Chapter 5: Expressive Movement

In his Expressive Movement chapter, David Small elaborates on how the movement of dynamic text is perceived by an audience. He dives into a description of the Minsky Melodies, in which music and text were combined to create an audio-visual experience. His description of fitting the text to the tone of the song, reminds me of Synesthesia, a condition in which certain music causes an individual to see shapes and colors. Moreover, his description of accurately timing the text so they were perceived as in par with the music reminds me of lyric videos; specifically, the idea of performing karaoke: where the timing of the text in conjunction with the music is crucial.

Small also gives into how sequential dynamicism of text enhances reading speed inviduals, and how this may mean that by enhancing the effictivity of a text’s movement, you are also enchancing its readibility. But he doesn’t just stop at tempo: he analyzes the influence of tone as well.

All in all, he creates a very intersting dynamic with sound an text. So far, our discussion has focused more on the visual movement representations of text and letters. Adding sound, music, and dictation to it adds an additional dimension that affects its perception. However, what is the line between this sound-driven text, and, say, a set of subtitles in a film? Or between it and the use of a kareoke machine as previously mentioned?

In the last section of this chapter, he discusses the Stream of Conciousness project. I found this work to be very intersting, as they use the flow of the water to have the audience interact with the text itself. The idea of word association, however, is a little lost on me. I would think that visitors of the space are more likely to play around with the letters, and arbitrarily see what other words are formed that directly meditate and associate with the words they first perceived. Regardless, the idea of the garden gives an erthereal feeling that, together with the interactiveness, clearly separates it from the idea of lyrics and/or subtitles. In this scenario, the sound at hand are the flows of the water, which are not directly connected with the words themselves, as is the case for the songs.