Sound and visual media

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Sound and visual media(a) How might a narrow understanding of television have contributed to a lack of attentiveness to sound?

Television is a medium of telecommunication that is used to transmit and receive moving sound and images (Kelly 2011). The device is capable of transmitting images that are black and white in colour or at times, it can transmit them in three dimensions. Understanding the message from television is very easy because it involves watching and internalising the meaning of information since television programs cover various things, which are understood from different perspectives. However, researchers have reported that a narrow understanding of television has contributed to a lack of attentiveness to sound.

As human beings, we blame our inability to concentrate and understand television fully from distractions resulting from many platforms, such as news feeds and tweets. As a result, we end up bemoaning our scattered understanding, which results in lack of paying attention to sound (Sándor 27). Unless people aspire to be attentive, the society will never focus more on what sound focuses on. If fact, anecdotal evidence shows that the number of individuals who are searching for methods of increasing their attention to sound has decreased dramatically within the last few years, despite the fact that narrow understanding contributes to attention which is just a single facet of our attentiveness. Mastering and understanding of television message means being the commander of mind, although many people lack this trait which leads to deliberate rotation of mind thereby causing lack of attentiveness to sound.

(b). Does an attentiveness to sound help draw our attention to aspects of television practice that typically go unconsidered?

What individuals decide to give attention to or to ignore shapes the existence of reality since the focus is perceived as reality. Of course, everyone pay attention to distinct types of sound, meaning that people have a diverse concept of reality. Attentiveness to sound explains why several witnesses in an account of sound crime could end up presenting varied information because people train their focus lens on diverse things and framing these shots of reality is not easy. Research has shown that attention is the capacity to focus on particular thoughts or stimuli while ignoring others and this shapes how people experience and perceive the surrounding world (Harper 2009).

When people engage the mind in wandering on meaning of sound, the brain employs the same region, which is utilized when individuals try to exercise attention. Therefore, even if they are not giving the task or work at hand the focus, people end up paying attention to the distracting practices of television. As such, we ought to improve our rate of critical thinking because attention to sound does not only allow us to read and also digest television information, but also assists in wrangling and analysing it. Whether the mind wander skews positive or negative depends largely in subset of our temperament and therefore, an attentiveness to sound help people to draw their attention to aspects of television practice that typically go unconsidered.

Two key problems for sound studies are the questions of noise and silence. What are the traditional ways of understanding these concepts?

The traditional ways of understanding concepts of noise and silence are not very different from modern approaches. According to the traditional perspective, sound is any type of energy which is transmitted by means of pressure variations. For example, whenever people play with musical instruments like the guitar, some type of vibrating chords set the air particles in such a way that they generates pressure in the form of waves after the process of vibrating. Consequently, an individual nearby might end up hearing this sound when the produced pressure waves are received in the ears. This could come as noise which may end up being distractive.

Sound could also be produced by several other sources like a running engine, a functional machine tool and by use of vibrating loudspeaker or even diaphragm. Upon clicking on the sound buttons, noise results from varied sources and therefore people should take precautionary measures because noise can have permanent destructive effects. Noise is usually regarded as an unwanted sound. Perception of noise is subjected to many factors like the magnitude, duration, characteristics and the period of occurrence. These factors are known for affecting subject impression and understanding of all types of noise (Gross 1964).

Subsequently, the meaning of silence under a traditional perspective refers to a state of quietness. When the noise is not produced, it means silence is enhanced and under this situation, the techniques of understanding many things are enhanced. For example, in a classroom set up, most teachers used silence for multiple reasons, such as promoting learners concentration. Indeed, silence promotes the process of focusing a learner’s attention, response. It also serves as a form of encouraging the steps of error correction. Of course, people might be silent oftenly and remain active. Traditionally, this was the most commonly accepted principle in learning and hospital environments.

Using traditional concepts of understanding, noise was not a preferred sound because it caused negative effects on health. For example, elevated noise in working places caused hearing impairment, annoyance, ischaemic, cardiac disease and also sleeplessness. On the other hand, transformations in birth defects and immune systems were also connected to noise exposure. Although presbycusis was partially associated with age, in numerous developed countries, the cumulative consequences of noise were sufficient enough to impair the process of hearing of a huge percentage of people in their lifetime. In addition, noise exposure was also known for inducing tinnitus, vasoconstriction, hypertension and heart adverse effects. Beyond these results, elevated levels of noise were known for creating stress, increasing rates of accidents in the workplace, and also for stimulating antisocial tendencies and aggression among the ancient people (Kelly 2011). Nevertheless, traditionally, the most important cause of noise were aircrafts and vehicles on top of prolonged exposure to an industrial noise. Research indicates that road traffic used to demonstrate how 80% of annoyances reports in the whole world were caused by noise during the ancient times. In addition, firecrackers used to upset wild and domestic animals or even the noise traumatized people, whereby the most frequent noise traumatized people were those exposed to the military conflicts even though loud groups of individuals triggered complaints and related behaviours on noise. Therefore, traditional approaches embraced and appreciated state of silence other than noise as a form of sound.

Early cinema is often colloquially described as “silent cinema”. Is this an accurate description? Might we think of contemporary cinema as a form of “silent cinema” as well? How so?

The description of early cinema as silent cinema was an accurate description. This is because a silent cinema is a cinema that lacks synchronized and recorded sound, as it lacks particular spoken dialogue, which was also applied to early cinema. In silent films, dialogue is transmitted via muted gestures, title cards, and mime. In fact, the knowledge of combining both the motion pictures and the recorded sound is as old as the cinema itself, even though there are several technical challenges, which affect the process. Early cinema aimed at providing a description to the early decade of pictures in motion and the designing which assisted in shaping cinema. It was therefore referred to as the full account through which cinema developments were made because it concentrated on the main events in history of cinema.

Therefore, we should think of contemporary cinema as a form of silent cinema because contemporary films provide the similar sort of insight, which we obtain from watching silent movies. Some offer a very intense artistic experience or penetrating objectives of life in other places and times while others document our daily existence during extraordinary and historical events. Nevertheless, other contemporary cinema could be resolutely very strange, just like the silent cinema, because some end up resisting assimilation to the current habits and behaviour of thought. Furthermore, they force people to agree that silent cinema is radically diverse from what people watch in these modern days, which call for the need to make adjustments in our way of viewing and learning cinema (Sándor 1981).

Just like any other old cinema, the history of silent cinema encompasses more information, which can be used constructively. By studying the criteria of making early films, people discover how audiences and creators responded to different scenarios at different moments in history. Consequently, searching for cultural and social influences on early films helps us to understand the ways through which silent films bear the specific traces and how the society consumes them. Despite the fact that old cinema did not use advanced technology, it employed the use of motion pictures that explored particular look of the main inventions in old cinema covering the Zoetrope, cinematography, and Kinetoscope factors, which are also used by the silent cinema (Harper 2009). This makes old cinema to be equivalent to silent cinema since both refer to several important issues with regard to facts of passion of the film. Many old motion pictures used to get lost since many artists used the nitrate storage, which was extremely flammable and unstable and this is the only difference that we can point out between old and silent cinema since silent cinema uses advanced means of storage. Moreover, both silent and old films can be deliberately destructed because they could be having little value, or could be inaccurate because of having insufficient numerical data and this makes them to be equal.

In conclusion, contemporary cinema is a form of silent cinema since most arguments rely on evidence, which comprise of message that offers grounds for trusting that an argument is practical. Use of evidence in both assists us in judging whether the artist presents some plausible answers to the initial question of the cinema (Friedmann 2011).

Works Cited

Friedmann, Anthony. Writing for Visual Media. Boston: Focal Press, 2001. Print.

Gross, Harvey S. Sound and Form in Modern Poetry: A Study of Prosody from Thomas

Hardy to Robert Lowell. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964. Print.

Harper, Graeme. Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media: An Overview. New York:

Continuum, 2009. Print.

Kelly, Caleb. Sound. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011. Print.

Sándor, György. On Piano Playing: Motion, Sound, and Expression. New York: Schirmer

Books, 1981. Print.

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