The Senses, Perceptual Objects and Their Dynamics

Abstract

Arnheim presumes to offer universal principles for the analysis of the various arts, but there are obvious differences between various media (painting, music, literature) and the sensory modalities through which they are communicated, principally hearing and vision. Arnheim's early work on the parallel worlds of film and radio provide a good paradigm from which to consider these differences. His pioneering essay, "A forecast of television" (1957), addresses this question so directly, I shall cite it at length. The eye gives information about shape, color, surface qualities, and the motion of objects in three-dimensional space by registering the reactions of these objects to light. The ear reveals little about the objects as such; it only reports on some of their activities, which happen to produce sound waves. On the whole, the eye takes little interest in the nature, place, and condition of the light sources that make the light rays fall upon the retina. The ear is interested in the source of the sound; it wants the sound waves, on their way to the eardrum , to be as little modified as possible in order to keep the message from the source unaltered. Sound is produced by an object but tells us little about that object's shape, whereas the eye, in order to fulfill its task, must reckon with the fact that a suitable likeness of a three-dimensional object must be at least two-dimensional. Any sense organ can register only one stimulus at a time so that the eye in order to produce a two-dimensional recording has to consist of numerous receptors that operate one next to the other. The mosaic that results from this collaboration of the receptors depicts three dimensional space and volume as best it can. The time dimension, which is available in addition, uses the change in stimulation in each receptor to record motion and action. A different situation is found in hearing. The sounds that exist in auditory space at any one time are not recorded separately but add up to one, more or less complex vibration , which can be received by a single membrane, such as the eardrum. This unitary vibration may be produced by the simple sound of a tuning fork or the complex noises of a crowd of excited people or a symphony orchestra. To some extent the ear succeeds in teasing the complex vibration apart, but it offers scant information about the locations of