You don’t have to be a designer or a devout Bauhausian to have heard the adage “less is more.” However, designers are (or should be) aware of the extreme abuses of simplicity this chestnut has inspired over the 90-odd years since Walter Gropius formally introduced design as a trade to the world. The result is what may be considered by some to be a vapid or valid reinterpretation of sound design technique—or at least a valiant effort to push design past its accepted limits. Let’s discuss further.
“Liminality” or liminal space is one of the many esoteric discourses these days that has captured the equally barren attention spans of generation Z, spawning many well researched studies on the subject. Liminality can be summarized as a transitional state of mind, body, or physical space—a literal or figurative “passing-through” from this to that. Many people have experienced an uncanny-valley experience in the midst of such states of being or space (e.g., a dead mall now devoid of all signs of life, or the famous rolling green hills of the “Bliss” Windows XP wallpaper, which was designed to be nothing more than a backdrop over which one’s desktop icons floated), and the topic of liminality has even infiltrated internet culture in the form of the Backrooms creepypasta.
With the 2011 release of Macintosh Plus’ Floral Shoppe, the internet fell in love with the vaporwave and mallsoft subgenres, the sonic equivalent of liminal space iconography featuring smooth jazz and funk muzak samples drowned in oceans of reverb and usually slowed down and glitched in a digital audio workstation to emulate the experience of listening to a decaying cassette tape. Visually representing this threshold between classic and modern technique, the cover of the aforementioned Floral Shoppe perfectly marries the classical with the contemporary, showcasing an expanse of checkered flooring and a bust of Helios, Greek god of the sun.
The ironic success of vaporwave and liminal space art is reminiscent of past countercultural movements such as dada and surrealism, which explored the deconstruction of meaning and method. In this case, when you push design to a point just past its optimal simplicity (in which the work still communicates a message clearly and intentionally), you actually reemerge in the realm of fine art—art that exists as beautiful or benign purely in the eye of the beholder, and which does not solve any immediate problem or satiate any dire need. In other words, while art lacking a clear focal point or serving as a glorified backdrop can be beautifully or intentionally created, it does not satisfy the job of a sound design solution in and of itself. Rather, it facilitates the completion of a design with the aid of further critical thinking and visual execution. It is the step just before (less is almost more) or just after (less is less) a sound design is achieved.
Caveat: it must also be argued that with enough momentum and tangible work behind any art or design movement, the demarcation between art and design technique tends to blur, or one becomes the other (such as how a movement based on folly came to be a focused, satirical critique of the follies of war). This is only natural, as these two separate practices are so closely related, and often bleed one into the other to achieve each their separate ends.
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