The reading I will be responding to is "Listening to Noise and Silence - Chapter 1". The section of this reading that I found most interesting was the passage about "Cézanne's Doubt.” The basic idea of this 1945 essay written by Maurice Merleau-Ponty is that the painter Paul Cézanne famously painted the same French landscapes in an attempt to “rediscover the world as we apprehend it in lived experience.” I definitely see the connection to sound production with this sentiment because I view a lot of that process as a way of immersing a viewer in a time and place and world that they themselves have not specifically lived and experienced. You as the producer might be trying to recreate a time and place that you yourself have previously experienced—like Cézanne—or you could be aiming to create an entirely new time, place, and world with all of the care and attention as one that actually exists. I believe the principles stay the same regardless.
In that way I find the painting comparison especially fascinating because I realized I had never thought of sound production as painting before. There are the obvious connotations of “landscape” vs. “soundscape,” but I think that the similarities also go deeper than that. In both cases, you have different layers that interact with one another to form a greater whole: foreground, middleground, background. I would also say that the same way color theory can inform the aesthetic whole of a painting, so can audio levels and textures and blending. I would say that the only big difference between the two—other than one using sight and one using hearing—is the inherent linearity of sound. A piece of audio cannot be listened to in a split second the way a painting can be viewed. However, I think that simply choosing to view a painting in a split second is missing the point.
As the reading states on page 8, “I hear and participate in the process of layers, distances, time and separations. The painting emerges over time in my ears.” This is to say that the real process of viewing a painting does involve linear time the same way a sound work does. You could look at the trees in the background of a Cèzanne painting, and then notice a house in the background, and then a stream in the foreground. The process of you “discovering” the painting takes time, and it is in this time that the immersion of a painting or an audio work truly takes hold.