THE SOUNDSCORE TO heartBEAT: A NARRATIVE-FORM MUSIC ...

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Television
Immediacy. Television, like fikn, presents visual artists with design possibilties of
an enormous range and scope. One the most intriguing (and economical) aspects of
videotape is its immediacy: there is no developing process. The tape is simpl\' rewound
and played back. This presents numerous advantages to an artist wishing to work in a
time-based visual medium. Elements can be manipulated quickly and immediately, with
the results recorded and reproduced in far less time and expense than on film. Video and
sound recording both utilize magnetic tape for storage, and are thus easily combined.
Cultural Identity. Over the past thirty years, television has emerged as a medium
with a unique cultural voice. It is totally familiar at all levels of society, and presents a
broad range of aesthetic and social values. The medium has shaped, and is shaped by,
the culture which has created it.
Television is at times a curiously contradictory experience. Key moments in a
fictional dramatic broadcast (such as the death of a loved one, or a profound moment of
personal discovery) segue incongruously into commercials conceming the values of a
low-calorie soft drink or a financial institution. The medium often presents totally
unrelated information simultaneously. Severe weather bulletins, election results and,
even more self-referentially, scheduling changes, electronically crawl across the bottom of
the television screen during programming of any type, from sporting events to talk
shows.
Many aspects of contemporary life are known to us only through the medium of
television. Our understanding and knowledge of the Vietnam war, for example, was
shaped significantly by the fu-st-hand information gathered and broadcast daily by
television news media from 1965-74. Live television coverage of sporting events,
political debates and church services provides viewers with a range and level of
experience previously unavailable through other mass media sources. As an educational
tool, television has significantly enhanced the practical instruction of such diverse subjects
as surgical techniques, home repairs, and pilot training.
Television speaks to our culture through a large vocabulary of familiar symbols and
conventions. heartBEAT not only communicates through these conventions, but
incorporates them as primary design elements of the work. heartBEAT expresses its form
and content through (and as) the presentational aspects of television. Contradictor.'
information, rapid changes in content, mood and tone, and kaleidoscopic sound
sequences call attention to (and thus defamiliarize) the medium, functioning
simultaneously as both presentational devices and elements of content. heanBEAT may