I’ve been listening to Sonic Museum today, and blogged about it at New Music Strategies.
It got me thinking about how we experience things through our senses, and the way in which (as McLuhan would have it) new media extend our senses.
Simply put, television lets us see things that are much further away than our eyes would ordinarily allow. Radio does the same for our ears. But just as we can extend our senses in terms of distance, we can also extend them in terms of our relationship to time.
Recording can extend our hearing back through time. Digital editing and, in particular, hypertext changes the relationship of our senses to time and space. In a way, digital technology allows us to perceive in 4 dimensions, travelling up and down, side to side and jumping around in the chronology as we see fit.
We can see some of these things being explored in narrative. This is, admittedly, not new – and experimental cinema has messed with sequence for some decades. However, our capacity to process multi-linear and non-sequential narrative has changed with an increasing familiarity with the 4-dimensional perception that comes with digital media.
Mental note made to explore and research this further – and I’d welcome any links to work that may have already been done in this area.
