A Proposal for a New Technology Instrumental Practice of Bowed Strings - Analysing Sonic “Afterimages”

Abstract

With this project, an aesthetic transformation of  afterimage is proposed as a means for the electronic processing of sound structures produced by strings. The results of this processing create energetic ‘imprints‘ within the temporal evolution of a musical event. According to Shimojo, Kamitani, and Nishida, afterimage belongs to the category of after-sensations. The function of cinema is based on a defect related to the physiology of the human eye, a phenomenon called “afterimage". In afterimage, a momentary visual presence remains in the sense of vision after the external stimulus. In other words, the reflection formed on the retina from an object does not vanish immediately, but remains in the visual system even after its disappearance. The idea of afterimage can be aesthetically transferred to the art of sounds as an ‘after-effect.‘ If we define energy as the profile of a sound according to its spectro-morphological properties (see Research), here an assumption is made as a working hypothesis, according to which the energy imprint of a sonic event, namely the after-effect, coexists and/or follows in time the initial sonic gesture by definition and constitutes a possible processed version of it, just as in afterimage the stimulus remains in the sensory medium of perception, for the perceptual mechanism to take place through processing. In an attempt to create sound stimuli that are subsequently used as material for electronic processing with continuous phase differences, a sequence of overlapping sound events is created, which function as after-effects. My work Afterimage for strings and electronics will be used as a reference.