{"id":398,"date":"2010-03-23T06:09:16","date_gmt":"2010-03-23T06:09:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp\/2010\/03\/widescreen\/"},"modified":"2011-10-20T18:26:55","modified_gmt":"2011-10-20T22:26:55","slug":"widescreen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/2010\/03\/widescreen.html","title":{"rendered":"Widescreen"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/youtubeAJ2.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"youtubeAJ2.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/assets_c\/2010\/03\/youtubeAJ2-thumb-120x124-14191.jpg\" width=\"120\" height=\"124\" class=\"mt-image-right\" style=\"float: right; margin: 0 0 0px 14px;\" \/><\/a><\/a>The 4:3 television screen ratio came to represent present tense &#8212; the &#8220;narrow slit of &#8216;now&#8217;,&#8221; to use <a href=\"http:\/\/www.billviola.com\/\">Bill Viola<\/a>&#8216;s term. With the increasing preponderance of widescreen 16:9 ratio, those of us who spent thousands of formative hours with the cathode-ray norm find that video suddenly got more narrative. With the new proportions, since the information in view is just a little too much (too wide) to see in a glance, my entire sense of the medium and its relationship to time is &#8220;recentered.&#8221; It takes me a moment to scan the whole thing, the image continues changing, and so, there&#8217;s a &#8220;story.&#8221;\n<\/p>\n<p>\nWould Mandarin speakers prefer a vertical box? 9:16? <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0088846\/\">Terry Gilliam&#8217;s <em>Brazil<\/em><\/a> notably substituted up and down movements for the side to side conventions of movie making and editing. (Films have been wide for a long time.) The habits of our written native language (for me, reading left to right) probably affects strongly the way we make sense of our perceptions.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Op2.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/Op2.jpg\" width=\"150\" height=\"112\" class=\"mt-image-left\" style=\"float: left; margin: 0 14px 5px 0;\" \/>Eighteenth-century keyboard music was printed oblong. The staves were laid out wide &#8212; &#8220;landscape&#8221; in the terms of the computer printer. Most organ music still looks like that. Right around 1800, music for the still-quite-new piano started to be printed with paper turned up-and-down. (Upright pianos?)\n<\/p>\n<p>\nSo the new widescreen YouTube format makes me wonder: Did the grown-up readers of Beethoven&#8217;s newest piano sonatas perceive the passage of time differently once printed music started appearing taller than it was wide?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The 4:3 television screen ratio came to represent present tense &#8212; the &#8220;narrow slit of &#8216;now&#8217;,&#8221; to use Bill Viola&#8216;s term. With the increasing preponderance of widescreen 16:9 ratio, those of us who spent thousands of formative hours with the cathode-ray norm find that video suddenly got more narrative. With the new proportions, since the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1177,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[223,47,226,227,224,219,222,221,220,225,218],"class_list":{"0":"post-398","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-223","9":"tag-beethoven","10":"tag-music-printing","11":"tag-musical-notation","12":"tag-narrative","13":"tag-perception","14":"tag-ratio","15":"tag-representation","16":"tag-space","17":"tag-storytelling","18":"tag-time","19":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}