^^
27.
The human auditory system has its own version of perceptual completion.
A psychologist named Richard Warren demonstrated this
particularly well. He recorded a sentence and cut out a
piece of the sentence from the recording tape. He replaced
the missing piece with a burst of static of the same
duration. Nearly everyone who heard the altered recording
could report that they heard both a sentence and static. But
a majority of people could not tell where the static was!
The auditory system had filled in the missing speech
information, so that the sentence seemed uninterrupted. Most
people reported that there was static and that it existed
apart from the spoken sentence. The static and the sentence
formed separate perceptual streams due to differences in the
quality of sound that caused them to group separately.
28.
Not all authors trusted that the theater audience would
automatically understand their plays in the intended
manner. Thus, they repeatedly attempted to make it clear to
their public that visiting the theater was not merely for the
purpose of entertainment, but rather to draw lessons from
the play offered onstage. It was, therefore, important for
the viewer to create a distance from the actions on the stage so as to facilitate
interpretation of the content. This idea was developed by
Bertolt Brecht with his ‘epic theater,’ which used alienation
as a strategy to prevent the identification of the public with
the figures of the drama. Through scattered narration and
commentary throughout the play, for example, the viewers
are invited to take a step back from the performance. In
this way, they are given hints to better understand the play
while the conclusion is left open so as to leave them to
draw their own conclusions.
29.
After dinner he built a fire, going out into the weather for
wood he had piled against the garage. The air was bright
and cold against his face, and the snow in the driveway was
already halfway to his knees. He gathered logs, shaking off
their soft white caps and carrying them inside. He sat for a
time in front of the fireplace, cross-legged, adding logs, and
gazing at the warm fire. Outside, snow continued to fall
quietly in the cones of light cast by the streetlights. By the
time he rose and looked out the window, his car had
become a soft white hill on the edge of the street.
