Charlotte Rørdam Larsen : Sound, lust and delicacies: media, hypersensuality and the senses
Industrial designers are engaged in creating aesthetic plenitude when they design a product so that it will address several senses at once ( hypersensuality ). This is expressed in product design and in the branding of companies, where we find sound, colour and fragrances matched and harmonized – for instance, as evident in contemporary commercials that seem to illustrate and visualize flavours, scents and sensations. Still, when it comes to media this sensuality is communicated and decoded by a two-dimensional audio-visuality: the image is understood as an audio track and is seen as an intensification of the picture. The appeal to the other senses can be seen on the TV screen as potential temptations, but in relation to the audio-visual character of the multimedia this can be communicated through sound and picture only: the commercial industry emphasises multisensuality, but television, the cinema and the internet can only communicate hypersensuality through and in an audio-visual context. The idea of the project is to examine how this is done.
The basis of the project is my ongoing research on sound: The Sound of Cooking: the audio staging of food, flavour and scent in TV food programmes, with special reference to BBC Food.
Through the staging of what seem to be authentic sounds – of, for instance, voices, sniffing and background music – the audio track serves as a substitute for the viewer’s lack of tactile and olfactory stimulation. The sound intensifies and facilitates a tactile experience as it communicates the taste and smell of the food that is presented to the viewer.
The project will make use of Danish audio-visual commercials from the last sixty years. Through an analysis of samples I will examine how sensuality itself is increasingly important in relation to the branding of food.
My preliminary hypothesis is that earlier screen advertisements presented the outstanding qualities of the product by naming the product – usually over and over again – whereas today’s audio-visual advertisements present us with a much more symbiotic relation between picture and sound. With help from the digitalisation project Dansk Reklamefilm (Danish screen advertisements) at the State Library of Aarhus, I will be able to analyze how the commercials over time change: In the 1950’s a pompous (male) voice vouched for the credibility of the article shown on the screen in the 1950s. Many products were presented in a song whose lyrics praised the product (e.g. Oma-margarine (1936), Alfa Margarine song books (the 1950s), and Star beer (1956)). Today we see how picture and sound together communicate the sensual qualities and temptations of the products. The project will examine how the screen advertisements demonstrate and negotiate changing concepts of appropriate sound, and it will demonstrate how the commercials’ use of sounds articulate and underline the hypersensuality of the articles presented. In the commercials, sound is essential to the hyperaesthetics (Howes) that characterizes today’s experience-culture including the sound-branding that expresses a synaesthetic strategy for approaching customers – also for commercials advertising products that do not speak to the senses in an explicit way, such as insurance or bank commercials.
Charlotte Rørdam Larsen is an associate professor at the Section for Musicology at the Department of Aesthetic Studies at Aarhus University since 1990. Her research areas are sound cultures and the history of Danish popular music. She teaches music culture, music media, and music and everyday culture. She is also interested in 20 th -century music in general, music policies, music and evaluation, as well as sound and sound cultures.
Charlotte has chaired the Nordic rock research network Nordisk Rockforskning granted by NorFA 1992-95, and the three-year research project Music and Media granted by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities (SHF),1998-2001. She has joined the research project Danish Rock Culture from the 50s to the 80s (granted by SHF), and has been working on a research-based model for evaluation within the performing arts (music, dance and theater), a project funded by the council of Aarhus and the Danish Ministry of Cultural Affairs, 2001-2003. From 1992 to 2001 she was a specialist adviser and writer for The Danish National Encyclopedia with regard to popular music. Since 2006 she has participated in preparations for a new Danish Music History .
Lately she has become interested in sound and sound branding as well as the sound of cooking in television programs. She is affiliated with the Humanistic Food Research project and is co-writing a book on media, food and places, in which she will elaborate on how sound communicates experiences of these things.
