The sound clip next to the color key is of the whole project together. Listening to it, we can hear the persistence of the self-referential theme (the tonic) and the gradual introduction of new ideas which is evident in the slowly ascending pitch.
Minor 213, Hamilton College, NY - May 9 (day of the our thesis presentations).
Addendum
I made this chart in an attempt to figure out what I had been doing for the past 2 months because, by the time I was forced to start thinking about presenting my thesis, I had really forgotten most of what I'd written. Such is the nature of feeble, fickle memory.
I also found the idea of marking my thought visually really interesting, because I'm interested in theory of mind and modern art, and I think the graph represents an example of the cross-section between the two.
I was also interested in the immediacy of the visual form verses the length of time it represents, both in pure content and in time of execution, in light of the work I did in my French thesis. That project ended up (through several painful overhauls) being a demonstration that the two novels I looked at for that project, Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano and Le Tombeau de Tommy by Alain Blottiere, a) constituted a new genre, the "nouveau roman policier", and b) showed that, given a brief analysis of their chronotopes, these contemporary authors felt affected but not incapacitated by the traumatization of the two world wars. Part of my argument was that the two novels recaptured a measure of the lost past through visual aides, like pictures and clippings of newspapers, which represented that lost time to the present, thereby bridging the gap from the past. (However, given the work I've done on he aesthetic solution for this project, it was clear to me that the attempt at recapturing the past, which the protagonists of both novels do through cinema and literature, was an attempt at an aesthetic solution, and so the existence of this new genre identifies a flaw in the contemporary world-view.)
The timeline I created works as one of these visual representations of lost time, since it condenses the experience into something tangible and (nearly) immediate.
I was inspired to try to put sound to the posts as well by a quotation from Passing Time:
"Thus each day, evoking other days like harmonics, transforms the appearance of the past, and while certain periods come into the light, others, formerly illuminated, tend to grow dim and to lie silent and unknown until with the passage of time fresh echoes come to awaken them," (Butor, 304).
I love this quote because it perfectly expresses the problem of inclusion with which Revel has been struggling throughout his journaling process. New experiences highlight new connections between our experiences, making some nearly forgotten memories rise into prominence while others sink back into oblivion.
It wasn't until after I had finished the whole process (twice) and written several drafts of my presentation that I realized why I had done this: I found my aesthetic solution, just like Roquenin found his. The chart exists as an aesthetic solution as well, but I found it still too difficult to decipher; it needed more explanation than it provided, which meant that there was too much room for meaning's degradation. The sounds, however, like the song which inspires Roquentin, will not change. They explain less, but require less explanation because they express themselves to the listener in a way that I don't feel the graph was able to do. There is a certain inherent value in the musical representation which, even without understanding the implications of the sounds, justifies its existence, and, at the same time, protects the meaning which is always there, if the listener takes the pains to discover it, which will, like the song, stand the test of time.
Nancy Drew Nook, KJ, Hamilton College, NY - May 10
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