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.
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Date: 2009-08-03 05:15 am (UTC)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.