Listening to music or looking at a piece of art both require some amount of brain power to appreciate aesthetically. One can sing along to music or appreciate the brushwork in a painting, and perhaps more importantly, these two actions can be performed simultaneously. Video, and its ability to combine both time, space, and often sound, compels the viewer absolutely. My inability to hear my mom talk while I’m watching Bones is evidence of the mediums ability to compel. This is because Video and other visual or auditory sensory tasks are variably mapped, while focussing on one you cannot also successfully focus on the other.
This makes video a powerful medium for communicating both ideas and emotion because it enraptures our visual and auditory senses bringing our full attention to the action unfolding on the screen. It activates our senses holistically, and this fact sets video apart.
Bellow is a podcast by Roman Mar’s show 99% Invisible, which attempts to highlight important factors in design that we might not think about. An episode I fell in love with, and believe is relevant to our upcoming project, is called Sounds of the Artificial World.
I think that this episode is particularly awesome because it shows that the sounds we associate with certain objects had to be designed. On one side of every product their is someone who decides what the seven key, the unlock sound, and the send sound for email should sound like. The objects come out of production with sounds that are seamlessly integrated into the device. I think that’s so cool I might even turn my phone off silent.
