MOMI Trip

My favorite part about our trip to The Museum Of The Modern Image was the demonstration where our guide played the scene from "Titanic" for the class.  The idea behind the demonstration was to take apart the audio of the scene, piece by piece, so that we could see the importance of dialogue, sound effects, and music.  The whole demonstration left a pretty big impression on me and it taught me a lot about experimenting with different methods of artistic expression.

Without the sound being played during the scene, it was hard to focus on the action in the film.  The movement of the characters on the set alone was not enough to capture our attention.  Then, with just the dialogue being played, it just seemed silly.  The sounds of the characters panting, screaming, and yelling, seemed comical when there were no sound effects or music to back it up.  Next, the scene was just played with sound effects.

 I found sound effects to be the most interesting part because, without dialogue or music, it was easy to make out what the sounds used for the sound effects actually were.  The cables snapping on the smokestack were gun shots.  The smokestack collapsing was a tin can being crumpled. The sound of Rose falling on the deck of the ship was actually a sack of potatoes falling off a chair.  This idea of using different objects to create different sounds that leave a certain impression on an audience opened up a new world to me.  I feel that using sound to represent something as opposed to recreating it is a beautiful method for artistic expression.