Sirovich Family Resident – Arianna Zuanazzi & Yashaswini Raghunandan
STEAMplant Faculty Member – Alex Noyes
“The Hidden Story tells a story that is not visible, but is narrated through speech and sounds and by making the process of film creation explicit. The audience enters a cinematic space where they participate in an interactive sensory experiment. In this science/art project, we use the medium of the film to offer immediate realizations of scientific knowledge and we forge the cinematic language of images and sounds through perspectives and angles that belong to the world of science. Together with the audience, we want to reflect on how the brain uses and combines different sources of information to interpret the story or to create a new story.”
The Hidden Story is a multidisciplinary and multisensory project. The idea behind this project stems from a fundamental research question: What narratives can sound tell? How do these narratives compare and contrast with those conveyed through visual mediums?
The Hidden Story project includes three production phases which will lead to a three-channels installation and a short film: (1) Cognitive Neuroscience experiment, (2) Creation of the visual-only film, (3) Creation of the sound-only installation. The team is currently in Phase 3.
During their time with STEAMplant, Arianna and her research collaborators developed an experiment to evaluate meanings and stories conveyed by soundtrack music. This study is available at https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/aj97z.
Informed and inspired by the scientific results, Arianna and Yashu, with the support of a screenwriter, wrote the screenplay for the visual-only film, so that moving image could directly be translated into acoustic features of sounds and music. Then, Yashu directed and shot the short film. Finally, Arianna and Yashu edited the film sequences and presented their work in progress at two NYU MARL Talk series in 2022 and 2023, one Science New Wave works-in-progress event in 2022, and was showcased during a dedicated event “Brain in Film” in 2024 at Genspace.
