mathieu ruhlmann

20 Notes on Sound

(adapted from robert bresson’s ‘notes on the cinematographer’)

• apply myself to insignificant (nonsignificant) sounds
• a whole made of good sounds can be detestable
• catch instants.  spontaneity, freshness
• someone who can work with the minimum can work with the most.  one who can with the most cannot, inevitably, with the minimum
• nothing too much, nothing deficient
• absolute silence and silence obtained by a softness of noises
• a thing that has failed can, if you change its place, be a thing that has come off
• reorganize the unorganized noises (what you think you hear is not what you hear) of a street, a railroad station, an airport… play them back one by one in silence and adjust the blend
• against the tactics of speed, of noise, set tactics of slowness, of silence
• “one must not seek, one must wait.” - corot
• to translate the invisible wind by the water it sculpts in passing
• empty the pond to get the fish
• ideas gathered from reading will always be bookish ideas.  go to the objects directly
• silence is necessary to music but is not part of music.  music leans on it.
• get things away from habit, de-chloroform them
• “when i listen to myself only, i do wonders.” - madame de sevigne
• one does not create by adding, but by taking away. 
• make audible what, without you, might perhaps never been heard
• let sounds present themselves spontaneously to your ears as words do to the spirit of a creative writer
• be as ignorant of what you are going to create as is a fisherman of what is at the end of his fishing rod.  (the fish that arises from nowhere.)