All my prior research and listening experiences of Acousmatic music have been a challenge for me to find personal insight and aural enjoyment in the concept, until today when Julio showed us about diffusion of this nature in a hands on manner.
The prior discussions on the arrangements of complementary phrases and the importance of choosing suitable sounds inspired in me ideas of musical narratives and more engaging forms of live performance than I had ever considered constructing before attending the lesson.
I shall continue to do more listening and reading on the subject, in addition I plan by next lesson to have a selection of sounds and spatialisation notes so I can get a clearer idea about potential compositional structures.
Task 6 brief includes creating a musical interpretation of a painting of our choice from the early 20th century abstract and expressionist art period. Using our own guidelines and rules that I shall shortly define, the music must correlate with the painting in an easily verifiable manner.
Following on from the brief, our first consideration must be the initial perceptions one has to a given abstract piece. From there, dissection of the different layers must be undertaken, coupled with an effort to subjectively justify what the different colours and shapes relate to.
Considerable research of the various sub genres of abstract art led me to the work of an arresting Ukrainian artist, Sonia Delaunay. The pieces of hers that caught my attention were those created during the ‘Orphism’ movement in France. Their explorations often indulged in the spontaneous mixing of bright colours together based upon geometrically designed foundations. However, their main concern was the way in which these interactions influenced sensations of depth and movement.
I was keen to absorb these ideas and philosophies, believing embodying their beliefs would help further portray the relation between the art and my composition.
Listening guidelines:
There are forty seven separate shapes with colour in the piece Orfizme. I decided to relate each of the shape’s colours to timbre. For example, darker tones relate to muddy and unclear sounds, such as the black shapes, which I modelled a low resolution noisy synth pad to; the brighter colours in contrast represent angelic sounds and appear purer. I used basic associations we have to colours (wherever possible) such as the colour yellow/light brown is often associated with airy bells and chimes, so I designed an electric piano synth as a parallel.
The lengths of each shape relates to the duration of sounds and their square diameter corresponds to the dynamic contours. Here is a scan of the notes and a structural plan which I made onto a print out of the painting, so that arranging the sounds was made as clear and easy as possible.
I needed to consider the way in which the colours are arranged together very carefully. I have equated the sense of spiralling outwards from the white centre partially through attentive automated panning and various subtle enveloping/filter effects to help aid the sense of movement in the piece.
As the piece progresses from the centre outwards, so does the pitch arrangement, though naturally only for the harmonic timbres. The sounds rise chromatically above the white centre (on larger shapes glissandi was utilised) and beneath, it descends chromatically in a symmetrical fashion.
The depth that Delaunay has implied is reflected in my overall mix through equalisation. If you take the white centre as the peak and the starting point, then anything outside of that circle must be travelling in the opposite direction. The development from high to low is an aurally gradual process that eventually ends with many low frequency rumbles.
The grouping of the patterns is also further defined in the grouping of timbres, with small gaps of white noise in between them to signify timbre changes, as reflected in the painting.
This spiralling from the centre which eventually leads to more independent organisations is reflected in my scores structure, for example the tonal groupings are denser and might appear more random the further the piece progresses.
The two most challenging aspects within this task are to faithfully portray the style of the artist in relation to my composed sound and also to address the difficulty of conveying completely the visual pattern’s structure to aural cognition.
By sound designing my piece in groups of colours I was unsure whether or not it would be completed in the way I had planned, yet I feel my interpretation was a success in that I can ‘read’ the painting like a score during playback.
Please watch this accompanying stop animation video for clarification of my structural intentions:
This task has definitely been the most intellectually and creatively stimulating piece of work that I have been assigned so far in the 18 months of studying CMT in Cambridge. I hope you enjoy the results as much as I did working for them.
I hope you’re all enjoying/making the most of your time off! I’ve been doing a lot of planning and writing for the ‘music for a piece of abstract art’ task (amongst other things) so when I get back to Cambridge I can get straight to recording; expect a more in depth post about that mid January…
In the mean time, if anyone is interested, I have uploaded my Electronica mash-up piece we had to compose for Dr Tom.
Mashed-up order:
1. Polymetre rhythms
2. Remix/plunderphonics/mash-up
3. Ambient/generative music (based on my own graffiti-collage score)
4. Metric Modulation and advanced rhythms
I’m very interested to hear others if they’re available?
P.s I found a link to that amazing Musicotherapie video Julio showed us!
For our third task, we were required to score a piece of music to a commercial of our choice and to then brand that product with a jingle at the end. After researching and scoring a few demos, I settled on an Air France advert by Michel Gondry.
I took into account Brian Eno’s Music For Airports liner notes about the way music can reassure a flight, but expanded on this with more obvious musical gestures.
My score is the most instrumentally diverse piece I have written so far with the inclusion of Cello, Harp, Marimba, Synths, Electric Guitar, Percussion and Electric Piano.
The hit points that are in the commercial are visually subtle, so my intention was to bring these out with spacious musical gestures. The gestures correspond to the planes movement from scene to scene, and I aided this movement with panning techniques.
Julio discussed with us harmonic rhythm and it’s importance to the scenes own progression, which is audible in the augmentation/diminution of the varying main chord progression: it corresponds loosely to the changing scenes (an example is the chord lift that is timed to the hair falling off the customer in the hairdressers, (third scene)).
For my jingle, I attempted to copy the timbres that are often heard in airports (announcements for example), but layer them in a strong quirky French way.
I am waiting on a small headphones amp so I can re-record the electric piano (I will collect it at 7am tomorrow from the post office); my advert will be available to see later on Monday.
Listening to my Pingu score on the university sound system cleared up many things and helped me gain a clearer perspective on my mix. I received a welcome amount of feedback and criticism for my conceptual ‘toy’ orchestration.
Clarity is a large part of mixing music successfully, and when there are dense Reverbs with similar Eq’s on multiple tracks, the overall sound soon becomes cluttered. With this in mind, I reworked the score, but priority of the sounds for each section is clearer and more exposed so that each musical gesture now has the space needed to affect the listener.
In class we discussed and learnt about recording ‘wild’ and the implications of having a live musician record and include their own articulations to film. I believe a much more playful and warm score is produced with this inclusion of traditional instrumentalists over solely working with digital sounds.
For the third task regarding commercial music, Julio informed us of what a commissioned piece of work for an advert entails and how one forms their deliverables. This is a very difficult way to write for film because any ideas are confined and inevitably ripped apart time and time again before the employing company is happy.
Aside from this fact, I look forward to working on this task!
I researched many cartoon’s soundtracks before scoring this piece of music; from Looney Toons to the newer cartoon network animations, the constant thread between them all was that the sounds and harmonies were something that were intended for youngsters to immediately grasp and understand, so that they can be influenced by the visual drama even more.
I wanted from the start to include a large amount of vocal samples and noises that the human body can make, much like Bjork circa Medulla.
This particular video encouraged my vision, and let me get to work without the concern that this particular way of scoring a film was incapable. With this in mind, I put myself in the mind-set of a toddler’s, who is just beginning to develop their ears to harmony.
I split my thirty-one second extract into different sections so as to focus on the precise sounds for each movement. I then recorded various harmonies, sounds and noises I made with my voice through my Sp-303 sampler, that I would later use as music and sound effects. Realising that this texture was a bit too sparse, I decided to score some Toy Piano which I think fit perfectly to the childish actions of Pingu.
I took into consideration different harmonic techniques, such as the opening scene where Pingu is walking, anticipation is created by the chromatic fall and rise of the different layers, which converge in unison to create a climax simultaneous to the visuals.
In addition, I cued various Rallentando/Accelerando melodies to Pingu sliding down the hill to represent the quick change in movement.
I hope it is apparent in my score my attention to the harmonic detail that Julio discussed last lesson!
NB: Excuse me for leaving updating my blog until less than nine hours until our next lesson, but I made a promise to my housemates that I wouldn’t go on the internet at all until we got it installed in our home!
I finished my Persona task yesterday after a careful reconsideration of my initial goals and objectives. Julio’s last lesson about automation and articulation made me more sensitive to the capabilities these dynamics can have and how they can play such a pivotal role in the scoring of a good empathetic sounding film.
After reading Chion’s idea about synchresis in Audiovision (in a book store) I became inspired to play with this theory, which is noticable at nineteen seconds in the background where with a fast-tremolo analogue synth I tried to mimic the way the old film flickers over the doll, in addition at twenty-six seconds there is a squeaky reversed guitar that I linked with the man on the bicycle.
Another example is at fourteen seconds where there is a Z shape projected through lights which I thought was reminiscent to a (very basic) constellation report, so I decided to record a glitched up bell melody because people associate a stars ‘twinkle’ this way onomatopoetically also.
I’m quite looking forward to hearing it on the uni’s soundsystem today, anyway, don’t forget to leave me some feedback!
First things first: Sorry Julio for not attending the morning lecture, I didn’t check my timetable properly and consequently missed some (supposedly) very interesting stuff.
It has not been a good week so far really. I’ve been left alone for a week (from Sunday) in my house whilst my flatmates go on an art trip to Portugal, which is a bit lonely (and they left me to sort out the place when my landlord comes on Thursday!); an upside to this is I can be left in peace when trying to be creative!
Scoring ‘Persona’ using an outdated version of Logic at first felt restricting, yet as I pressed on with the score, these limitations turned out to be encouraging rather than confining.
I chose to use a section from the start of the extract, and am aiming for a mix between analogue glitchy ambience, with some post rock esque crescendos. I am attempting to use a more organic approach to reflect the film’s cut and splice feel, but still plan to abstract and manipulate many of the recorded sounds in post production.
My initial demos are promising, all I need to do now is press on with the work!
I hope everyone else’s scores are coming along well.
SinceI was a youngster i’ve been fascinated with moving image, even to the extent of attempting to re-shoot some of my favourite video games on the family camcorder, (I kind of gave up after the lack of commitment my neighbours had for my resident evil short )…
Currently I am in the midst of conceptualising a short stop animation film with some plasticine characters; the introductory class (Music for Digital Media) gave me some great ideas and made me hopeful about all the interesting and clever techniques we are bound to learn. I hope these techniques will thus help me produce any future projects better than if I had otherwise not taken this module.
