Well here I am In Olmypia Washington trying to figure out what I’m doing with my travel arrangements and as I am sitting by the bay listening to the waves splash, and the birds speak, and the people playing I realize that I no longer felt as if I was at the bay enjoying the sun and the natural sounds scape but I had literally been transported to a point in my past of when I was child screaming an playing in the park back home. Remembering this meant that at that moment this familiar sound was actually triggering a moment in my past, making that very moment relatable to my present position. Except one small difference, that even though my mind was taken back to a place of familiarity that the experience I was having was still different. With out realizing every position of sound in and around us we all consistently making choices actually by the sounds we are hearing, weather or not it mentally registers or not, sound is energy that is moving and affecting us all in a physical way. This is where the idea of sound manipulation comes into affect, how corporations and even our own government take advantage of fear, happiness, sadness, and almost every emotional response that consumers can relate to. just like In one of the readings from winters quarter we talk about the city, how all cities seem to have similar qualities that remind a person of a city, that similarity still does not define the identity of every city. Tying that in my experience on the bay, Even though the feeling and experience was similar to that triggering moment from my past it still was not the same. So how do these large corporation draw consumers into buying or investing in said ideas, goals, or lifestyles if not every experience is the same? My theory is that the sounds that do not affect our minds due to exposure from multiple similar experiences/sounds then build stereotyped like muscle memory. Business use this Stereotyped “Sound” with in there advertising, film, and music, to portray an emotional response that these business are hoping most people will relate too. The thing though about these relatable triggers is that people do not tend to acknowledge that even though something about this piece of art is relatable and similar, the situations are not the same nor are they they in most cases real.
This all started with the coming of technology and large corporate mass media, also know as urban ethos’s. When Film first became popular it was entertaining by means of being in a quiet room watching black an white screen with subtitles and large facial expressions, until music was added to silent films as a way to portray sounds and emotional responses to the body language of said characters and scenes. As soon as sound hit the screen it changed the very art of film, there is a saying; that, that day film it self as an art died. relating this to programed music and absolute music to film, absolute film would be film itself, when it was silent, then there is programed film, this is where film no longer is just a silent film, but is using sound to help portray the meaning of the story by using sound to emulate the meaning of the films original story.
This is a picture of the capital building at night, not many people see this but late at night when its dark out the capital building has lights on it. There is a lighting design on the building that actually makes the capital building look like there is a giant smily face on it. When I see this at night I think about the artist who took the time to do the lighting for this building and what there intentions as a light designer was when they put the lights on the building, or did they even know that this would happen? Either way, I look at what this building, what it represents and where it is located. Only in one of the most open, liberal places in this country would have a lighting designer create a shadowed smily face on our states capital building.