MEDIAART 2G03: Corrective vs. Exploratory Transformations

So before going too far into this module, a remark about this terminology of exploratory transformations. I think that this terminology of exploratory transformation is really meant to distinguish corrective from exploratory transformations.

Elsewhere, including earlier in this course, we will have mostly explored what I might call corrective transformations of sound. In other words, these are transformations where audio signals are taken and they're transformed in ways that lead us hear something about those signals more clearly than we did before the transformation. For example, if we took a field recording and we used filters/equalization to lessen the presence of some lower frequency traffic noise, perhaps that transformation lets us hear more clearly the other things that are in that audio signal.

And one of the things we are doing now, is to start to pay attention to the possibility instead of having exploratory transformations of sound. Using sometimes “extreme” techniques, we take audio signals and we transform them in ways that reveal hidden aspects of the original sound or even completely new sound characters.

Going back to our corrective transformation example above, when we took that field recording and we attenuated parts of it using filters (such as the traffic noise), we could hear more clearly things that were in the signal, but probably we could have heard most of what was there even without the EQ or the filtering, just not as well. What we're doing with corrective transformation, then, is just letting our audience hear that signal in a more clear way. We were focusing their attention on something they could probably hear already, but now they could hear it more clearly. When we go into the realm of exploratory transformations of sound, by contrast, we are exposing possibilities that are there in the sound that really are not obvious or that no one could really hear in the original. Maybe you could only hear it if you had a particularly active imagination. In that sense, exploratory transformations of sound are a kind of act of the imagination mediated by audio technology.