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ELASTIC SYNCHRESIS
"Synchresis is the spontaneous and irresistible mental fusion, completely free of any logic,
that happens between a sound and a visual when these occur at exactly the same time"
Michael Chion (Audio-Vision 1994)
I'm interested in the idea of 'Elastic Synchresis', which involves creating dynamic fluctuations in the expected connections between sound and image, almost to their breaking point. This concept inspires me to create experiences that oscillate between representations of the natural world and pure abstraction, while maintaining a dynamic audio-visual correlation grounded in minimal causality cues.
Disrupting cross-modal response timings
Sounds are quicker to process than images and the brain expects certain response times between sonic and visual events in a relational manner based on its expected causality.
When the expected timing that correlates audio-vision events is not confirmed, the brain will try to make sense of divergent stimuli coming from different senses in an abstract and creative way.
The impression of movement merges divergent auditory and visual stimuli into an unified meaning.
Motion is the fundamental attribute of sound (sounds only happen when things collide or when something moves the air around us).
Similarly, in animation, motion is key. Minimal abstract animations that lack basic formal information but are rich in motion information, can create a cognitive gap that makes the brain rush to search for meaning in auditory stimuli.
But if sounds are also too ambiguous to make sense, our perceptual system will try to validate stimuli based on common qualities present in both modalities.
When motion is the common attribute between sensors, the brain tends to fuse the two inputs into a single meaning using the impression of movement as the most reliable information.
This process leads to uncanny and unconventional interpretations of ambiguous stimuli that inspire unique cognitive strategies that uses motion perception to bridge the understanding of auditory and visual information.
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