It's All Artifice

While technologies can extend perception, they can also mask it. Hearing music through speakers or headphones is one level of transmission loss. Experiencing the visual world through a camera is kind of a transmission loss, compared to direct observation, but creates a space for creativity.

On a cold morning recently, the air was very still and I got a chance to experience sound refraction, where the sound source is displaced or bent, similar to light refraction through glass or water. Sound appears to be closer than it really is, even though sound is traveling slower through cold air. But there is no way to artificially recreate sound refraction through headphones, as the sound spatiality is flattened. Then I realized that direct experience is not always better in an aesthetic sense because with art you want some degree of artifice because that's where the creativity is. There is no creativity through simply experiencing a moment and storing the memory, or recording it so that you can have others share your direct experience. The artist wants to use that memory in some way as an abstraction or to leave some kind of residue on a flat surface, a corollary to a 'flat' audio space. Audio recordings are like painting in this respect, as there is no way to authentically recreate experience such that everyone sees or hears it the same way. Memories of experiences are always in a vacuum, and in order to communicate them, it can only be through abstraction, even if it is representational like a portrait or landscape, a song or a symphony.

If I had a binaural mic with me and recorded that moment, you wouldn't experience it directly through headphones, and I'd have to construct an abstraction of it.

Art is more like the moon than the sun. It reflects (abstracts) rather than shines directly.

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I found this in passing as I was writing, an excerpt from Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics Nature And Culture By Yi-Fu Tuan, where he talks about the "multimodal" experience, which can't be directly reproduced in art, but enriches the art experience.