The question I will like to look into is how the voice used for words gives them a meaning fbeyond their definition, evident when the voice is placed in a social sphere: the social context of the audience and social position of the voice as understood by the audience informs the implications voice has on the words being said. The implications are concerned with that possible effects of the words and the production of a broader meaning around them.

I think this enquiry is important for two reasons:

• Research into this social aspect of voice serves movie creators as a tool to maximizing their control over a message they hope to portray in their movie.
• Situating voice in this social sphere would provide a medium through which the viewer can exercise through experiments about the society they are in: an understanding of the manner in which interpretation of voice and its effecs is contingent on social factors may lead to questions about why a particular interpretation is made, what would have to change in society to create different interpretations, how would the story change if the viewer opened herself to different interpretations of voice? These questions arising from voice in movies can lead the engaged viewer to experiment through the movie. This play of ideas ignited by placing voice in a web of social connections may influence the viewer’s world-view thus possibly affect their action in that world.  

Reasonable, Risky: It was hard to find out why my argument may be riskly since I usually don’t articulate ideas that seem to make no sense to me. I think my argument is reasonable because hearing is just another sensory organ whose information must be made sense of by the brain, and I think that a lot of our understanding is informed through social relations.

It’s risky because it doesn’t accept that a composition of words holds a unalienable concrete truth but instead is alienable and malleable, and their voice, once understood in a social context, produces meaning; and this meaning lies in the recipient, thus it arises from a reaction. If one accepts that meaning lies in the recipient then it is easily understood that the meaning of words is in essence their effect. The idea of word’s meaning being alienable raises questions about ownership and authorship: how does the author claim ownership over words when their essence is not fixed? Are they taking ownership over a single meaning?

Viewing the audience as a producer of meaning goes against the view that voice-over narration spells things out for viewer.

For my first major paper I will probably use Alcoff’s Problem of Speaking for Others and Davis’ Acoustic Cyberspace. Just today I came upon the Comstock and Hocks reading and when I skimmed through it I thought they may have relevant ideas.

 My sound-script: I am not sure of the details but I know I am going to change the voice without changing the content of the original narration; possibly focusing on gender if I can’t find another social issue to relate it to.

Her claims about the dangers about speaking for others include the idea of ritual  of speaking (bringing speech into a social sphere will be helpful in our activities with boys and girls club), and it seems that this concept of speaking implies that one cannot be objective at all.

the statement that a model of the subject person is made when one speak for or about them (or ourselves) seems relevant to our project inspeaking for the boy’s and girl’s club: we are going to have to hghlight some of their characteristics as people, and not tell others, in accordance to our purpose.

Alcoff’s suggestions for evaluating discourse so that one may decrease the dangers of speaking for others set up a framework through which we can look at our roles with the boys and girls club, and service in general: 1) one should interrogate the impulse to speak can be reformulated to question impulses to serve. 2)One must analyze the affects ones location and context have on what is said: affects on what service is and does. 3) Accountability and reponsibility for what one says; in practice, this involves being open to actively understanding criticism: accountability and responsibility are implied in popular conception of service, but not extended to include damages. 4) one must analyze probable effects of words on the discursive and material context – where is the claim going and what it does there; this relates a lot to the kind of writing Jentery has been guiding us towards: not only looking at how things come to be but also extending these claims into the future – questions about effects.

Alcoff’s approach to speech in a social context can be used to study our service at the club. We can start to think about the context we are doing it in, service-learning, who we are, why such a club was set up, why service-learning exists, how our service may be received. The analysis of service or speech within a social framweork is to the purpose of improving our ability to increase effectiveness.

Her article was useful to me because it advocates for a multi-dimentional analysis of something; an approach that can be used in organizing essays, making claims, increasing the good that comes from any service, and relates to the class, or to any academic pursuit, because it recognizes the modes of production: it questioned the production of meaning, truth, effects.

“Actually, they frequently wind up alleviating the damage done by money and weapons, or ‘seducing’ the ‘underdeveloped’ to the benefits of the world of affluence and achievement.” – Ivan Illich

This quote was introduced after stating that the export of the U.S idealist is the third largest export after money and guns. The paragraph has already identified the volunteer as an idealist who believes he is providing a service. This quote positions this supposed service as a means to compensate for damages, such as a payment of interest on a debt. The quote also highlights the debt a volunteer feels they must pay to the “underdeveloped”; the former believes that they possess and can give something that is worth having. Illich has already clarified that the quality that the American volunteers value in themselves and wish to share is merely a byproduct of their American “American society of achievers and consumers”, and infers that the volunteer is promoting this way of life, through volunteering, across the globe; the volunteer is pretentions for thinking that their ideals, manners, systems are needed by other societies – permeating a mentaling of manifest destiny among the volunteers.

Notes

Distinguished from voice-off, interior monologues, voiced texts. Instead, voice-over narration is an oral recounting of a narrative whose source is not fund in the time and time of the scence being visually presented.

how do we recognize voice-over as narration? linguistic cues (simple past tense verbs, more by Labov?), “intuitive knowledge of narrative structure”, context in which speech arises – sound, movie, content of speech..

A purpose of voice-over narration identified by Kozloff : convey important events,info or create intimacy with audience.

The claimed familiarity with narrative structure may help create this intimacy, because regardless of the amount of speech done by the narrator, audience has identified it as a narration and may experience the rest of the film along the narrative structure introduced in Kozloff’s introduction, thus stimulating an intimacy to the film paralleled to one between oral storyteller and listener.

Points out a major division, though recognizes variations (based on level of narration and narrators relation to the story), between : “authorial, 3rd person” and “character, 1st person” narrators.

I enjoyed the history and defense article of voicec-narration more than the other one because it pointed out the role it plays in enhancing the audience’s experience and amplifying the content of the film. I know that I will now pay attention to the way a voice-over narration affects me and the qualities it adds to the film.

Against voice-over narration: hinders the growth of cinema as a seperate visual art, insults the intelligence of the audience, results in the diminished use of the creative visual resources offered by film, is authoritative and provides a single interpretation instead of allowing individual spectator interpretations.

For voice-over narration: deeper characterizations by introducing emotions, thoughts..; provides historical context and expositional data; the layering of the oral narration and the visuals provides a distance that may be utilized to bring irony into the film (presenting what characters do not know, “tribal blind spots”). Also mentioned the possibility of introducing poetic feel to the film.

Those against voice-over narration view cinema as an art form with a single medium of creation – the visual, and thus by ignoring the unique features of film and allow the complex intertwining of various techniques. Their argument the a voice-ver narration would limit the film to a single biased interpretation does not seem to be aware of the different ways of narrating and contents. A well introduced and written narration can efficiently add to the visual story so that the audience may have more factors to interpret. For example, knowing the historical context of the events gives them another layer of significance beyond the scripted drama. I especially value and enjoy the irony introduced by a narrator when they voice a “tribal blind spot” because it is a fact that probably would not have been evident without the narration and it submerges me deeper into the film by acknowledging me presence.

The movies that I can remember used voice-over narration are Transformers and War of the Worlds, and both had the effect of tying me emotionally to the movie – I felt like a child listening to a great storyteller recounting a great adventure. They both also provided a context that otherwise might have been boring or too time consuming to watch, yet added significance to the events in the film by situating them into a larger context. Stranger the Fiction used narration in a curious way since it played a more effectual role in the story being portrayed, yet even then I do not think that the audience was deprived from the chance to interpret characters’ actions, feelings, etc.

As to the film we must chose for analysis I am considering : Transformers, Grizzly Man, American Beauty and About a Boy. I haven’t seen Am. Beauty or Grizzly Man though.

Acoustic Cyberspace, Erik Davis 

Is McLuhan saying that an acoustic space can give rise to a certain subjectivity depending on the construction of that acoustic space? I think that’s what I understood from that beginning of the reading. i then follow how he traces some of the chracteristics of acoustic space’s construction such like simultaneity and resonance, and the subjectivity they each produce. However, I get lost at the point where he says that ” we hear things and we see things simultaneously – but accodring to different logics, logics that are culturally defined and change over time.”  What are these logics? From what do the arise? Soon after he mentions “the conditions for experiencing information, consciousness, conception” and I wonder if these are what he refers to when e talks about “logics”. Also, what realm of sound is he considering that lends itself to logic? I don’t think I’m thinking of sound the way he is, and I should be, yet. At this point I understand this logic as something used to perceive sound. However, later on he higlights that “sound and smel carry vectors of mood and affect which change the qualitative organization of space, unfolding a different logic with a space’s range of potentials”, and I become confused as to whether the logic he spoke of precedes the perception of sound or if it is effected and produced by sound instead.

At the middle of the reading I am intereseted to see why he thinks this is of any importance : the “larger implications of sound and acoustics”.

He parallels the “utopian imagination” produced by the invention of the radio with “the rhetoric surrounding information technology”. This “utopian energy”, that uses imagination to dream about the possibility of progress, then dwindles away as the radio spectrum becomes “commodified and consumerized” by the state (“boundaries and rules that defince the commercial radio”)

He claims that radio, and presently the acoustic dimension of electronic media, produced “a different logic”. What is this logic produced my the acoustics of electronic media?

Early on in the text he wrote that “acoustic space isn’t limited to a world of music or sound; the environment of electronic media itself engenders this way of organizing and perceiving the other spaces we intersect”, and I had no idea what he meant by this, however after reading his idea about the logic produced by the acoustic dimension of electronic media I think that it may be possible that what he was saying at first was that this logic, which I still don’t know the mechanism he proposes it is produced by, is used as a way “of organizing and perceiving the other spaces we intersect.” …???

 He proposes that acoustic space can create subjectivities that “can help us feel our way through the spaces we are opening up and moving into”, and I am lost about what spaces he is talking about: information technology, electronic media, and their repercussions? How would these subjectivities do this?

Is his example of 60s and 70s electronic music’s “emphasis on the cosmic, on spatial disorientation, on transport, on affect, on the nonhuman.”, and example of the ability of acoustic space to create modes of subjectivity? The subjectivities it opened, contrasted to pop music, are the less personalized soundscapes and the pyschic spaces (vs the organization of narrative around love and lost)

In the first paragraph of the text he notes sound’s ability to act as a map, and then towards the end he states that electronic music “involves mapping the electronic media spaces that humans find themselves in”. WHAT THE HELL?? What is this “mapping” he is talking about?

Electronic music, dub music create “environments [that] suggest a kind of cyberspace – a spacious electronic orienation of affect and quality rathaer than information and quantity…”

 When he ends with “By pushing the boundaries of electro-acoustic environements, of acoustic cyberspace, we can maintain a line into the open spaces of the unknown”, I hope it is correct that I understand this is possible through the production of subjectivities…??

 Quote:

              “Sound and smell carry vectors of mood and affect which change the qualitative organization of space,     unfolding a different logic with a space’s range of potentials.”

• The words themselves are quite simple, however the ideas he wants to capture with phrases like “qualitative organization of space”, “space’s range of potentials”, along with the word “logic” are difficult to grasp unless one has read the entire text. His claim about the vectors of mood and affect instilled in sound and smell would have to be substantiated by some scientific data in my opinion, although personal experience may seem to support the statement. This quote is establishing the characteristic of sound that gives rise to it’s importance in producing subjectivities, and in turn the roles, he later writes, they play in human experience.
• The fact that the quote states that there are potentials in a space that can be tapped into by sound’s effects on the “qualitative organization of space” hints to the importance of studying sound because it opens new qualitative dimensions in an old space which serve as avenues to new ways of thinking, understanding, etc.

Megan Nordstrom’s Engl121 Portfolio

Well I first read Erik Davis’s text and then when I came to the portfolio I naturally found it boring, since the first reading provided ways of understanding sound to which I had never been introduced before; still, the information in the portfolio is very helpful, detailed, and well organized. It provided hints to what the instructor is looking for in a good paper.

             Quote:

                        ” ‘By setting this background mood with the help of narration and sound, Seabiscuit starts to be transformed into a symbol for success and overcoming hardships’ “

• The reasoning behind the sentence is clear because of its structure, and the choice of words is appropriate for the audience. The writer shows that they have given thought to the role of sound in the context of a movie.
• The quote gives evidence to the role sound holds in the realm of people’s perception and understanding of the world around us, even when this example used film as the object of attention. This role is important if people are interested in widening human experience of the world.