Sound Image Silence

A visionary new approach to the Americas during the age of colonization, made by engaging with the aural aspects of supposedly “silent” images Colonial depictions of the North and South American landscape and its indigenous inhabitants fundamentally transformed the European imagination—but how did those images reach Europe, and how did they make their impact? In Sound, Image, Silence, noted art historian Michael Gaudio provides a groundbreaking examination of the colonial Americas by exploring the special role that aural imagination played in visible representations of the New World. Considering a diverse body of images that cover four hundred years of Atlantic history, Sound, Image, Silence addresses an important need within art history: to give hearing its due as a sense that can inform our understanding of images. Gaudio locates the noise of the pagan dance, the discord of battle, the din of revivalist religion, and the sublime sounds of nature in the Americas, such as lightning, thunder, and the waterfall. He invites readers to listen to visual media that seem deceptively couched in silence, offering bold new ideas on how art historians can engage with sound in inherently “mute” media. Sound, Image, Silence includes readings of Brazilian landscapes by the Dutch painter Frans Post, a London portrait of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison’s early Kinetoscope film Sioux Ghost Dance, and the work of Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School of American landscape painting. It masterfully fuses a diversity of work across vast social, cultural, and spatial distances, giving us both a new way of understanding sound in art and a powerful new vision of the New World.

"Do you have a favorite sound?" little Yoshio asks. The musician answers, "The most beautiful sound is the sound of ma, of silence." But Yoshio lives in Tokyo, Japan: a giant, noisy, busy city. He hears shoes squishing through puddles, trains whooshing, cars beeping, and families laughing. Tokyo is like a symphony hall! Where is silence? Join Yoshio on his journey through the hustle and bustle of the city to find the most beautiful sound of all.

The Sound of Silence explores how non-verbal communication in film, shown primarily through the acting of Ryan Gosling, provides an expressive space in which passive audience viewing is made more active by removing the expository signifier of dialogue. The German Expressionist era may have been brief, but the shadows cast since its end nonetheless loom large. The silhouetted, cigar-wielding men of film noir and their respectively dark, doom-laden haunts mirror the angst-inducing atmospheres of their forebearers, while also introducing the now-familiar figure of the silent hero. Considering the numerous silent hero actors in film history, there's one that stands out in the 21st century like no other: Ryan Gosling. His later career has seen some of the most iconic silent heroes of the past decade, with films such as Drive, Only God Forgives, Blade Runner 2049 and First Man cementing him as the go-to guy for a monosyllabic, taciturn and moody hero whose actions speak louder than words. This book argues that it is Gosling's expressive capabilities that keep audiences compelled by his performances. With the use of non-verbal silence – combined with its counterbalance, sound – a more active, emotive audience response can be achieved. Looking further into this idea through theorists such as Michel Chion and Susan Sontag, the book demonstrates that the sound of silence is one of the most meaningful cinematic sounds of all.

"This study brings together for the first time scholars of Christian, Islamic and Jewish art and music to reconstruct the complex intersection between art, architecture and sound in the medieval world. Case studies explore how ambient and programmatic sound, including chant and speech, and its opposite, silence, interacted with objects and the built environment to create the multisensory experiences that characterized medieval life. While sound is probably the most difficult component of the past to reconstruct, it was also the most pervasive, whether planned or unplanned, instrumental or vocal, occasional or ambient. Acoustics were central to the perception of performance; images in liturgical manuscripts were embedded in a context of song and ritual actions; and architecture provided both visual and spatial frameworks for music and sound. Resounding Images brings together specialists in the history of art, architecture, and music to explore the manifold roles of sound in the experience of medieval art. Moving beyond the field of musical iconography, the contributors reconsider the relationship between sound, space and image in the long Middle Ages."--

This unique book takes silence as its central concept and questions the range of meanings and values which inform the idea as it impinges on the creative process and its content and contexts. The thematic core of silence allows a consideration of silencing and silence as opposite ends of a spectrum: one shutting down, the other enabling and opening up. As a multidisciplinary collection of essays derived from the teaching and implementation of Creative Writing at university level, the contributors consider silence as strategic, both through the need for silence and as something which compels resistance. They explore how writing has employed images and tropes of silence in the past, and used silence and gaps technically. In considering marginalised and forgotten voices, this book shows how writers bring their diverse range of backgrounds and experience to work with and against silence in Creative Writing Studies. The first theoretical work on silence in Creative Writing, this field-shifting book is an essential read for both practitioners and students of Creative Writing at the higher education level.

Résumé en 4ème de couverture: "This book examines different kinds of analogies, mutual influences, integrations, and collaborations of the audio and the visual in different art forms. The contributions, written by key theoreticians and practitioners, represent state-of-the-art case studies in contemporary art, integrating music, sound, and image with key figure of modern thinking constitute a foundation for the discussion. It thus emphasizes avant-garde and experimental tendencies, while analyzing them in historical, theoretical, and critical frameworks. The book is organized around three core subjects, each of which constitutes one section of the book. The first concentrates on the interaction between seeing and hearing. Examples of classic and digital animation, video art, choreography, and music performance, which are motivated by the issue of eye versus ear perception are examined in this section. The second section explores experimental forms emanating from the expansion of the concepts of music and space to include environmental sounds, vibrating frequencies, language, human habitats, the human body, and more. The reader will find here an analysis of different manifestations of this aesthetic shift in sound art, fine art, contemporary dance, multimedia theatre, and cinema. The last section shows how the new light shed by modernism on the performative aspect of music has led it-together with sound, voice, and text-to become active in new ways in postmodern and contemporary art creation. In addition to examples of real-time performing arts such as music theatre, experimental theatre, and dance, it includes case studies that demonstrate performativity in visual poetry, short film, and cinema. Sittingat the cutting edge of the field of music and visual arts, this book offers a unique, and at times controversial, view of this rapidly envolving area of study. Artists, curators, students, and scholars will find here a panoramic view of discourse in the field, presented by an international roster of scholars and practitioners."

In this poetic exploration of the auditory imagination, the third in his series on sonic aesthetics, Seán Street peoples silence with sound, travelling through time and space to the distant past, the infinite future and the shadow lands of the inner psyche. Our mind is a canvas on which the colours of the sound world leave permanent impressions. It is the root of all listening.

In a world ever more congested and polluted with both toxins and noise, award-winning photographer Pete McBride takes readers on a once-in-a-lifetime escape to find places of peace and quiet—a pole-to-pole, continent-by-continent quest for the soul. We tend to think of silence as the absence of sound, but it is actually the void where we can hear the sublime notes of nature. In this National Outdoor Book Award winning work, photographer Pete McBride reveals the wonders of these hushed places in spectacular imagery—from the thin-air flanks of Mount Everest to the depths of the Grand Canyon, from the high-altitude vistas of the Atacama to the African savannah, and from the Antarctic Peninsula to the flowing waters of the Ganges and Nile. These places remind us of the magic of being “truly away” and how such places are vanishing. Often showing beauty from vantages where no other photographer has ever stood, this is a seven-continent visual tour of global quietude—and the power in nature’s own sounds—that will both inspire and calm.