Random thought for today:

It seems like we like audio all the time. I've got music on literally half the day. Sure, I watch TV and movies, but I've never stared at fractals or video art for any length of time while doing something else, so it just started me on thinking about why.

Here's what I've come up with:

1. Convenience & Focus: I can listen to or ignore the radio, but it's hard to ignore an image and come back to it. I think this is the biggest reason TV and audio are so different, but there's probably more to it.

2. Historical: Video is new to the human race, while music is as old as history

3. Range: Audio/Hearing has greater range - 20Hz to 20kHz covers three orders of magnitude, which allows both geometric patterning (octaves) and linear patterning. Video has primary colors and combinations, but--and maybe I'm way off base--patterns seem to be much more linear by nature, rather than linear plus logarithmic. Sight may have greater resolution than hearing, but it seems to lack range.

Thoughts? Will a new "video art" emerge as LCDs get cheaper and cheaper, or will audio always keep it's place uncontended?


And OT, I am probably both overpaid and underworked.

 

you are overpaid and underworked

 

you cant focus on other things if you are visually stimulated non-stop. The visual cortex needs too much input to tell the rest of your body what needs to get done.

we can listen to music and do a myriad of other things.

Vision is where most of our stimulus about our surroundings comes from therefore we give most of our "attention" to it.

Lets say we tried to use video stimulus like we do music and devise a way to constantly have it reaching us in some way (goggles of some kind that allow for other vision to still occur) so the visual stimulus in this case would be transparent to some degree.

you would probably find that the brain would shut down after a few hours to the point of causing a severe headache or fatiguing the user to the point of wanting to sleep. the user will most likely be recieving too much stimulus. try spending 6+ hours in a night club, you will see what I mean

people sleep because they get so bombarded with stimulus throughout the day, they have to reset in some way.

Now, there are plenty of examples of digital art you can have on your wall. that would be different because you would "choose" to look at it and then look somewhere else. the brain concentrates very hard on visual stimulus, becasue it is so important to our safety.

I am not sure if what I am describing is what you were thinking.

People have tvs on all day while they work too but they are mostly receiving audio stimulus from it until the audio causes them to look up at the screen for whatever reason.

 

Your brain can process many sounds at once but can only process one image at a time. That's why you can't watch a video while driving without killing someone, but you can listen to music and perform brain surgery at the same time.

OK I just made that crap up but it sounds logical to me.

 

we have large LCDs here at work that plays annoying stuff all the time... i sit right infront of one but find that I can ignore it much more easily than music...

i guess depending on the music volume.

:S ok my 2 cents.... waiting for lunch

 

It's because of how are brains are wired. Sound is processed by the emotional part of our brains and sight is processed by the logical part. It effects us differently.

 

Ok, well you all confirmed what I thought the main reason was. I guess it takes a lot more of our attention span to intake a visual input than an audio input.

Pretty odd how people work...

I thought the orders of magnitude might have been something--audio being "prettier" than visual stimulus because we can understand or hear a broader range than we can see--but it seems like that's just not the dominant effect.

Thanks for your input on my idle thoughts

 

Sound is our primal sense.

 

Music is a funny thing. You can engage much more brain power than you probably do today. Back in college I took a serious jazz appreciation class. After that, everytime I heard jazz I was deconstructing it, determining its historical place, and so on. I could not easily put jazz into the backround after that.

 

Yes, I do, it's called the internet and I'm useing it right now. It's all made by people and people go to sites that serve their interests, like s2ki.com