Amanda Mattson

COMM 141

Semester Project

4/19/01

Seeing With Sound

"I took a blind man to a particularly heavy drama, which depended solely on action throughout. Afterwards he could tell me the whole play, and he want so far as to describe certain dramatic actions which he had "seen" and compared with what I saw myself; little had been lost."

After reading the above quote from The Play in the Studio by Victor Smythe in Alan Beck's article Is Radio Blind or Invisible? A Call for a Wider Debate on Listening-in, I became instantly intrigued by the idea that a blind person can "see" what is occurring on stage in a drama such as the one described above. Beck, who hails from the Drama Department at the University of Kent in the Canterbury region of the United Kingdom, also adds that, "To satisfy myself further, I asked a doctor friend of mine whether he considered that our sense of hearing would be intensified as a blind person’s by the constant listening to broadcast performances. He assured me that it was quite within the bounds of possibility." This admission furthered my interest and led me to wonder if a blind person could also "see" what was happening in a non-live performance, such as a movie, based solely on the sounds they heard. These questions and my curiosity in the subject ultimately lead to what is now my semester project. I chose to conduct an experiment with a movie that exhibits a wide range of sound accompanying the visual images onscreen. I had one blind person, and one blindfolded person with normal vision listen to the same scene of a movie to determine if they could accurately describe the events taking place on screen. As Merleau-Ponty states in his Theory of Integrating Perception:

"The sense of touch is transferred to the eye and one is able to locate and identify things in the environment, in one's sensory envelope. So can we consider synaesthetic aspects of aurality? That listening can also be divided into the optic (where the sense of seeing is transferred to the ear) and into the haptic (where sound is physicalized and sensually experienced through the body, and touch, perspective and depth are experienced to a greater extent by the listener in processing)."

I hoped to discover that listening can be "divided into the optic". Going into the experiment, my thought was that the subject with normal vision would give a less accurate account of the action taking place, therefore reinforcing the idea stated in the quote above that a blind person's sense of hearing is more acute than that of a person who can also rely on vision to analyze his or her surroundings.

The experiment in which the class participated at the beginning of this semester also came to mind when reading Beck's article, as well as in preparing for this project. I recalled the experiment in which the class had to determine if they would rather be blind but able to hear, or deaf but able to see. I chose to be deaf but able to see over blindness with the ability to hear. While doing this experiment and learning which sense I would rather be without if I had to choose, I watched television as part of my experiment, or better yet "listened" to television. This was very frustrating to me, and I realized that I wasn't very good at being able to picture what was going on with sound as my only guide. Because television, unlike radio, is largely based on visual action, I felt very lost and yearned for my sight. When I reversed the experiment, and was able to see but not hear, I could still watch TV, and was better (much better) at being able to put together what was going on. However, I couldn't listen to the radio or a CD of course because I would be completely unable to hear it, making those mediums useless. I realized though that even without TV, radio, or music, I would prefer to be able to "see" my surroundings rather than "hear" my surroundings. I felt less lost, less frustrated, and much more comfortable when I simulated deafness, but was still able to see. One thing that also came to mind during this experiment however, was that in real-life people can't choose if they'd rather be blind or deaf, they get chosen. Thinking of this scenario when planning my semester project, I remembered the fact that it was difficult to determine what was going on in a television program without sight, and thought it could be interesting to investigate. However, I chose to use a film rather than a television show based on the idea that feature films tend to put more effort into the sound and musical score associated with the action that is taking place than do television programs.

In Beck's article, he goes on to discuss radio, a solely aural medium which is not "lacking" a visual aspect like a movie is when one watches it blindfolded. He does use several comparisons though between the blind, aural "seeing" and how this relates to radio:

"Blindness - pathological blindness - is certainly equated with total visual loss, and therefore in radio audiences with the inability to 'see', and in radiowriting, sometimes with an overcompensatory emphasis on those radio texts which typify this ('pure radio', the 'radiogenic', blind characters in radio drama, occurrences of the almost totally aural 'mise en scène', etc.)."

So Beck argues that radio can compensate with sound because the broadcaster knows that there is no visual aid to lead the listener. By using a medium that that is not only aural, but also visual, such as film, I sought to learn whether or not the sound in a movie merely accompanies the visual, or if it plays just as big of a part as the visual itself. Later on in his writing, Beck goes on to highlight an article entitled 'Wireless for the Blind' from The Radio Times of January 30^th, 1925 (p. 244), which he feels is "most perceptive on the lived experience of blindness and listening-in." Like Beck, I also found this article to be quite perceptive. The article deals with Captain Ian Fraser, a soldier that was blinded in France at the end of the first World War, and a comment he made about the differences in perceptions for him in listening-in to dramas on the radio and attending the theatre:

"The BBC has one difficulty . . . namely, that all the voices they present to the listener come from the same place, relatively to his ears. It may be a loud-speaker, or a headphone, but the voice is always in the same relative position with regard to the listener’s ear, whereas, at the play, the stage is wide and deep, and it is possible to receive great assistance in following movement to utilize this direction."

I wondered if a movie's sound could provide this depth. I was sure that at a movie theatre it would because of the surround sound systems used, but I didn’t know what it would be like to watch a movie on a television, and if a sense of depth and movement could still be gained. Beck also traces the blindness trope back to its origins in the 1920's:

"In the first decades of wireless, comparisons were made with the experiences of blind people, almost always to the advantage of the BBC, and to reassure listeners: How many listeners have considered the great advancement which has been made in the power of "seeing through the sense of hearing" since broadcasting began?"

This is important because not many listeners have likely thought about the advancements that have been made in the realm of sight through sound.

The first movies ever made were of course silent films. The idea of film was so new at that time, however, that viewers probably didn't feel like they were "missing" anything, because just to be able to view images in motion on a screen was such advanced technology at that time. The silent film obviously did not rely on sound, but it also didn't have to, nor was it able to. In today's films, sound is relied upon heavily. Or is it? Is it just an added bonus that technology has produced, or is it merely that today's audience is so used to watching movies with sound, that watching one without would be completely unacceptable? I think movies do rely on sound, and today's movies wouldn't be what they are without it. But is the sound so good that a blind person can tell what is going on?

There are millions of movies, and a large number of them use sound as a paramount feature in the film. I decided to choose a new movie, as few experiments of this sort would likely have been done with it, as well as for the fact that the subjects I used in the experiment would be less likely to have seen or "heard" it before. I chose the film Gladiator by Ridley Scott. It is a big Hollywood blockbuster film, which took home the most Oscars at this year's Oscar Award Ceremony. This movie, which uses digital sound to enhance every scene, paid close attention to detail throughout in capturing every sound going on in and around the action. There are numerous battle scenes where the sound is so accurate that it seems as if the scene is actually taking place right in your living room with you; it is quite intense and very much a major feature of the film.

Throughout this course, as well as in planning this project and experimenting with the choice of blindness versus deafness, it was impossible for me not to think of my uncle, Rob Mattson. My uncle Rob is blind, and has been so since around the time he turned 16 years old, 36 years ago. I have always thought about Rob when thinking about sound in this course, and knew I wanted to use his insight somehow in my final project, even before I had decided upon a topic. After reading the quote in Beck's article though, I knew what I wanted to do, and I knew that Uncle Rob would be the perfect subject for my experiment.

Rob was born with vision, though it was very poor and he could never see in color. As his eye-sight grew worse, a black rim around his vision began to set in, getting bigger and bigger every year, while taking away more and more of what he could see, until he could only make out a little dot of light in the middle of each eye, until that too was eventually overtaken by darkness. His blindness has never slowed him down though, and still he never ceases to amaze me. At 52, he is the mayor of Ballard, Washington, a large suburb of Seattle, Washington. He has been married for almost thirty years, and has four children. His wife is legally blind as well, though she can see, just not very well, but none of their children are blind. Rob has a Seeing Eye dog named Peso, a beautiful black lab. Rob's biggest pet peeve and the thing that makes him the most frustrated is when people only talk to his dog, or come up to his dog and get down on their knees and start petting him as if he's not even there. These are also usually the people that if they do say something to Rob, they speak very loud and slow, as if being blind means you are also deaf and mentally challenged. Rob was very willing to participate in this experiment, and has listened to many movies throughout his lifetime. He sees his blindness as a challenge, not a handicap, and has never let it stand in the way of accomplishing what he wants in his life. He also believes he is a stronger person from his blindness. I admire Rob so much and have learned a great deal from him; he truly is an amazing person, and has already done so much more than most people who have their vision do in a lifetime.

The person that I used as the seeing subject for this experiment is my fiancé, Joe. I knew he would be the most honest about the experience, and take it seriously. His vision and hearing are normal, so taking away his sense of sight and forcing him to rely on his sense of sound is a new and different experience for him.

My hypothesis for this experiment was that the blind subject, Rob, would be able to explain the scene more accurately than the blindfolded subject, Joe would. I believed that because Rob is used to relying on his hearing and listening to every detail, he would be able to paint a picture that more closely resembles the actual action taking place onscreen. The following comes from page 39 of the 1998 article entitled Route Descriptions by Visually Impaired and Sighted Children from Memory and from Maps by Edwards, Ungay and Blades. I feel it captures how I came to the decision about my hypothesis:

"The wayfinding skills of blind and visually impaired people are based on very different kinds of information from those of sighted people. The information which the visually impaired person receives through the senses of touch and hearing are more limited and fragmented than visual information. Therefore both the quality and quantity of information needed for wayfinding is likely to differ between sighted and visually impaired people."

The skills that visually challenged individuals use to determine what is going on around them truly is different than those that are able to take their sight for granted and use it in addition to their other senses. My contention is that Rob, for example, compensates for his lack of vision by relying more heavily on his sense of sound, therefore being able to complete a picture of what is occurring around him in a more accurate way than that of someone, such as Joe, who is not used to having to depend on his hearing alone to decipher what is happening around him. Rob's skills are more conditioned to listening, as opposed to Joe who uses his vision combined with his hearing.

The scene I chose from Gladiator is a battle scene. There is not very much talking involved, but a lot of music and sound effects that shape the scene. It is scene number fifteen entitled 'The Battle of Carthage' in which the Gladiators, including the main character, Maximus played by Russell Crowe, fight in the Coliseum in Rome for the first time in the film. The Caesar Commodus reopened the Coliseum for a series of games, and the Gladiators were not expected to win this opening fight. The scene opens with the Gladiators being instructed by their "master" in the dungeon beneath the Coliseum on what will take place when they enter the stadium. The battle to the death involves about ten Gladiators on foot, each with a sword, chained together to hinder their mobility. Their opponents in the fight are several chariots driven by warriors wielding all types of gruesome weapons and huge men on horseback in armor with axes and spears. The Gladiators prevail and gain the respect of the audience at the Coliseum. The crowd in the Coliseum is very vocal throughout the scene and help to shape the mood of the battle. The scene closes with an obviously entertained, but slightly perplexed Commodus as he ponders over the fact that the Gladiators won the opening fight.

Blindfolded, Joe watched the scene. He explained to me what he pictured as he listened to the movie. He was quite accurate. In the opening of the scene, he "saw" a dungeon with huge bellows and blacksmiths pounding chains, as he heard the sound of fire and the banging of metal. He then pictured a tall man instructing the Gladiators, all of whom he knew were in chains due to the prevalent rattling noises. He heard the cheers and taunting of a large crowd and pictured the Gladiators in the stadium. He pictured a sunny day and men on horseback blowing long, thin trumpets. So far Joe is quite close to the actual occurrences in the film, though the trumpet players were not on horseback. He then saw a man in the middle of the huge stadium addressing the crowd and welcoming them to the games. The man was actually on the edge of the stadium, but was still the center of attention. Joe pictured the Gladiators huddled together, as he heard the voice of Maximus instructing the men to stay close together. He then heard swords drawn and horses enter, which is precisely what happened. He knew someone else got killed and pictured blood, due to the screams he heard.

As the scene continued, Joe's imagination was used more and more. He started explaining colors and expressions that he "saw" and described actions more fully and included a lot more detail. For example he said towards the end of the scene that he saw "a man falling to the ground off his horse and landing on his back and getting stabbed," as opposed to his earlier statement, "someone just got killed," which he uttered upon hearing the first death.

Continuing on, Joe heard more horses enter and the music grow louder. By cheers of the crowd, he could tell that the Gladiators were winning; he sensed a turn of emotion from the crowd rooting for the people fighting against the Gladiators to rooting for the Gladiators themselves. He heard wheels spinning, and saw a chariot, which is what occurred onscreen as well. He saw a horse fall and heard the Caesar laugh as someone else died. He could tell when the crowd was surprised, and as the music grew more triumphant, he could tell the Gladiators had almost won the battle. He explained men running about, as he heard their armor against their skin and against each other. Joe "saw" almost every stabbing that occurred in the fight, and could tell that the Gladiators were becoming more aggressive, which is just what happened. As the music reached its loudest point, Joe explained the triumphant crowd he pictured, and the Gladiators standing in the middle of the stadium as they looked around at the all their fans, cheering them for their victory.

Joe described accurately the main events in the scene. He felt a lot of movement due to the constant sound, and by the end of the scene was describing everything in a lot of detail. For example, he knew there was a stone wall in the stadium because of the sounds from the crashes he heard. This particular detail is interesting in that I didn't even notice the stone wall because I was busy watching the people. He pictured a lot of metal due to the "metallic sounds," as he described them, and even pictured gold on the chariots, which was true. He pictured Caesar in white, though he was not, but a detail such as this does not hinder the scene whatsoever. Joe revealed after he removed the blindfold that he was "trying to listen for everything," and that he listened very closely in hopes of picking out sounds that would aid him in telling him what was happening in the film, rather than listening passively to get a general picture of the scene.

Though Joe was surprisingly accurate in his depiction of the scene from Gladiator, Rob was even more so. Not only could Rob explain what was going on, the way he explained it was truly as if he had watched the scene with his eyes; it was eerily accurate. He knew when people were running or walking or standing, and went so far as to describe emotions that people were feeling, which he could tell from certain voice inflections or from the music. For example, he knew that the Gladiators were more nervous than anything at the beginning of the battle, and could sense an "uneasiness on their faces" just before the fight began. This was right on, as I watched with my own eyes the Gladiators look like scared little boys as they grew more and more petrified of the battle that they were expected to die in. Rob explained the scene differently than Joe in that he described it as a continuous movement. Joe would listen for a second and then describe what he heard. Rob described the scene just as a seeing person would while they were watching it; he gets an overall sense of what is happening and "watches" the scene as a whole, not just in segments. At the beginning of the scene he described a "dark, hot dungeon where men in torn clothing were slaving away in their chains." He explained the scene just like a story would be told, and it was very descriptive.

Rob described the Gladiators as entering the coliseum in rags for clothes, which was correct, although Maximus and one other Gladiator did get to wear armor. The fact that Rob pictured the Gladiators as wearing tattered clothes is significant, because there were no audio clues that served to highlight this. He created this detail in his mind based on his understanding of what he imagined they would be wearing. This shows how experienced Rob is in listening to the world around him and filling in the details mentally, based on contextual clues. Compare this to the fact that Joe didn't describe at all what the Gladiators were wearing, and it is clear who is a more skilled listener. Joe heard the obvious sounds, and "saw" the obvious images. Rob filled in the gaps created by his inability to see the actual action by constructing a kind of reality all his own, which was remarkably consistent with what happened. Rob described the deaths, just as Joe did, but saw expressions and tumbles to the ground, and dust rise up, and the flailing arms of the crowd as they cheered for the Gladiators. Rob described the battle very closely to what I saw onscreen, and just as it was quoted in the beginning of this paper, "little had been lost" in this action sequence. Rob described the chariots that entered the Coliseum with "angry warriors" steering them, and explained most every slash by a sword, up until the Gladiators had won the fight. He saw them triumphant at the end, and was also aided by the music, as Joe was, in picturing the crowd's delight in the victory.

Just as Alan Beck's article highlights the blind person who was able to "see" the play that he listened to, Rob was able to clearly picture the scene from the movie he heard. The descriptions they give make evident the fact that sound can paint a picture and explain precisely what is going on, even in a medium that relies heavily on visual images. Rob commented on how constant the sound was in this scene, and how this definitely adds to what he is able to picture in his mind. The sound in this particular scene was brilliant, and after my project, just for fun, I watched this scene myself without the sound. Contrary to my experiment at the beginning of the semester in which I preferred watching television without sound, as opposed to solely listening to it, I found that with this scene, the sound was so dramatically rich that I would rather hear the scene and listen to all that occurs than watch it without it.

My hypothesis proved correct in this experiment; although Joe did much better than I thought he would, and even became more accurate with his descriptions by the end of the scene. I also never imagined that Rob would describe so colorfully the scene to which he listened. Rob was able to take a scene from a movie, a visual medium, and follow its progress accurately solely by what he heard. He "saw" with sound.

Works Cited

Beck, Alan. "Is Radio Blind or Invisible? A Call for a Wider Debate on Listening-in,"

article from World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, electronic publication.

Gladiator. Dir. Ridley Scott. With Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix, and Connie Nielsen.

Dreamworks, 2000.

Mattson, Rob. Personal interview. March 31, 2001.

Nichols, Joe. Personal Interview. March 30, 2001.