From: garry@cs-sun-fsc.cpsc.ucalgary.ca (Garry Beirne)
Subject: Re: Sensory Modalities (was Re: Musical Virtual Worlds)
Date: Tue, 20 Nov 90 20:59:22 GMT
Message-ID: <1990Nov20.205922.12716@cpsc.ucalgary.ca>
Organization: The Banff Centre for the Arts

> Bringing this discussion back to VR, I think that the focus of VR has
> been on the visual modality because vision is a more information-rich
> domain than sound.  Sound is a one-dimensional medium while vision is
> two-dimensional (two-and-a-half-dimensional for stereo vision).  To
> put this in more psychological terms -- you can extract much more
> detailed spatial information about your world by looking around with
> your ears plugged than you can by listening with your eyes closed.

Arguments have been made that vision is *NOT* more information-rich
than sound.  Sound is *definitely NOT* one-dimensional.  The problem,
is too many people *believe* that sound is less important than images
because of our cultural bias towards a greater conciousness of image.
Sound has been relegated to the subconscious (of course I am generalizing)
in our culture, but that does not in any way reduce it's potential as
a medium for communicating important information.  Try watching a movie
without the sound.  Even in these cases, where the sound is an apparent
supplement to the image, the image takes on a completely different
meaning with sound than it does without sound.  If you are sitting in a
dark room, a good composer can affect your mood and emotions *much* more
effectively than a good imagemaker.

With regards to any references about MTV, I think we should be aware of
the difference between the crass exploitation of image for (predominantly)
mindless entertainment and the well-crafted use of image for expression
of useful information.  (Ooops, lots of assumptions on my part...)

One of my premises is we should look to our aural senses for methods of
creating *truly* virtual worlds that are effective and expressive.  (By
*truly* virtual worlds, I guess I mean those that do not attempt to 
recreate the real world.  Rather, it refers to those that describe new
worlds, new vehicles of expressing information to and gathering
information from the occupant;  those that create new cognitive models
of what the 'world' is and how it works.)  Sound may have a distinct
advantage over image for novel virtual environments because our culture
tends to have a less defined notion of the meaning of sound than of
image.  We won't have the same expectations, due to preconditioning, in 
an aural world than we will in a visual world.  Now, if I can only
*prove* my hunches, we might have something....

I agree with Brian Yamauchi:  the net is *NOT*
a visual medium....it *is* symbolic  But, that raises the question
of what images are NOT symbolic ?  How
do we extract meaning if we don't perform some kind of 
interpretation?  This is, I expect, a well discussed topic
in the visual arts.  Are there any readers out there who
are more fluent on the topic out there ?

-- 
  Garry Beirne           Box 1020        Phone:   (403) 762-6641
  Head, Computer Media   Banff, Alberta  FAX:     (403) 762-6659
  Media Arts             Canada          UUCP:    garry@cpsc.UCalgary.CA
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