Vita
Jan Philip Müller studied cultural studies and economics in Berlin. His graduate thesis was on the media history of the x-ray image. Between 2002 and 2006, he was involved in various cultural projects. In 2006, he began his doctoral dissertation with the working title „Audiovision and Synchronization. Seeing, Hearing, and Simultaneity in Sound Film,“ as a member of the DFG research training group „History of Media - Media of History“ of the Universities in Erfurt, Jena, and Weimar, followed by a grant from the Bauhaus Research School in Weimar. Since June 2010, he has been a Junior Fellow at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy (IKKM) in Weimar.
Dated from 2010
Audiovision and synchronisation. Seeing, hearing and simultaneity in the sound film
Sound films are not merely an addendum to the history of cinema. The advent of sound films is the occasion for a far-reaching discourse about the relationship between seeing and hearing; about what ‘audiovision’ actually is, could, and should be. And even more generally, one could discuss the fact that sound films are one of the first big projects of the convergence of technical media which appears today – perhaps particularly in the light of the computer – to be a central aspect of media history. The emergence of the sound film in cinema is thus traversed by other lines than just the increase in realism achieved by adding sound to moving pictures. An attempt will be made here to trace some of these lines by assembling various arrangements of people, things and devices in which hearing and seeing and an issue relating to their simultaneity occur. When, for example, knowledge about human perception is produced in the experimental psychology lab of Wilhelm Wundt, the problem of the simultaneity or non-simultaneity of seeing and hearing is called a complication. When the attempt is being made to link moving pictures and sound technically, it is called synchronization. When film theory discourse discusses what is to be done with this new medium, the sound film, it is called asynchronism. Following the thesis that the senses are divided up in the 19th century, there will be heterogeneous things happening at some point in these arrangements. But at what point? And what is the meaning of this simultaneity of unlike things which constitutes audiovisual objects?
Publications
Monographs
Butis Butis (Marion Herz, Alexander Klose, Isabel Kranz und Jan Philip Müller) (Hg.): Goofy History. Fehler machen Geschichte, Weimar: Böhlau 2009. Link: http://www.boehlau.at/978-3-412-20426-6.html
Articles
»Ist der Tonfilm ein Monster? Antonin Artaud und die Unmöglichkeit des sprechenden Films«, in: Wentz, Daniela/Wendler, André (Hg.): Die Medien und das Neue (FFK 21), Marburg: Schüren 2009, S. 97-110.
Link: http://www.ikkm-weimar.de/publikationen/ikkm-schriftenreihe/band03_wentz_wendler/prm/233/ses_id__feae8321769d7909419047a82cc77fe7/cs__/index.html
»Synchronisation als Ton-Bild-Verhältnis« Beitrag zum Online-Kompendium Bild-Ton-Relationen www.see-this-sound.at des Ludwig Boltzmann Institut Medien.Kunst.Forschung, Linz 2009.
Link: http://beta.see-this-sound.at/kompendium/abstract/47
Englisch: »Synchronization as a Sound-Image Relationship«, in: Daniels, Dieter/Naumann, Sandra/Thoben, Jan (Hg.): See this Sound. Audiovisuology Compendium; an interdisciplinary survey of audiovisual culture, Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König 2010, S. 401-413.
»Dickson Experimental. Wie im Jahr 2000 der älteste Tonfilm der Welt produziert wurde«, in: Butis Butis (Hg.): Goofy History. Fehler machen Geschichte, Weimar: Böhlau 2009, S. 227-245.