Culture building Community

A scene from Agantuk (Director: Satyajit Ray) set in the dining room.

A well-traveled gentlemen is having a conversation with a young boy and his mother. The gentleman is a relative of the theirs but meeting them for the first time. The conversation moves from the exchange of pleasantries to the food on the table and then on to painting. The kid asks the elderly gentleman if he paints more precisely if he had learnt to paint. The gentleman starts by talking about his visit to the Altamira caves in Spain. He goes on to tell the kid that since a painting of such beauty came about in the absence of any training, he lost interest in learning to paint.

The story above forms the pretext to a discussion of an aspect of art that I find difficult to pin-down with a term. This is the age of effects such as auto-tuning but if you listen to old recordings or some live performances, you sometimes get ‘hit’ by the music. People sometimes use the term raw to describe this effect. It is as though an emotional response was triggered automatically and yet it is at such a primitive level in our head that one cannot reason about it or explain how it came about.  I also think that it is difficult to bring this quality into art consciously and this is the reason that majority of artists use certain symbols to connect with the audience or buyers(for example, Buddha, Ganesha, poverty and so on). The example below is interesting in this light.

A German-American psychologist by the name Wolfgang Köhler showed a picture similar to one below and asked the subjects to choose a name for each shape. They were provided two names — Takete and Baluba.

If you try this experiment, a majority of you will choose the name Takete for the form with sharp edges and Baluba for the rounded form. Wolfgang conducted the experiment on residents of Tenerife. More recently, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran from UC San Diego conducted a similar experiment with undergraduate students in the US and native speakers of Tamil. The shapes were similar but the names were now changed to Kiki and Buba. The results were the same with more than 90% of the subjects choosing the name Kiki for the star and Buba for the rounded form. Ramachandran also points out the strange co-incidence that the shape of the alphabets in the name Kiki and Buba themselves have sharp and rounded characteristics. This is a startling example of how the human brain associates abstract visual forms to sound pattern characteristics.