"Barlyk River" by kass [inhuman intelligence challenge]

[kass]

Yay! I get to sneak this one in under the wire! Many many thanks to bironic and renenet for beta & encouragement.


Title: Barlyk River
Music by Huun Huur Tu

Learning to communicate.


download: 26.6mb divx (please right-click & save)
or stream: at BAM or at blip.tv

Comments

[ratcreature]

Oh, first contact with whales. I thought the ancient script was really neat visually. Do the characters say anything, or are they random?

[kass]

I'm glad you enjoyed it! It was really fun to make.

The characters say things like "the whales want to talk with you" and "can you hear the whales singing, each to each" (a bastardization of a quote from the poet TS Eliot) -- so there's some meaning there. I liked the idea of the Ancient characters representing the whales' language, which -- even once our team figured out that the whales were trying to communicate something important -- wasn't necessarily easy to parse.

[no_detective]

Is the song itself about whales?

[kass]

I haven't actually been able to find a translation of the song. It's in Tuvan, and Tuva is a landlocked nation, so I'm guessing it's not about whales at all! But I thought the high-pitched hum of Tuvan throat-singing might be a way to evoke whalesong...

[no_detective]

Hi - thanks for replying, and sorry about the abruptness of that question. I'm really uncomfortable raining on anyone's fanvid parade since I know how much time, work, and love goes into their creation, but I'm even more uncomfortable about the association of the ethnic Other with communicating with animals (even if, in an ep of SGA, said animal species is really smart). Tuvan throat-singing technique may sound quite alien to most of us, but to suggest that the singers sound like animals, without at least finding out (and announcing in the vid info) whether the meaning of the song is remotely relevant to the message you're using it for... well, maybe this is just my overly sensitive personal trigger (my ethnicity has had its share of similar associations through history), but the song choice strikes me as inappropriate.

Again, I truly regret that I had to raise this issue - because you're one of the coolest people in the SGA fandom, and because I'm really happy that SGA still has an active fandom, and because it's fantastic to hear in a vid the music I've only encountered once before (years ago when a college buddy made me a mixed tape) and the internet should be as beautifully global as you have clearly intended it to be in your work - but this has been weighing rather heavily on my mind for the past few days, so I had to point it out.

[kass]

I'm really glad you raised this, actually, because it's something I thought about and discussed with one of my betas -- I was concerned that the vid might be read in this way, which was not my intention. I contemplated adding some kind of explanatory note which would make clear what my thinking was and wasn't -- but I tend to feel like a story or vid should stand on its own, so I decided not to frame it with an essay about my intentions; maybe I should have written the essay after all! :-) Instead I'll wind up saying some of it here, and I'd love to have a conversation about this with you or with anyone else who wants to jump in.

Part of what I love in SGA is the narrative (which exists mostly in fanworks, not so much in the original source -- TPTB didn't handle this so well) of our heroes going through the gate into another world and being changed by the experience of encountering the "Other," both in tough ways (waking the Wraith) and in positive ways (I think that all of our major characters are radically changed by the experience of interacting with Ronon and Teyla and Pegasus cultures -- again, that's how I want to see their story; I know that the series didn't often do a great job with that.) I see the story of walking through the 'gate as a story which is essentially about travel to somewhere new -- and while I can't walk through a stargate, I know what it's like to go somewhere far from home where all of my assumptions are challenged and I learn new things about the world and also about myself because I'm out of my familiar context.

So I wanted to make a vid about encountering the foreign, the unknown, and maybe initially being confused or troubled by the encounter (in the episode that most of this footage comes from, there are the headaches and nosebleeds and so on) but ultimately being transformed by the discovery that we can communicate across our various divides. I was hoping to evoke that sense of foreignness with the music of Huun Huur Tu, which sounds deeply foreign to the American ear in, maybe, a way that's analagous to how the alien whalesong sounded foreign to the ears of the characters on the expedition.

I didn't mean to suggest that the singers are in any way "animal" or that their artistry is actually akin to whalesong. My hope was that in reaching outside the musical genres which I tend to encounter in fanvids, I might be able to awaken in the viewer a little bit of that experience of encountering something foreign for which we don't have a lot of context, which is how I think the characters experienced the arc of the show. I've been a huge fan of Tuvan throat-singing since I first saw the movie Genghis Blues (which I highly recommend, btw -- it's the true story of blind bluesman Paul Peña going to Tuva after he taught himself to throat-sing) and I thought its strange beauty would be a good fit for the emotional experience of encountering the strange beauty of the Pegasus galaxy.

I love the vid because I love what I was trying to say with it, but I'm open to the possibility that it fails as a fanvid because my intentions aren't the point. And if this vid makes you, or anyone, uncomfortable, then I want to sincerely apologize -- I love this fandom and the people in it and I never want to be a jerk, even inadvertently.

[no_detective]

Thanks for the reply; it doesn't surprise me that you've taken this issue into consideration, and I really appreciate the thought you've put into it.

I was hoping to evoke that sense of foreignness with the music of Huun Huur Tu, which sounds deeply foreign to the American ear in, maybe, a way that's analagous to how the alien whalesong sounded foreign to the ears of the characters on the expedition.

I think this is where, from my perspective, the intention doesn't translate into the end result of the vid; while the ethnic Other has been used extensively to illustrate alienness in lots of SciFi canon, here I hear the music of an indigenous people associated specifically with communication with animals. The rhythm of the song follows the whales - the footage of them swimming, the representations of the sounds they make on various monitors, and the effects of those sounds on the Atlantis team. Only toward the very end of the vid can the music be visually interpreted as something the human characters understand and might even attempt to reproduce (with that closing shot of Rodney looking at the water and maybe, just maybe humming a little?). In that sense, the encounter with the Other and the learning that takes place from it is pretty eloquent. Hey, it's a good vid!

But the trigger for me was that with this visual parallelism, the whale song seems to be replaced by (and thus somewhat equated with) the Tuvan throat-singing here, instead of - I don't know - actual whale song, or a whale song remix (if there is such a thing), or heck, a song about wanting to talk to whales; and since the song used in the vid is part of an ethnic musical tradition (rather than some "foreign-sounding" uniquely weird musical product outside of an identifiable cultural background), the association is what it is. I hope this explanation makes sense.

Thanks again for replying and elaborating on your thought process behind the vid. I too love what you were trying to say with it, and I really don't enjoy being the voice of dissent regarding its execution.

[beledibabe]

Very cool!

[kass]

Thanks, hon! I'm glad you enjoyed it.

[anatsuno]

Very nicely done!

[kass]

Thank you kindly! It was fun to go digging about for external whale footage to complement what the show gave us.

What a fabulous idea!

[sherrold]

And the music is haunting.

Re: What a fabulous idea!

[kass]

Thank you, honey! As soon as the idea crossed my mind, I had to do it. I love the ethereal, otherworldly quality of Tuvan throat-singing.

[bironic]

Still fantastic. This was such a great idea, with the alien-like music underscoring the challenge of attempting to communicate with the whales (or perhaps the whales' attempts to communicate with the humans :) ), and the moments where the music pulses along with the whales' calls, and John looking like he's bopping along to the music when he raises his eyebrows, and how you placed the footage to look like Zelenka's excited to have found where they are in the ocean. Etc.

[kass]

Thank you so much, hon, both for sharing my squee and for helping me identify and root out the intriguing aspect ratio challenges of vidding with disparate sources of footage!

I'm just so happy that all the things I was trying to say came through for you. :-) Plus: Tuvan throat-singing! \o/

[bironic]

McKay Feynman would be proud!

'twas my pleasure. You come up with such cool ideas on a regular basis, it is great inspiration.