A Communications Model

The transmission model of communication, shown below, provides some elementary insights into how messages are sent and received. Entering into a communications environment, a sender encodes a message and directs it towards a receiver through some medium. Before the message reaches the receiver, interference related to the medium may add noise to the message. The receiver must then decode the message and, if it is understood, exit from the communication environment. Many systems accommodate feedback loops, through which the receiver may ask the sender to clarify the message in some way, thus initiating a revised message.

This model is useful when the movement of information across space and through time is a central challenge. Since the model looks at communication from a "message" point-of-view, its usefulness is limited when the information exchange is so complex that it cannot be isolated into message units. The speed of electronic communication can also radically alter relationships of time and space, so the linearity of the model is less suited to describing the actual patterns of communication. Media theorist Tony Schwartz addresses the limitations of the transportation model in The Responsive Chord: "The linearity of the print bias in communication is accompanied by a strong dependence on visual analogies to represent truth, knowledge and understanding. With the advent of electronic media, we experience a return to an auditory-acoustic communications environment reminiscent of oral cultures. In this environment, communication strikes a "responsive chord." (9)

The Tribal Echoland

Schwartz echoes Marshall McLuhan in this analysis of electronic communication. Both noted that the dispersal pattern of a broadcast radio signal is circular, not linear, and McLuhan made the famous pronouncement that we are not equipped with ear lids with which to filter out the sounds which surround us. Acoustic space--or the soundscape as Canadian composer Murray Schafer terms it-- surrounds us in a spherical communications environment. For McLuhan, electronic communications return us to the acoustic space of tribal peoples. Acoustic space

has no centre and no margin, unlike strictly visual space, which is an extension and intensification of the eye. Acoustic space is organic and integral, perceived through the simultaneous interplay of all the senses; whereas "rational" or pictorial space is uniform, sequential and continuous and creates a closed world with none of the rich resonance of the tribal echoland. (Essential McLuhan 240).

McLuhan argues that tribal peoples led "a complex, kaleidoscopic life precisely because the ear, unlike the eye, cannot be focused and is synaesthetic rather than analytical and linear" (240). The abstract encoding of the phonetic alphabet meant that the rich auditory and kinaesthetic experience of speech, as well as the complex social interactions that accompany it, were at least once removed.

McLuhan echoes Harold Innis in the assertion that the bias of any particular medium marks the kind of empire which may be built under that medium's ascendancy:

Only alphabetic cultures have ever succeeded in mastering connected linear sequences as a means of social and psychic organization; the separation of all kinds of experiences into uniform and continuous units in order to generate accelerated action and alteration of form--in other words, applied knowledge--has been the secret of Western man's ascendancy over other men as well as over his environment. (242)

McLuhan's gender specific language--i.e. that we use the masculine pronoun to refer to the general class of humans--may reflect just that kind of empire building which results when identities are abstracted through language and differences are ruled by convention.

However, the perspective so essential to the print bias is radically compromised with sound waves and, by analogy, with electronic and digital communication. Schwartz elaborates on this analogy in the following way:

The ear receives fleeting momentary vibrations, translates these bits of information into electronic nerve impulses, and sends them to the brain. The brain "hears" by registering the current vibration, recalling the previous vibrations, and expecting future ones. We never hear the continuum of sound we label as word, sentence, or paragraph. The continuum never exists at any single moment in time. (12)

Both Schwartz and McLuhan, as suggested above, assert that electronically-mediated information is patterned like auditory information. And in this century, during which we have seen the proliferation of such media as telephone, radio, film, audio recording, television and computers, we have "developed a stronger orientation toward the auditory mode of receiving and processing information" (Schwartz 13).

Seeing is Believing

With film, for example, the illusion of movement is created by projecting a series of still pictures in rapid succession. Each still frame is projected for approximately 1/50th to 1/75th of a second; following each frame, the screen is black for a nearly equal length of time.The brain "sees" motion by registering the current still picture, recalling previous frames, and anticipating future frames that will complete the movements. Our unmediated visual experience is quite different: the eye is bombarded by a continuous stream of (analogue) visual information. This experience is fractured by film, where the brain must function in a new way to reconstruct a continuous visual image. With film, the brain does not "fill in" the image on the screen--it fills in the motion between the images.

With television, the analogue visual image is fractured even more radically. The image we "see" on television is never there. The cathode ray gun of the CRT directs a beam of charged electrons at the back of the screen, illuminating dots of light one at a time, and zigzagging down the screen along alternate lines. (NTSC TVs have 525 such lines.) The scanning process completes one sweep every 1/30th of a second, two sweeps for a complete frame every 1/15th of a second. Schwartz comments:

In watching television, our eyes function like our ears. They never see a picture, just as our ears never hear a word. The process differs from film in that it requires much faster processing of information and more visual recall. With film, the brain has to process 24 distinct inputs per second. With television, the brain has to process thousands of distinct inputs per second. Watching television, the eye is for the first time functioning like the ear. With television, the patterning of auditory and visual stimuli is identical. (16)

While McLuhan calls TV a tactile medium---since the skin and retina of the viewer are "tattooed" with an electronic beam---he agrees with Schwartz in concluding that the viewer is immersed into a more involving, simultaneous environment: "The essence of TV viewing is, in short, intense participation and low definition--what I call a 'cool' experience, as opposed to an essentially 'hot,' or high definition-low participation medium like radio" (246).

The Resonance Theory of Media

Schwartz developed his insights regarding the impact of media stimuli on the brain into a theory of resonance which he applied in his career as a master of persuasion. He recommends that, when discussing electronically based communications, we use auditory terms such as feedback, reverberation, tuning, overload, regeneration and fading. "In electronically mediated communication, the function of the communicator is to achieve a state of resonance with the person receiving visual and auditory stimuli."

Decoding symbolic forms--signs--is no longer our most significant problem, since the message transactions are occuring so quickly or so continuously we simply don't have time to decode the messages. Many of our experiences with electronic media are coded and stored in the same way they are perceived. We hear a series of sounds or see an image which we register without thinking about its meaning. Since these messages do not undergo a symbolic transformation, the original experience is more directly available to us, and others like advertisers, when it is recalled. Also, since the experience is not stored in symbolic form, it cannot be retrieved by symbolic cues. It must be evoked by a stimulus that is coded in the same way as the stored information is coded. The critical task for the Schwartzian communicator is to "design stimuli so that it resonates with information already stored within an individual" to induce the desired learning or behavioural effect.

Resonance takes place when the stimuli put into our communications evoke meaning in a listener or viewer. That which we put into the communication has no meaning in itself. The meaning of our communication is what a listener or viewer gets out of the experience with the stimuli. The receiver's brain is an indispensable component of the total communication system. As McLuhan noted, the audience becomes the work force.

A listener or viewer brings far more information to the communication event than the communicator can possibly put into the program, commercial, or message. In communicating at electronic speed, we no longer direct information to an audience, we try to evoke stored information out of them, in a patterned way. The contemporary person has a huge psychic reservoir of impressions that can, in effect, be played like an instrument.

Following the resonance theory to achieve a behavioral effect, whether persuading someone to buy a product or teaching that person history, one designs stimuli that will resonate with stored impressions to produce that effect. The traditional communication is thus reversed. A message is not the starting point for communication. It is the final product arrived at after considering the effect we hope to achieve and the communication environment where people will experience our stimuli:

1. we examine how stored experiences are patterned in our brains, and how previous experiences condition us to perceive new stimuli;

2. we must understand the characteristics of the new communication environment, and how people use media in their lives;

3. we consider the content of the message, and this will be determined by the effect we want to achieve and the environment where our content will take on meaning. (Schwartz 27)

For further illustrations of these principles, see Guerrilla Media and Secrets of Effective Radio Advertising, both of which are based on the resonance theories of Tony Schwartz.

The Acoustic Community

In Acoustic Communication, Barry Truax explores the ways in which sound, including noise construct both a soundscape and a sense of community.

...[T]he term "soundscape"...refers to how the individual and society as a whole understand the acoustic environment through listening. Listening habits may be acutely sensitive or distractedly indifferent, but both interpret the acoustic environment to the mind, one with active involvement, the other with passive detachment. Moreover, listening habits create a relationship between the individual and the environment, whether interactive and open-ended, or oppressive and alienating. (xii)

Individual listeners may have contrasting relationships with the same sound environment because the patterns of communication are different in each case. In his comprehensive analysis of the acoustic environment, Truax suggests that we can radically shift the patterns of communication by active listening, and by becoming aware of the powerful impact sound has on the formation of community.

The acoustic community may be defined as any soundscape in which acoustic information plays a pervasive role in the lives of the inhabitants.....Therefore, the boundary of the community is arbitrary and may be as small as a room of people, a home or building, or as large as an urban community, a broadcast area, or any other system of electroacoustic communication. In short, it is any system within which acoustic information is exchanged. (58)

Consider the remarkable shift in the construction of acoustic communities enabled by the digitization of music and its distribution on the internet, or the use of streaming audio to provide internet radio. We will, no doubt, see the formation of some fascinating acoustic communities on the internet, some of which may have the ability to influence the business of the music industry. In addition, the widespread distribution of digital sound will be found in close proximity to the text of the internet--they will coexist to some extent--thus producing a new synaesthesia of sight and sound. Skilled media designers will explore the equilibrium between word, image, and sound in their communications, seeking the best resonant chords with which to move their audiences.

Marshall Soules
(c) 2000
Fair dealing applies.

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