The Third Work Symposium

I was able to catch the ends of the “Enunciative Acts: On the Materiality of the Voice” and all of “Strangers on a Journey: Mimetic Sound, Synchresis and the Attraction of Foley” and the “Live Foley Performance”.  Each panel expanded on or criticized how fiction and non-fiction media represent audio-visual relationships.

Panelists Irina Leimbacher and Pooja Rangan elaborated on the subversive status accorded to the voice. In editing interviews, typical practices attend to voice to lead attention on it by taking out the “uhs” and “ums”. It disinvests the power of voice, ventriloquizes the voice and body. It creates a disjunction of individual and personal experience. Rangan highlighted the voice and body are to be taken into equal consideration, but we should also acknowledge the voice is embodied to begin with.  

In the panel of Foley & Synchresis, Jackie Goss stated when sound and image have the same connotation, it becomes a less complex experience for the audience. She had shown a section of “Hello Photo” in which footsteps were the same Foley sound for every person. Humans can perceive the slightest noises. It was noticeable the current person’s footsteps sounded exactly the same as the person three seconds ago. She proposed, with the Robert Bresson definition, image and sound should not support one another. Goss featured “I Begin to Know You” and specified the exaggerated Foley, the never fully fused image and sound, and the continuous switch of Foley and music. She concluded Foley that uses space for confusion between image and sound has the most profound effect.  

Kelly Kirshtner performed a live Foley soundtrack to a short video loop from Jeanne Dielman’s “23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles”. The character enters the dining room, sets the table, and leaves. She continuously added additional sounds on each pass of the loop while Daniel Robert Kelly’s interactive program would decay older tracks, dismantling the soundtrack as new sounds were recorded. The sounds she produced disassociated from the image. She exaggerated sounds, used the closing click of a box or the sounds of swirling water to suggest the character doing something off-screen, and placed the ‘clink’ of glass milliseconds after the image sets two glasses down. It reinforced the original narrative and invented an alternative narrative simultaneously.