The Art of Noise

Russolo differentiates between noise and silence by stating that all nature is just silence. Earthquakes, tornados, rain, and thunderstorms are all regarded as silent. All man made sound would be considered noise by Russolo. Anything machine oriented or mechanically produced was thought of as noise. Sound on the otherhand was distinct and independent of life. Music was considered to be sound. By reading Russolo's definition of silence, all nature was silent in the ancient past. Anything untouched by man but made by nature was considered silent. What I believe he was trying to get at was if there was no man to make noise then everything was silent even natures weather because there was no man to hear it. Therefore I believe that according to Russolo in today's world there would be no silence.

Russolo sees the state of current music as complicated, harsh, and strange. Futurists can improve on music by enlarging and enriching the field of sounds. Moving away from pure sound and creating noise-sound futurists will be able to improve on the state of music. The adding and substitution of noises for sounds is key according to Russolo.

Pleasures of Light

This made me think of a few people's first video project:

The Pleasures of Light at the Ludwig Museum

The Art of Noises

This is kind of off topic in relation to the purpose of us reading this article, but Russolo's writing style gives me weird vibes about his personality. I keep imagining him being a conceited snob and kiss-up to "Pratella the futurist genius", which made reading the article a strange and slightly comical experience for me, and causing me to be distrustful of the validity of what he says in it.

At the beginning of the article, he's personifying and exaggerating the origin and history of sound, which made sense and was a pretty good description about the auditory aspects of life back in those days. Some distortion is there, but the general ideas seem accurate. Then, he begins to talk about how music (specifically classical music) has gotten boring and stupid. This is where it starts to get a little crazy.

"Meanwhile a repugnant mixture is concocted from monotonous sensations and the idiotic
religious emotion of listeners buddhistically drunk with repeating for the nth time their more or
less snobbish or second-hand ecstasy.
Away! Let us break out since we cannot much longer restrain our desire to create finally a new
musical reality, with a generous distribution of resonant slaps in the face, discarding violins,
pianos, double-basses and plainitive organs. Let us break out!"

His evangelical approach of discussing futurism is kind of annoying, although I have to agree that the idea is innovative and clearly relating to Project 4. When he begins to the list the kinds of sounds that futurists would use to create "music", it reminds me of something a teacher told us in high school. We were discussing the difference between abstract and concrete (figurative) visual artwork, and how the same two categories exist in sound as well. She said that abstract sound is every musical instrument note or noise that we hear in music, and if abstract noise didn't exist, we would all be listening to only natural sounds, like the sounds of waterfalls, wind, etc., pretty much the same examples that Russolo gave as the medium for futurist orchestras. So now I have categorized that futurists use "natural" sounds (also including industrial sounds that are seemingly natural to humans today because they are so commonplace) and regular musicians use "abstract" sounds.

Scott McCloud

This comic article was extremely enlightening and a fun read. I was able to easily follow his concepts and he made it fun to look through and read. He successfully captured my attention and my interest with the use of his examples through comics and his variety of techniques. I like how he went into great detail in his examples, explaining how the time, action, motion, sound, and box contributed to that scene in the panel. I also liked how he talked about the first example into such depth and would bring it back up to prove a point later on in the comic. From now on, I definitely want to learn everything in this comic style manner rather than just plain text in textbooks or online. There is so much more to comics than I would have ever known. I find it so interesting that time and motion are such complicated and intricate aspects in creating comics but comics can easily display it otherwise to audiences in the final product making stories flow seamlessly throughout time and space and throughout the pages.

Scott Mcloud article

After I finished this, I looked back and was actually really pleased with how much thought was provoked by a reading assignment that was comprised of more image than text. I had not really considered the fact that comics strips had been around for so long, nor had I put much thought into the idea of time and motion in comic form. I can see how comics could really lay a great foundation for things such as animations, especially the story-boarding process that leads up to it. I think that this article has definitely helped me get into the right mind frame for our stop-motion project, seeing as it is a project which is also developed on a frame-by-frame basis.

comic within a comic

This article made some really interesting points about comic strips such as how several different moments or events can occur within a single picture especially with his comic within a comic approach yet at the same time comics lack transitions between frames and are missing huge chunks of information explaining how characters get from point a to point b or how much time has elapsed but for some reason we subconsciously fill that gap. However, what seems like a complicated process of jumping from frame to frame actually isn't that difficult to understand because its based on real life experiences such as long pauses. Also, the importance of the frame was fascinating, how a single square can define time and space as well as separate the future from the past because all three (past, present, and future) are visible at the same time, which doesn't occur in other mediums such as film. Lastly, I thought the idea of separating motion from sensation was interesting for a lack of better word. How the simple movement lines were based off of futurist and dadaist artists. I never knew how much thought went into creating a comic, the space between and size of the frames, layout, types of word bubbles, etc. This makes storyboarding seem a lot cooler than it actually is.

Scott McCloud

The use of the comic strip to aid in defining the examples worked great. With many of the examples, I feel as if I would not have followed what it was saying without the visual aspect with it. I also felt that the reading helped explain how to "fix" the distortion of time from point A and point B. This will help me better convey a span of time when I need to do so.