Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1490686
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S I 51 The reason I bring this scene up is because there is a similar haptic connection between films and us when we're experiencing a film. Before even sound's characteristics are perceived, cognised, or recognized, sound is felt. The audiovisual contract between audience and film is also haptic, and it is inherently so because sound is vibration. Let's define sensation and audition: Sensation: "Sensory receptors are specialized neurons that respond to specific types of stimuli. When sensory information is detected by a sensory receptor, sensation has occurred." (Spielman, Jenkins, and Lovett, 2020). According to Paul C. Jasen; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari understand sensation "as something 'pre-personal,' a matter of qualitative change in a body that precedes the interpretative work of perception. It strikes before cognition can make sense of it, and before culture can mediate it." (Jasen, 2016). Audition: "Sound is created when matter in the world vibrates and takes the form of pressure waves that propagate through the air, containing clues about the environment around us. Audition is the process by which organisms utilize these clues to derive information about the world." (Wixted and Serences, 2018). To explain what I mean, there is a scene I'd like to talk about in Darius Marder's Sound of Metal (2020) at [01:00:4] where Ruben and a kid who are both deaf and living in a deaf community, are taking a break. Ruben is sitting at the bottom of a metal slide and senses the kid at the other end of the slide tapping it with his hand, producing a percussive transient. And it just so happens that percussion is our protagonist's weak spot and metal happens to be an ideal conductor of vibration, making it travel even faster than through air. So while in the scene they appear to be hearing a very blank representation of the transients, they are also feeling the vibration they produce because they are on top of an ideal transducer of sound. The vibration and the message pass through the whole slide." As they exchange a few rhythmic patterns and Ruben finally settles on a beat, the kid lays his head down on the slide and with his ear pressed against it, he enters a calmed state and sort of dozes off into the horizon. There is an expression of attention and newfound interest in the look of Ruben's eyes as he plays "the drums'' for his one kid audience. The realization that he can produce rhythm and establish a haptic and a musical connection with another human being that has also lost his sense of hearing, is the beginning of his transformation and coming to terms with being deaf.