Phantasy and Illusion: Audio Unconscious in Creative Sound Practice

Listening to music through headphones while gazing out the window of a moving train exemplifies a profound perceptual exercise in linking sound and vision through a manifold arrow of time.This experience, where one element might appear external and the other internal, engages internal processes as we emotionally interpret the external environment alongside the music's auditory stimuli.Imagination is crucial in bridging sound with imagery, functioning through recognition and memory.This sensory training involves a discerning process, an automatic response of consciousness.In video art, particularly when a film lacks clear directives, the composer is free to select from a rich tapestry of memories that resonate with the moving images.This selection often activates based on the sensory-emotional stimuli provided by the visual content, followed by a reflective phase where initial emotional responses are rationalized and linked creatively using available tools.This dynamic not only demonstrates technical skill but also a deeply intuitive act that melds sensory experiences with emotional and cognitive processes to transcend their individual components.It underscores the seamless integration of sensory inputs to form coherent, emotionally resonant experiences.For example, anxiety symptomatology, often manifesting as psychological noise, resembles auditory noise in its creation of defragmentation, dissonance, distortion, repetition, and intensity.Elizabeth Grosz's framework underscores the relational nature of time, highlighting how it is shaped and experienced through ongoing engagements with the world-an embodied and interactive notion of time contrasting with what she terms "empty time" or "time in itself." 1 By conceptualizing time in this manner, Grosz invites a reevaluation of conventional notions of temporality, foregrounding the complex interaction between human agency and temporal phenomena.Dysfunctionality stands out and persists until understood, deciphered, and unified, much like an unknown language.Henri Bergson articulated that unity is the product of mental simplicity, with divisibility arising from spatial extension. 2Repetition forms a unity, coagulated in form, like the rhythmic clicking of a lighter trying to light a cigarette-a repetitive action reflecting anxiety.The separation between internal desire and external repetition is evident in how others perceive this action differently.Repetition is insistence but lacks meaning or true knowledge, making perception subjective.The tolling of bells, discussed by Bergson, illustrates how individuals attribute significance to the sequence of rings, counting them to ascertain time-a pattern sensation that forms a desire to know, control, construct, shape, and form an atemporal sensation that is "time in itself." 3 R.D. Laing highlighted the destructive potential of lost experiences, suggesting that our behaviors are influenced profoundly by our memories and perceptions. 4 As we navigate between reality and dreams, the