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history of Recordings and recording—Page 5the pastrepeats...or does it?the development of sound movies in 1927 was only the tip of the iceberg; new recording technologies and techniques emerged after that and new ones are emerging today at an ever-quickening pace. As pointed out on the previous page, this increase in the pace of change is all for the better, as it gave us the merger of sound with film, which is perhaps the most momentous development in art history. For the first time, sound movies gave us the power to immerse an audience in a multimedia experience; only since then has it been possible to combine images and sound in such as way as to imitate life and transport people to other worlds...or is this really the case? Surprisingly, scholarly research has established that the feat of integrating sound and moving images in story-telling may have been accomplished long before the Jazz Singer. This possibility was originally reported in a telecast by David Attenborough in 1960 and has been rebroadcast in episode four, Once Upon a Time, of a 2005 BBC television production hosted by Dr. Nigel Spivey called How Art Made the World, a made-for-television video series shown on PBS. In a recent interview for How Art Made the World, which was recorded for the 2005 production, Attenborough recounted his 1960 experiences with aboriginal nighttime ceremonies that integrate sound, imagery, and dance. He states: "…you have to recognize that they [the paintings] are only a part. They don't exist by themselves. … So the music is an integral element from all kinds of points of view and to abstract that from a piece of painting is to impoverish the painting." "the use of a single image was only one part of the Aborigine storytelling secret. These artists also use music, song and dance to transport themselves to the imaginary world of their "movie." Attenborough uses the four pictures below to illustrate how Aborigine movie telling hasn't changed. The two pictures at the left below are modern paintings drawn by a living Aborigine artist from Arnhem Land in northern Australia near Darwin. The two pictures at the right are petroglyphs from rock walls in the same region which were painted thousands of years ago. The pair at the top on both sides represent the Barrimundi fish. The bottom pair represent the Aborigine earth mother, Yingarna. The Barramundi fish and Yingarna each figure in a different Aborigine "movie." the fact that the pairs haven't changed much indicates that Aborigines have been telling the same stories since time immemorial. What makes these stories so compelling that they have lasted through the ages? the fusion of music, song, "moving" imagery, and the dance, Attenborough claims.
Aborigines believe that these creatures are literally alive in the Dreamtime world, another world to which they are transported when they dream, or in visions, or in ceremonies such as the ones Attenborough describes. They believe that they are transported to this world. As far as brain processes are concerned, these aborigine experiences are not appreciably different from what happens to modern movie audiences when they experience a "willing suspension of disbelief" while watching a movie. They, too, forget for a time that they are not immersed in another world. Aboriginal "movies" like these demonstrate that the multimedia performance has had the ability to move man deeply at least for tens of thousands of years.
Aborigine ceremonies are not open to the public, so videos of actual "movies" are unavailable. However, Aborigines practice and perfect their "movie" rituals just as a choir would practice a hymn before a church service. You can see or hear a brief clip of Arnhem Land Aborigines brandishing spears and playing their didgeridoos and click sticks for one of their stories by clicking in the NOTE, below. In the movie version, notice how the music, singing, and dancing heighten the dramatic intensity of the story.
about the futureRecording innovations may have been slow to come in the past, but today they are coming at a vastly increasing pace. As we shall see throughout these pages about recording, we now live in a golden age. The Internet, on which Electricka and the other modern muses depend for their existence, is in effect a massive recording and playback system. It could only have happened after mankind turned a gigantic technological corner in the 19th century. the story of art could not be written without also telling the story of recording. The modern Muses—creatures of the Internet—owe their very existence to man's ability to make recordings—to recording. And, just as with its predecessor recording technologies, the Internet is contributing to the advancement of the arts at a great pace and in new and different ways. ETAF recommends...Coming.
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