669
|
URI | |
Degree | |
Program | |
Affiliation | |
Degree Grantor |
University of British Columbia
|
Campus | |
Scholarly Level |
Graduate
|
Aggregated Source Repository |
DSpace
|
Item Media
Item Citations and Data
Rights
For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use.