Title - Sound Stack, Soundwalk, Southworth
Creator - Cormac Donnelly 0000-0002-8872-0752
Affiliation - LJMU
Right Holder - Cormac Donnelly
Year of Pub - 2024

Decription
This videographic portfolio questions the extent to which a scholar (me) might go before they consider a piece of videographic research to be ‘complete’ or at least to have been engaged with as completely as possible. The portfolio comprises 3 elements; the video essay Sound Stack queries what value there is in the quest for sonic authenticity within film soundtracks, and what are the apparent extents of this authenticity? The tutorial video interrogates the particular means by which the Sound Stack video essay employs volumetric visualisation. It is my attempt to address how formal methods of videographic research and experimentation might be shared within the wider community of practice. The annotated soundwalk reflects on the deep sense of delight I felt in being able to practice this particular piece of research in a very real sense. The process of walking, re-tracing, and recording provided me with an opportunity to embody Southworth’s research in a way that I could not do simply by reading the thesis.

Key information
These are 3 linked videographic works which expand on my research into film soundtracks and city soundscapes. They also reflect on the nature of videographic making and the disemenation of method as an important part of the research and publishing of new work.

Citation
Donnelly, C. 2024. Sound Stack, Soundwalk, Southworth. Screenworks. 15(1) https://doi.org/10.37186/swrks/15.1/1

Contact
cormac@restrikestudios.co.uk

Terms of use
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Project and Funding
n/a

Contents
Sound Stack (mp4) - 9' 58" Video essay
Sound Stack Tutorial (mp4) - 34′ 53″ video tutorial
Taking Delight (mp4) - 88′ 07″ annotated soundwalk video


Methods
 
The Sound Stack video essay makes use of a volumetric imaging process made possible through the use of the medical imaging program Fiji. My use of this method builds on the previous formative work undertaken by Kevin L Ferguson (2015). Beyond this formal method, the video essay also acknowledges its debut as a conference presentation through the inclusion of a ‘quiz, which was timed in such a way as to allow for participant engagement in the room.

The use of the medical imaging programme Fiji for this video essay was not a fait acompli, but rather an extension of a short annotation experiment that I published on my blog, Deformative Sound Lab, in April 2022. This initial experiment (and indeed the blog as a whole) is an attempt to engage with O’Leary’s “luxury scholarship” (2021), a provocation to videographic practitioners seeking to goad them into experimental work that might lead towards new deformative and parametric methods of practice. Where Sound Stack is inspired by Ferguson’s Volumetric Cinema, this first experiment reflected on his earlier work on Film Visualization, which also used medical imaging software to create a single image, summing together the frames from a film. In my version, I worked with a short clip from The Double, annotating the clip with all the sounds I could hear in it, then summing the frames from the clip together. The resulting summed image retains a ghost of the film soundtrack in these annotations, where the dominant sounds in the scene are rendered in bolder text while more sporadic sounds fade into the image.

On sharing this first image on my blog, it was Alan O’Leary himself who suggested taking this annotation idea further into Ferguson’s subsequent volumetric work. That prompt led to this first annotated volume, where I sought to catalogue all the sounds present in the San Francisco Chronicle newsroom as rendered in Zodiac (Ficher, 2007). The resulting annotated volume seemed to take me a stage beyond Mittell’s unbound archive. The volume rendered the scene anew, a novel material object that I could directly interact with. One that represented time, space, and sound but was not reliant on temporality for critical engagement. In the manipulation and annotation of this 3D volume, I found the question about sonic authenticity, within and without the San Francisco Chronicle newsroom.

My soundwalk reflects on some of the earliest interventions in soundscape research, but through the recording of the soundwalk, it also reflects on the developing network of soundscape and soundwalk recordists (such as Radio Lento). I appreciate that presenting the soundwalk as a video might be seen as sullying the experience (Southworth blindfolded some of his participants and pushed them around in wheelchairs so they could listen unencumbered by sight), but I felt it was important to take this somewhat unique opportunity to see what further revelations might be gained through this intervention into the research. Barring one short video clip, I did not film the walk, as that, I feel, would have likely privileged the image over the sound, to the detriment of my experience and that of the subsequent listener.

The tutorial video is somewhat formally aligned with more technically focused tutorials that can be found on YouTube. I don’t imagine I am the only videographic scholar who has turned to channels such as Premiere Gal or Vince Opra to refresh myself on a tricky feature of the software, and my tutorial by and large follows the form of these. Given that this version originated from a series of online Zoom sessions, I chose to retain the Zoom meeting aesthetic, which helped frame the tutorial.

Sound Stack Tutorial Support Links: https://linktr.ee/soundstack