Paying special attention to sound and music in live-dance contexts, this chapter maps out some of the challenges for choreographers and composers in the transition to screendance. It challenges the inherent ocularcentrism in film, and foregrounds sound’s cognitive interplay with the image in creating or dissolving illusions and by extension facilitating or disrupting narrative and temporal continuities. It evaluates the perceptual position of sound within audiovisual mechanisms and positions sound’s communicative qualities as an essential contribution to sound film and possessing distinctive possibilities for screendance makers. ‘Sound as choreographic object’ highlights the significance of sound within the field of screendance. We will concentrate on two different points of view: on one side, we analyse how sounds can build temporal discourses that become attached to specific spaces on the other side, we consider the use of a space that emerges from contextual connections triggered by sounds. The sound art repertoire approaches these two aspects in a very particular way, placing them at the core of its creative process and establishing connections with conceptual and referential aspects that are put in evidence by sound. To analyse these relations we focus on two fundamental aspects for the study of sound art: space and time. At the same time, it resists being fully incorporated by these two domains as it develops a discourse that is very specific to its own. As a relatively new art genre it oscillates between aesthetical and organisational strategies that are commonly found in the domain of both music and visual arts. We concentrate on the particular use of sound in this repertoire whose delimitation is still increasing among practitioners. This paper addresses some aspects related to the use of sound to create referential and representational discourses in sound art. Finally, I discuss several strategies that can be used for the creation of large-scale form, with particular reference to algorithmic design principles used in my recent audiovisual installation, Room Dynamics. Using practice-based observation and analysis, I describe several compositional strategies through which musical concepts of material and form can be extended in space and time: each of these strategies provides means with which to shape or constrain the visitor’s co-production of experiential form.
By applying this musical perspective to macro-scale formal structures, a set of tools and concepts become available for the analysis of temporal form in existing sound or audiovisual installations. Due to the differences between concert and installation presentation practices – including, but not limited to, the increased agency of the mobile visitor – I re-examine form in installation contexts as the particular temporal experience co-produced by the first-person subject as they navigate in, through and out of the work’s frame. In order to enable a greater understanding of temporal form in sound installations, I suggest a cross-disciplinary adaptation of musical form to the installation context. Sound and media installations are rarely considered from a time-based, formal perspective. The framework will relate the compositional concepts of vertical harmonicity and horizontal counterpoint (Chion 1994) to the perceptual notion of “cross- modal binding” (Whitelaw 2008), thus linking compositional dynamics to perceptual effects and affects. I will suggest a graphical framework for the analysis and composition of audiovisual relations between sound media and self-illuminating light objects, detailing various forms of integrated audiovisual dynamics. I propose to delineate the various shades of synchresis through a case study analysis of the somewhat simpler relations between light and sound in media installation works using luminosonic objects: objects which appear to emit both sound and light in an integrated manner. While existing analytical frameworks (Chion 1994, Coulter 2009) provide basic classification tools for experimental audiovisual works, they fall short in elaborating the variety of compositional possibilities falling within the notion of “synchresis” (Chion 1994).
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