Second Sound

 

Going through my incunabula of old article clippings, I stumbled on an article about an idea called "Second Sound" from the late 1990s. It was an idea proposed by Kenneth "KJ" Stewart for binaural cognition of dialog in films, based on decibel levels and frequency bands.

Innovation in image and sound always relate to the same idea: that attention is selective and can be subjectively experienced on different levels or layers, which is the same idea in some respects to Music For Places, i.e. using the ambient audio (or even a photograph or video) of a place as a background, for a "Second Sound" experience. Like the Necker Cube illusion, you can only focus on one thing at a time and let them 'flip' back and forth in attention, which is crucial to music listening and appreciation. Music seems 'flat' but there are other dimensions that are never liminal.