Day: September 3, 2015

Exploring the Gestalt principles in music is certainly something that I hadn’t thought about before listening to Spoon. However, once I did listen to the podcast and to the song (several times), it began to make sense how there are specific Gestalt principles that can be heavily applied to music.

Firstly, there was the element of repetition. The drummer, Jim Eno, points out that they played around with different types of music, but with each beat, there is a specific repetition to it. There is also a distinction between the repetition during the chorus and during other parts of the song. There are different types of music that get repeated at different parts, but in the end, it creates a sense of unity in the song because there is an overarching drumbeat continuous in the background.

Additionally, there is a sense of continuity in the song. While there are different types of music in the song, the transition from one beat from another is seamless, and doesn’t break up the song and cause the words or meaning of it to become lost.

I feel that these two Gestalt principles in general are what drive most forms of music to be considered art. We as humans are always looking for patterns, and repetition + continuity is a pattern that is, well, music to our ears.

I’ll admit it. I didn’t understand Stan Brakhage’s video at all. For at least the first three times I watched it. But then I started to ask myself why the video was 2 1/2 minutes long, why he would compose the images in that way, and why he titled the video “Stellar”.

I did a bit of Googling on Brakhage’s films when I was stumped the first time, and I found a wiki archive that listed several of the films he had done, and their lengths. To answer the last question first, I think there’s a point to why that particular video is nearly 2 1/2 minutes long. It tells a story. The film begins very slowly, and I believe this is a parallel to the beginning of time, or life. The span of time between images is long, as is the amount of time that you see any specific image. However, as it progresses, the time between images shortens and the images flash by faster than the viewer can keep up with. I think this parallel is a signal of how time progresses and seems to pass us by so quickly near the end that we do not take the time to enjoy the things we see.

Secondly, I was unsure how the video related at all to the Gestalt principles. The grouping of images seems random at first, but when I paid closer attention to ways that they could be categorized, I noticed that they had predominantly cool, dark colors. This of course is reflective of our perceptions of what the universe looks like beyond the atmosphere of the earth.

Additionally, the proximity of images changes. Like I mentioned before with time, the images seem more distant from each other in the beginning, but by the end of the video they are nearly split seconds apart.

Brakhage’s choice of composition still confuses me, and watching other videos of his doesn’t help, but I eventually opened my mind to the abstractedness of the work and was able to appreciate his unique creativity and composition.