Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 September 2002
Schizophonic soundscapes in Murray Schafer's critical acoustic ecology mean a split between listening and seeing, between space and place, between audience and communicator. His idea of a gap between senses is based on electronic media like radio and telephone, but it gains new actuality in modern (multimedia) times. The new technology and its users have too experimented with the creative inversion of schizophony in sound and vision. Film sound design and film music combine sound in and out of context, composition works with contrapunctual audiovisions; video art and sound art, as in the work of Robert Cahen, combine and mix genres of all kinds and senses. MetaSon #5 Skruv Stockholm is an audiovisual soundwalk, based on soundscape recordings in Sweden in the 1970s and 1990s, combined with associative pictures and designs, each in its own rhythms and times. It consists less of the common meaning both share, being more dependent on the fluidity and dynamic of the relationship between the elements. Sound and image create an intermedium, intermodal space neither of which could project alone. From moment to moment, schizophonic montage and idea invert into a fresh, maybe evocative look at the way we perceive, where the audio flow transforms stable pictures into liquid forms, where image follows sound and is treated like sound.