Presentation of Research + Animation using Paper

Question

I have been skimming over a book which highlights music history into new developments and transitions from genre to genre. Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures into Sonic Fiction has begun my thought process and made me consider how elements of music such as breaks in beat, progressions and climaxes can be replicated by visuals and layered onto the music to create an emphasised emotional resonation within an audience or viewer. Using this theory, an animator could create visual stimulus which creates a reflection of what is being received initially through the audio.

Context

Eshun's commentary on music makes it seem almost tangible and certainly as something that can be experimented with like an artistic medium. Artists such as Underground Resistance and A guy Called Gerald seemed at the forefront of pushing the boundaries of musical cognition. Eshun comments on their work, saying they "do what you do with paint, but with music... It's all valid... De-realising the boundaries between live and synthetic noise". This quote resonated with me because it validates any experimentation into sound as a valuable practice. I want to push this theory, making visuals which further explore how music can become visually expressive too. (I'm sure anyone with Synesthesia would agree)

Method

Choosing a piece of music with attributes such as fluid, synthesised sound, definitive breaks, and repetitive beats would be a good start. Following this, I can work on visualising these sounds using different cognitive methods (other research will back this up, previously I have looked at Michel Chion's Audio-vision: Sound on Screen). Furthermore primary research will involve exhibitions involving visuals and light shows (potentially Chris Levine at Houghton Hall). I can observe stimuli from these and listen to audio. Through this I can record my personal findings, edit videos which demonstrate my theories and show them to others to back up my research and create statistics on how different people view them.

Exercise - separate important information from my writing to make studies more concise

Kodwo Eshun's book: More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures into Sonic Fiction has opened up my ideas about transcending musical comprehension. His notes on music's ability to open up the senses like "growing a third ear" make me theorise about extending this idea into visual applications over music. In the same way that elements of music can resonate in an audience, using theory about sonic art and sound design will extend the theory behind emotional responses to music, inviting viewers to be stimulated in a multi modal way.

Eshun's analogies on the development of music makes production seem like an artistic medium in the way that it can be synthesised and edited. His interests lie in people who have pushed the boundaries and invite new ways of hearing. When you produce, you "do what you do with paint, but with music... It's all valid... De-realising the boundaries between live and synthetic noise". Using animation, I hope to explore ways in which to engage musical interpretation with timed visuals and imagery. 

Different sounds can warrant different visual cues; direct beats can have tightly timed actions such as footsteps, more fluid sounds can be matched in less direct ways by gentle movements and transitions. Tony Gibbs' book The fundamentals of Sonic Art & Sound Design observes that By observing and listening in my every day practice. Audiovisual relationships will be informed and, in turn influence my output. This will be a video which summates my research in some form of multimodal spectacle, wherein animations will be dictated by music

Paper in Animation - Beginning to test my theory

Much alike to a lot of the live visuals we see in performances today, I have made my paper animation have simple transformations to work in conjunction with my chosen piece of music. The head bops have the purpose of being tightly timed with the kicks and drum beats within the music, giving a visual representation of each sound. This is a basic approach to multimodality.

Working with paper as a medium was good practice. Sometimes adding limitations to your animation is a good thing. It can ground your work and help to not overcomplicate things. Also depending on what world you are creating, limitations are sometimes a good thing to consider, especially when you can create anything you want within animation.

The animation itself could have been improved on. With this style, timing is important, and compared to the digital precision achieved by A/V visuals, the Timing of movement in my film is quite off in relation to the music. However, I am working on creating key frames in After Effects which react directly off sound. This should help me with demonstrating beats as movements in a more uniform way.