Journalist/critic Virginia Heffernan wrote a thoughtful summary essay in last weekend’s New York Times Magazine about the 2010 Academy Award nominees for best sound-design.

Sound-design is, of course, one of those categories for which the award is presented long before George Clooney ever steps out of his limo. Awards for technical production are a funny contrast to the glitz that comes later in the night – most sound designers, however talented, won’t be mistaken for having personal trainers. But I suppose it’s only apt that an award for sound isn’t the most telegenic moment at the Oscars.

Nevertheless, the convincing consensus – and of course our position here – is that a movie’s aurality has a great deal to do with how audiences receive and understand it, as we’ve explored in the past. These days, sound design is attached to every second of a film. Only a fragment of what the viewer hears was recorded while the scene was being acted out – most were added after the fact, in the studio, from crowds murmuring to doors slamming, from feet shuffling to guns firing. But the aim of the sound designer is higher than realism. Characters are tagged with “sonic signatures” to deepen their personalities. Weapons are made fearsome, encounters tense, exotic locations present, fictional things real, and drama obvious. Sound is crucial to making us feel.

Ms. Heffernan generously agreed to an interview with Weird Vibrations, in which she elaborates on her article, and fleshes out her thoughts on sound and violence – this year’s crop of nominees, as it happens, are almost all war pictures. Excerpts from the five nominated films are interwoven.

Weird Vibrations: How did you do the research for this article?

Virginia Heffernan: All I did was watch and listen to the films, very slowing and haltingly, with lots of pausing. (With the exception of Avatar, which I saw in the theater; I don’t envy movie critics who attend screenings and can’t pause!) I also read the articles and watched the videos in which the sound editors discussed each film. I did not speak to any of the nominated sound editors until after the piece ran, and then only because one emailed me. I always want to be entirely audience-side, a reader who doesn’t know or speak to authors, though I realize that by pausing and making notes I corrupt the experience somewhat, and I may miss the forest for the trees sometimes. In some cases (Inglourious Basterds and The Hurt Locker) I listened again straight through, to get the full effect.

WV: Sound designers often claim that their work operates at something like a subconscious level – at least compared to cinematography, screen-writing, etc. Why don’t viewers notice sound? Is this quasi-hidden status a burden or an opportunity for sound-design?

VH: It may be that the critical vocabulary for sound is just displaced. Good acting, for example, seems to me to be largely tonality of voice. So people talk about “acting” instead of talking about tone and pitch and sound design. There’s an ethical dimension, too, especially where violence is concerned. NFL Films mikes uniforms to make these robot-looking players seem “human” and raise the stakes. UFC fighting doesn’t use body mikes to downplay, I think, the scary squish of soft tissue and crack of bones in half-dressed men who look all-too-human as they fight hand-to-hand. A person watching might conclude that X pro football player is “a good guy” meaning he makes human sounds, while X mixed-martial arts fighter is “a machine” because he doesn’t. They think they’re reflecting on personality and goodness and effectiveness; in fact, they’re reflecting on sound.

The fact that viewers don’t notice sound qua sound–that they call it “performance,” say–makes life more interesting for critics, who like to disaggregate these things. It may be a burden for sound designers who have a rock-star side, and an opportunity for sound designers who have a stealth/spy side.

WV: Does the ethical dimension of sound in sports coverage also extend to fiction? There are longstanding debates over the ethics of visual depiction (violence, sex, smoking – these seem to be the basis of film ratings). Beyond curse words, should we be thinking about sonic rights and wrongs as well? Can the treatment of sound in fiction make us numb to injustice or violence?

VH: I don’t really know about those things. As a viewer, listener, reader, user, I tend to want more art, and not think about the consequences. I also don’t draw much distinction between fiction and other kinds of spectacles–sports, documentary, etc.

Put it this way: I do think that UFC fighting might be unwatchable if the fighters were miked. Very interestingly, to my mind, a contestant on a VH1 reality show called “Tough Love” recently went on a date with a big, burly MMA fighter to a sparring match. The fighter was put in a choke hold and briefly passed out in front of her. To me, the fighter-suitor seemed pretty cool and attractive the whole way through–at least as cool as the men in pay-per-view UFC fighting. But to her, after he passed out, he became horrifying and actual hateful. Having been hugely attracted to him, she decided he was “passive” and could hardly look at him. I wonder if she might have heard, live in the cage, a whimper or choking sound that I couldn’t hear at home, and that made him seem the opposite of heroic. Probably if we heard the vulnerability in fighters’ bodies, we’d find them unbearable. Maybe we’d move to outlaw UFC fighting, and maybe that would be a good thing.

Should we hear the crackle and singe of cigarette smoke on lung tissue, to remind us that smoking causes cancer? I can imagine, in a fiction film, that that could deepen characterization and ambiance in a fascinating way–you could hear a character killing himself, you could tune in to his vulnerability and deathwish. But does fiction have a public-health *obligation* to play up this effect? That’s not the role of fiction.

WV: It’s interesting to consider that four of the five sound-design nominees are war films. Meanwhile, the management of sound also plays an enormous role in real warfare today. iPods and noise-canceling headphones, to name just a couple of technologies, are ubiquitous on the battlefield – for communication, mood-enhancement, personal space, nostalgia, safety, you name it. The military is invested, for all intents and purposes, in sound-design for its soldiers. What are your thoughts about a theater of war in which real fighting has become something of a cinematic experience?

VH: Public consciousness of sound design seems to have been exponentially heightened with Braveheart, don’t you think? Maybe war sound is the only sound we now routinely call “sound.”

Possibly the reason I keep turning to sports, fighting and war in thinking about sound is not just because martial arenas have sound attached to them (Star Trek keeps up a marching-band volume, I think I wrote; the sort of “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory” major-chords/anthem/trudge sound) but because you can do broader characterizations with sound–as in the Nazi “click”–when there’s an us-and-them context. Since WWII, in movies, and now in semi-satire like Tarantino, bad people often click, snap, rap and are brisk. The feminist-earth-heroes of Avatar make that wing-flap-whoosh sound. Giovanni Ribisi had some wonderfully unctuous/officious sounds associated with him in Avatar too; I think I call that his “performance.” ;) But I’ll have to see those scenes again to see if there were effects apart from his voice. What I mean is that Hollywood movies with good and bad guys (reality TV works this way too) gives good opportunities for playful and even sophisticated sound design (the right “click,” the deconstructed “click”), even though the ethical universe of a Hollywood film or a reality show may be childish and even stupid. I love it when the sound (or palette, etc) is smarter than the movie, or the script, or even serves to undermine it. . .You can get fascinating, if sometimes bewildering, effects.

Clearly Kathryn Bigelow was interested in “embedded” as a vantage on war. She also was interested in the cameraphone and the possibility of YouTube uploaders (who take crude sound, even; one character mentions YouTube in the film) as witnesses to war. These figures obviously watch and listen from a different place than did the consumers and producers of newsreels, whose aesthetic probably determined the look and feel of “All Quiet on the Western Front,” etc. And I have no doubt–though I should admit it’s merely an article of faith with me–that these representations, and ways of producing and consuming war, affect how wars are actually fought.

Above: Thomas Ashcraft’s recording of the invasion of Baghdad, 2003. From Soundtransit.nl

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This is a follow-up to the previous post, which was a general typology of sound maps. Many readers wrote in with more maps that, in one way or another, extend the format. Ten of them are listed here.

1) The London Sound Survey

The London Sound Survey map is both assiduous and lovely. Many sound maps treat geography in two-dimensions – the LSS adds graphical elements that go further. It uses “recordings of background atmospheres and incidental noises from all over London” to comprise “a sound grid series recorded at evenly-spaced points across the city.” The recordings can also be represented graphically, so that a musical note represents a musical recording, and so on. Some other sound maps do this, too, but LSS is unique in that the boldness of each icon represents that element’s volume. This is much easier to see than to explain.

2) Madrid Soundscape
Madrid Soundscapes is a Spanish-language, collaborative documentary map of Madrin and environs, with recordings marked by color-coded pins indicating categories such as “social interactions,” “events,” “mechanical sound,” and “silence.” The site includes a Derridean manifesto about the divide between the visual and the oral.

3) Free Sound Barcelona
Free Sound Barcelona is another Spanish-language site that features not only a map, but a blog and other specific projects, such as the documentation of personal “audioways.” The map uses a satellite view, with larger pins representing clusters of sounds which can be accessed by zooming in and clicking directly. Although this map is structurally very similar to many other city-based collaborative efforts, it has a rather unique voice.

4) Noisetube

Noisetube, in its own words, is “is a research project about a new participative approach for monitoring noise pollution involving the general public. Our goal is to extend the current usage of mobile phones by turning them into noise sensors enabling each citizen to measure his own exposure in his everyday environment.” The project monitors more than 35 cities in total, using a sophisticated system to analyze raw loudness. Recordings can also be tagged with “social annotations,” weather, time, location, and more. The number of measurements per city ranges from less than 10 to more than 10,000.

Noisetube seems to be the most advanced effort at noise pollution control through environmental engineering. While the project leaves itself open to a number of methodological and theoretical questions, its approach to sound mapping is worth a look:

5) Soundcities
Soundcities was created by the British artist Stanza. It is effectively global in scope, although clustered in Europe (and to a lesser degree east Asia and the Americas), with Google Earth-based maps of forty cities in total. Rio de Janairo has one recording, Chicago four, and London perhaps a hundred.

Soundcities is described as “An online open source database of city sounds from around the world, that can be listened to, used in performances on laptops, or played on mobiles via wireless networks.” The sounds are meant to evoke a sense of place, but also to become available for composition.

6) Locus Sonus
Locus Sonus is a world map with pins representing active microphones streaming ambient sound in real-time. Microphones are operated by volunteers in many cities, some of whom also provide photo galleries of their locations. The intention is to “provide a permanent (and somewhat emblematic) resource to tap into as raw materiel for our artistic experimentation.” The streams can be mixed or heard individually.

The site is essentially an ongoing art project, which also serves as fodder for further projects. It is essentially generative rather than documentary in nature.

7) Hypercities

Hyercities is “a collaborative research and educational platform for traveling back in time to explore the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment.” Sound is just one among many elements in a “digital curation project” that collects data about a time and place – say, Tehran in 2009 – and then gives visitors access to that material through an interactive map. With the Tehran example in particular, Hypercities is advertised as a tool for political transparency.

8 ) SOINU MAPA

SOINU MAPA is a collaborative sound map documentary of Basque country.

9) Sound Transit

Sound Transit is a well-designed site with a robust database of phonographic recordings. The home page offers three options: “search for sounds,” “book a transit,” and “localisms.”

“Search for sounds” is a simple database, searchable by keyword or location. A search for Thailand, for example, led to a submenu of four cities, from which I chose Bangkok. Seven recordings by five different sound hunters came up. Searching by keyword worldwide, queries for unlikely terms such as “golf,” “hospital,” “spider,” and “tomato” all turned up positive, suggesting
the database is deep indeed. More likely words such as “birds” and “street” each returned more than 100 results.

“Book a transit” – my favorite sound mapping instrument anywhere to date – allows you to “plan a sonic journey through various locations recorded around the world,” with an interface that imitates online travel booking. My itinerary looked like this:

The site also outputs sounds from each location in your itinerary into a single, playable string, with slow fades between each part. No other sound map I’ve seen evokes so emphatically the transformations of space, including sonic space, that take place in a mobile modernity. Although this suggests the possibility of even more commentary and critique ready at hand, it is an exceptionally thoughtful presentation.

10) Radio Aporee
Radio Aporee is a global map that can be viewed through Google Maps or as a bewildering network of lines and tags. The map does not reveal political divisions. The recordings, of which there are thousands, are user-contributed, and include not only environmental sound, but voicemail “tags” of a location that can be added by anyone with a cell phone. Visitors can access sounds directly, at random, or as mixes.

According to the site’s proprietor, Udo Noll, “there are some other “interfaces” to listen, e.g. the permanent stream of (randomly or intentionally grouped) recordings at http://radio.aporee.org/ , the experiments in public spaces, with hybrid/mixed realities (superpositions of “real” spaces and the geolocated sound archives, explored by GPS-walks etc. http://aporee.org/maps/mobile/), and last but not least the user’s, artist’s, contributor’s projects within radio aporee, e.g.”

These include

- The Global Bridge Symphony

- Allah Bul Kheer – Of street vendors and displaced people in damascus

- The Montreal Sound Map

- The The Stuttering Stroll

- Resonanzen

In many cases, reducing sound to a visual field is a bit awkward – do we really hear better while looking at a two-dimensional picture on a screen than we would if we were actually in the space being represented? Maybe not, but the general desire to control sound is very strong, and what better way to control something than to pinpoint it? In this way, for example, compositional maps bring the urban din into a realm of aesthetic order, policy maps subject it to regulation, archival maps protect it against decay, and application maps help us navigate it. There are obvious appeals (and complexities) in each.

Below is a typology of the most common kinds of sound maps, with examples. Many of these come from recent discussions on the Sound Studies listserv, and from an item on Wayneandwax. Have I missed any important categories? Do you know of other examples?

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Collaborative Documentary
This is probably the most straightforward category, and the most logical outgrowth of available technologies.

Open Sound New Orleans is a simple map of the city that allows users to upload self-recorded sounds in the categories of “voice,” “music,” and “ambient,” and to plot them where they were made. The site functions as a local forum, with an emphasis (based on the most frequently used tags) on post-Katrina revitalization, business, neighborhoods, and community. Many of the recordings are interviews. Like many sound maps in this category, Open Sound New Orleans uses sound (as opposed to text) to better emulate “being there.”

In a similar vein, SoundSeeker.org overlays user-submitted field recordings on a map of New York City.

A sound map of Montreal.

Soundwalks in San Francisco, Lisbon, Istanbul, Basel, and more.

Composition/Artwork
This is actually a very diverse category, and one that relies comparatively less often on mapping in the standard visual sense. For example, GPS Beatmap: Planet as Control Surface is a piece of software that uses GPS to assign musical snippets to small circles of land all over the planet. As users walk or drive around, they traverse different circles, creating a beat-matched mix as they move:

There is also a lot of politically oriented work in this category. Heidi Boisvert’s sonicWarfare hands listeners a map of midtown Manhattan, overlaid by a semi-transparent map of the section of Baghdad where U.S. troops invaded in 2002. You follow a route on the map while listening to a recording of an imaginary war – the intended effect is to make conflict seem real, even personal: “Protest in Vietnam was mobilized by images, but today images of war barbarity do not pose the same disgust, disquiet. We have become inured by the spectacle of violence paraded on TV and in movies. Why though when you see war reportage on the news are we not forced to endure the sounds of war? Is it harder to bear the pain of others through our ears … ? ”

Consumer Empowerment
There is something mildly unsettling to me about this category, even though I recognize its utility.

Soundaroundyou.com is a project under development at the Audio and Acoustic Engineering Research Centre at the University of Salford, for which people are asked to add their own recordings to a large data pool for professional analysis. Sounds are also tagged by users with their own qualitative opinions. According to the site, the project “could have far reaching implications for professions and social groups ranging from urban planners to house buyers.”

As you can see at the end of the clip below, sound clips are rated from 1 to 10 in several areas, such as tranquility, activity, soundscape quality, etc. It is implied that the research could ultimately identify areas of sonic pollution, allowing them to be cleaned up through various strategies. But a rating system like this invites much subjective disagreement, since sound is notoriously prone to differences of interpretation. And subjectivity, especially in metropolitan cities, is always bound up with issues like class and ethnicity. The (very difficult) question not asked here is how we can manage sound in a way that is also socially just?

Meanwhile, GeoGraffiti is a cell phone application that allows you to “tag” any place with a voice recording. You might leave a restaurant review, an event announcement, or a funny comment. Other GeoGraffiti users passing by that same spot could then call in and hear your message.

Preservation
This category essentially has two subsections: historical and natural sound. Both of these are animated by an impulse that ethnomusicology knows very well, that is, the need to save “endangered” sounds through archival preservation.

The most prominent historical effort is the BBC’s global Save Our Sounds audio map. Save Our Sounds is built on an engine much like the collaborative documentaries above; however, its purpose is explicitly ecological: “Precious sounds are dying while new ones enter our lives … So here at the BBC we want to build a sound map of the world – and save endangered sounds from extinction.”

Another site, Sydney Sidetracks, offers historical material, including sound and video, tagged to a map of Australia’s largest city. The site encourages you to “download a version to your mobile or load up your player and take the stories with you. When you next visit the city, you can listen to the crowds at Martin Place celebrating the end of WWII or watch George St., 1906, from a moving train.” Sydney Sidetracks combines documentary and artistic approaches to produce a heightened sense of verisimilitude about the past.

Preservation of natural sound has a slightly different flavor. This type of work often vilifies man-made noise, and calls for a greater appreciation of natural or environmental sound. Groups like the Right to Quiet Society call for outright abatement, while artist-researchers like Gordon Hempton (whose recordings are fantastic) pursue sonic purity and plot it geographically. Not silence, per se, but spaces where human sound is totally absent. Such a pursuit is, clearly, about more than volume. However, it is increasingly clear that the preservation of sonically “natural” space requires lots of work – campaigning for awareness, lobbying for changes in flight patterns, hiring park rangers to enforce sound restrictions in wooded areas – all of which, ironically, produces noise.

Policy Data
This is by necessity the most reductive category of sound mapping. Cities pursuing noise control need clear data that can be translated directly to enforcement. Unfortunately, this usually means maps not linked to actual sonic events, that estimate decibels based on things like infrastructure and traffic level.

San Francisco Department of Public Health, noise pollution map

Noise map of Central London

These maps are meant to help city planners be more aware of the impact of sound when making choices about zoning and construction, which is a good goal. However, acoustics (especially theoretical acoustics) can only predict so much about aural imposition.

A spectrogram is a three-dimensional picture of sound – any sound. The three dimensions are time, frequency, and amplitude. Spectrograms usually look abstract, like successions of clumsy paint strokes or stills from Tron. They’re useful for sound engineers, but not all that good to look at. However, some software can also conduct spectral analysis in reverse, translating images into sound. In this case, the images are clear and the audio typically abstract.

The sound clip above, for example, was created from the picture(s) of me, moving from left to right and reading discrete clusters of color and texture as frequencies. The line of my thumb moves diagonally upward from finger to nail, causing its attendant sound to rise in pitch.

Photosounder.com, home of Photosounder, has a great demo video of how their program works with various images:

This kind of graphic sound creation has actually been around for several years (though newer programs are increasingly sophisticated), and musicians and sound artists have toyed with it extensively as a way to create strange noises that don’t otherwise exist.

I bring it up today not only because it’s fun, but because of the rhetoric of truth and discovery it inspires. People encountering this software for the first time quickly figure out that it can be used to encode information. As an experiment, you could take a screen shot of an email, turn it into “abstract” spectrographic sound, and then send it as an .MP3 to a friend. If your friend knew how you’d created the sound, she could then translate it back into an image, and read your original message. Likewise, you could embed translations of any image or text in a song or movie soundtrack as an ambient layer. The mind races at the probability that this has already been done many times, as a prank, an easter egg, a subtle political gesture, or even a means of legitimately covert communication.

Says one blogger about Photosounder:

I can see people … maybe hid[ing] messages in photographs or art work.

The hermeneutic exercise can, of course, encompass not only human communication, but universal structures as well. Several posters on Photosounder’s Youtube page imagine the applications of spectral analysis for science or pseudo-science:

The potential in this concept is far more than many people realize.

You could, for example, create hidden coded messages insides pictures/fractals, and/or DECODE incredible secrets of the Universe with very little modification. ;)

It would be interesting to hear whether electronic voice phenomena (EVP) could be detected in these complex sounds.

These posters understand implicitly that visualization is the standard best mode of reading data, that sound as we hear it fares poorly against image in revealing patterns and broad trends. Thus, they assume that phenomena in the world (say, ghosts) may exist under our noses, present but undetectable until we invent a light that can shine on them.

For both the spiritual and science-minded, this suggests that natural sound could be worth divining spectrographically in search of patterns we haven’t been able to pick up with our ears. Sonic images that appear orderly invite claims of design, intelligent or incidental.

A recent photoessay of whale and dolphin sounds, rendered with a program similar to Photosounder and published in the London Telegraph, is a great example:

These images may look like just pretty patterns, but they are visual representations of songs sung by whales and dolphins

The sounds were recorded by American engineer Mark Fischer and transformed into visuals using a mathematical tool called wavelets

Mark used to work on US Navy sonar and software for defence and aerospace companies but he now records the underwater conversations between whales and dolphins and transforms the waves into art

Mark then uses a branch of maths called wavelets which creates these intricate structures

"To look at a spectrogram you will see a simple, boring blur with a few harmonics," he said....

"With wavelets, however, there was an image that displayed extraordinary structure. Something was going on with this sound, even if we are not quite sure what"

The effect is even more apparent when colour is applied and the graph transformed from rectangular to polar coordinates, forming a circular graph

Atlantic spotted dolphin, wavelet graph

Recent research shows that humpback whale songs differ in local dialects and contain complex grammatical rules, showing a higher level of communication than first thought

The risk of this approach, of course, is in romantically imagining that the software has no bearing on the data represented. The complex beauty of the pictures may lead us to forget that the computational processes used to render them were designed by people who probably share many of our own standards of beauty – formal symmetry, clear coloration, sharp lines, etc. Faced with images like these, we’re inclined to imagine that god, or evolution, or some other force, created a perfectly-patterned world, one that can ultimately be “read” and understood. But no matter who or what is in charge, that isn’t the case.

I made some recordings during and after one of the last screenings of the movie at the Bridge cinema de lux in Philadelphia. And Amina Robinson, who played Jermaine (pictured above), was kind enough to answer a few questions as well.

To first offer some minimal background for those who haven’t seen or otherwise heard much about the movie, Precious is an adaptation of a 1996 novel chronicling the harrowing difficulties of a 16-year-old girl growing up in deep poverty in Harlem. We see Precious, the title character, abused in just about every way imaginable, and the story piles her troubles on thick. The ending is hopeful, if not quite happy. Stylistically, extended sequences of grim realism are broken up by vignettes of playful, ironic fantasy, as well as some fleeting moments that border on normal adolescence. (More detailed plot summaries are widely available elsewhere.)

Critics were knocked backwards and sideways by this movie, to its immense credit. I’m not sure I read a single great review, but I certainly read plenty of painful ones. Somehow, Precious brought many critics to an irresponsibly simplistic conception of how race operates. Although the movie never claimed to speak for “black experience,” and in fact alluded to the fiction of any such singular experience (black characters spanned the socioeconomic spectrum), many writers missed this point entirely, and built entire arguments around a premise that existed only in their own nervous imaginations. And this was the case equally for those who loved and hated it.

Reading the reviews in aggregate offers a breathtaking picture of how inadequate our vocabulary for discussing race can be. The archaic presumptions left unquestioned by critics include, but are not limited to: that definitions of race are rigidly fixed; that race is only about black people and white people; that all black people are poor; that all black people see the world the same way; and that all white people are plagued by guilt. And not at all unconnected to the desperate poverty of wise commentary about race among film critics has been a persistent emphasis on race as an exclusively visual concept.

Listening to audiences watch Precious speaks to race and racial anxiety in ways that vision cannot. Unfortunately, almost all ethical questions raised about the movie in print so far have been about watching the main character. Is it therapeutic? Pornographic? How does the way YOU look affect your right to see her? But in truth, audiences do a lot more than watch during films. They listen, to the characters and to each other, and respond to both. In doing so, they open gaps that suggest nothing if not race’s perplexing contours.

At Precious, a culture of audience participation met awkwardly with a story whose villains and laugh lines were often ambiguous. On one hand (0 – :29 seconds), the movie had a wry sense of humor, even at serious moments. On the other hand (:29 – :58), the mother character, played by Mo’ Nique, was obviously a villain. But viewers disagreed as to whether her villainy was dead serious, a target for verbal outrage, or even a source of comic relief. I spoke to a young couple (:58 – 1:41) who had watched in a theater with an older woman who was so enraged by Mo’ Nique’s character that she yelled at the screen. Meanwhile, the couple found some moments, including a self-deprecating line about Precious’ weight (1:43 – 1:54), funny. Finally, a woman about my age outside the theater (1:55 – 2:55) was “appalled” by laughter at moments that she felt were inappropriate. She attributed such laughter to people being nervous about confronting the seriousness of the content.

I asked Amina Robinson about these kinds of reactions:

I actually had this conversation with one of my White co-workers. He asked why the African-Americans in the theater were laughing while it seemed the White people were appalled. I certainly have noticed that as well. When I’ve seen Precious with a lot of Black folks in the audience it is actually more funny throughout, just as when there has been mostly White people there is a lot of silence.

I find both very interesting. I can’t speak for all African-Americans, but some of us know the characters in this movie. When we see them and are confronted with this particular brand of pathology we identify with it and laugh. It feels good to know that you are not alone in what you’ve experienced. There is a certain justification. While other African-Americans see it, identify with it, and feel the strong push to deal with and heal it.

In reverse, many White people watching this movie seem to be being introduced to a part of life that they were ignorant to. So they get sucked into the world and are captivated and speechless. That is not to say that White people don’t deal with the issues in the film, because they do, but Precious is simply the Black version. It takes place in a world they may be unfamiliar with.

Personally, I laughed some and cried some. And I find any reaction to the film valid and worthy of discussion.

The disparity in reactions, ostensibly along racial lines, has led some viewers to extreme conclusions. A viewer in a forum on Oprah.com, writes:

I tried to talk about the film, process the themes and examine the extraordinary performances. I tried, but I could not escape the whole of the experience. I walked in a white woman and walked out a racist. Disgust with the audience became disgust in my heart, disappointment with myself and fear that my work as a teacher in the inner city was tainted by unclaimed/unacknowledged racism. I can escape neither my disgust with the audience nor my own sense of shame and loss. Is this the power of “Precious”, I wonder?

But, to put it bluntly, not every African-American laughed, and not every white person didn’t. However, for those unaccustomed to hearing interpretations vocalized during the movie, half of the audience, or even a handful of people, could easily stand in for everyone, or at least be a pesky distraction. Robinson describes the importance of responding authentically, regardless of one’s reasons:

We are human beings. We all have different experiences of life that affect how we view the world. We are as different as we are the same, and I think it does humanity and art an injustice to try to dictate how someone should respond to an artistic work.

I say laugh if you must, cry if you must. I do draw a line at talking in the theater though, because then you are ruining the movie for others. Other than that let the movie affect you as it does.

For Robinson, all viewers may relate to dramatic material differently. In an environment where loud response is normal, such relationships are not necessarily more fractured, just more public. This has benefits as well as drawbacks:

I can only speak from my experience when I say that I feel African-Americans like to connect to art in a very visceral way. We like to live our art, feel it, and breathe it. So when we are moved by something we become a part of it and enjoy communicating with it and adding our input. We do come from a tradition of call and response and I think that it can be a beautiful thing.

Aside from possibly that, I don’t think it is a racial issue. I think it is one of experience and identification. We as people connect in different ways to different things based on what they mean to us. Precious is a universal story of triumph over the odds, but it is still about a Black girl.

Clearly, listening to audiences watch Precious does not signal the end of racial difference. What it suggests, rather, is the danger of taking race at face value. Critics have been so quick to divide white and black viewers that they’ve missed the enormous interpretive divisions that the film has created among viewers of all racial self-identifications. This fact is much more audible than it is visible. But our audition has to be thorough. Just because we hear someone in a theater – or experience their silence – doesn’t mean we understand them, or even know what their reaction means.

Visual technology can be inserted strategically into situations of injustice, standing witness to very real problems, triggering necessary responses. It can, as the The Organization for Visual Progression (OVP) puts it, “amplify voices.”

But it takes work to make visuality work for you. The politics of any sense-mode run deep, so any sense-material will naturally be volatile. I spoke with OVP’s Ben Foley and Iben Trino-Molenkamp about how they utilize and handle film and video in the name of projects dedicated to social justice. (d/l here.) (read more about OVP here.)

Gallery:

The Louise Vitton company produced three “soundwalks” this year for travelers visiting Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong. They cost US$17 a piece.

The soundwalks are sold in two parts; first, an MP3 that you play on your iPod and, second, a map that you use to follow a route that corresponds with what you hear. Each hour-long track is narrated by a venerable Chinese actress, who points out things you’ll see as you walk – parks, shops, landmarks. She speaks about the landscape in nostalgic terms – youthful romance, family, an elderly bicycle store owner who collects bells from around the world. Sounds, interspersed throughout, serve as nostalgic triggers. Orchestral music so heavy-handed that it borders on comical plays without pause. But the company and its products are never mentioned.

Why would a fashion designer sell soundwalks that bear no obvious relationship to its wares? Their effort is, in fact, part of a long advertising tradition, developed perhaps more intricately in fashion than in any other industry, and exemplified by the model. Just as fashion models are the ideal wearers of a given piece, scenic images and rhetoric generate its ideal contexts. Recall the catalogues of the J. Peterman company, satirized by Seinfeld:

The outlandish language of Peterman’s catalogue offers the consumer a narrative model, an imaginary world he or she can work to create, outfitted of course in the proper wool shirt and sturdy safari pants.

Bruce Weber is a famous fashion photographer whose campaigns for CK and Abercrombie, among others, are foundational. The summery, wistful style of the image below is Weber’s trademark:

His campaigns depict a fantastical universe of budding sexuality, shirtlessness, and wet golden retrievers. We immediately recognize the character types, and link them with what they wear.

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Commercial soundwalks are a lateral movement from the Peterman and Weber campaigns. They are in truth no more enveloping than those ads, but they do operate a bit more powerfully in the contemporary moment. As Dyson argues, many people are apt to believe that hearing something through headphones dissolves the channels of aural mediation – truly and fully placing us in a separate world. The actress on the soundwalk MP3 seeks to “transport” the listener to “[their] Beijing” through an overlay of sonic triggers on what is properly regarded as the purely specular field of the city. Reality, in the problematic sense of the word that Dyson critiques in the rhetoric of “virtual reality,” is thereby branded, but the brand itself, like the technology, is invisible. And out of sight is, ontologically, out of mind.

All that matters about the reality so represented is that people be enchanted by it as an idea on the horizon, that they be willing to see themselves in it and work towards it as consumers. Its empirical nature is of no consequence to its creators otherwise, which should be worrisome.