Lets start at the beginning...

Not even joking, my mind feels like information overload, there is SO much to look at!! So I was trying to look at so much stuff and I was just confusing myself so I am just going to start at the beginning, making a timeline of significant people, ideas and projects so my mind can work better! OK....

Around 1742 (1725 when the idea came about) - The first "colour organ" designed and constructed by Louis-Bertrand Castel. It was a stringed instrument with moving transparent and colour tapes. It used seven colours which tied to the seven whole notes.

In relation to Castel's "organ machine", as I was doing research into his colour association with music notes, I started finding out how it has changed and different people take on it. Here is a chart which visualizes the past three century's debate on which colour goes to which note, its quite interesting!

Looking more into colour theory I started looking at the association with colour to emotions. As I will be doing a visual piece I have to be ever aware of colour association how that maybe the viewers feelings can be manipulated. Here is an example of "standard" colour association:

Narrative Non-Narrative

More of an abstract way to visualize music but still enhancing the viewers senses with the combination of visuals and music is music videos! The aim of music videos are to enhance the viewers experience not just to physically visualize the music, you get see that on windows media player with all its psychedelic waves of colours and patterns. So instead of the direct one to one collaboration with visuals and sound what music videos do is more create a more abstract and almost inspired visuals from the music. For example if the music video has a narrative to it, the video could be what the band/singer is talking about in the song and the video simply displays what he/she is singing about. If the video is non narrative you can play around with what you feel when you listen to the song and with around with different styles and techniques. I will give you an example of a narrative and non-narrative movie video:

This is such a lovely example of a narrative music video, C'mere by Interpol was directed by Adam Levite which putt a contemporary twist on Hansel and Gretel in a snowy forest gives an aesthetically pleasing video.Visually the flames that are in fact fabric add a new interesting level to the video, giving it a softer edge where real flames would have been more aggressive. The fabric flames also tie the band playing with the snowy scene together nicely. Over all the short winter day light has added a gentle tone to the video with subdued colour tones which gives quite a vintage feel 

 A good example of a non-narrative music video is by Franz Ferdinand is "Take me out"

Directed by Jonas Odell. This Swedish director was influenced by the non-art movement Dada for this video. Franz Ferdinand comes from a Glasgow School of Art background and Odell has sympathetically emerged it with a graphic edgy style. Odell used a mixture of filmed performance, animations and green screen.

From the book "Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context" by Carol Vernallis, Vernallis describes music videos as 

"showcasing the star, reflecting the lyrics, and underscoring the music"

Turning music into a story

I came across this absolutely beautiful video today, this lady Alice Ninni has created a story out of the notes that make the music that you can hear, its just such a really cute simple idea but so effective and aesthetically pleasing to watch the progression of the story. Creating a story that enhances the music is a really good idea, it can provoke emotions and the viewer can be taken along with the story.

Maura McDonnell- Visual Music

I did some more research to find more people that are using film/video/motion graphics to visualize music. Maura McDonnell is a very interesting and she also wrote an essay on visual music, but just an introduction to it. It was a really good and interesting read especially at the stage that I am at. It was good just to see the highlighted artists and art work. You can read the essay from here :http://www.soundingvisual.com/visualmusic/VisualMusicEssay.pdf it was very helpful to find out about artists that I had missed in my research so far and was a good starting ground.

McDonnell also has also been involved with some visual music installations/works. One I particularly like is called "silk chroma" (you can view the videos here : http://vimeo.com/silkchroma ).

"Silk Chroma is a fixed media visual music video that employs a technoscience approach to both colour and timbre experience to create a visual music and electroacoustic composition. Silk Chroma can be presented either as a fixed media piece or as an installation piece using a surround sound presentation. A technoscience approach to colour and timbre phenomena provides a basis for aesthetic design. The technoscience approach to the perceptual aspect of colour and timbre is an innovative, non-standard approach to perceptual phenomena which permits a systematic handling of aesthetic issues; issues which are normally excluded from more scientific/technological considerations." (taken from soundingvisual.com)

Daft Punk- Anatomy of a Mashup

This is a really really cool idea that basically visually shows the different layers of one of Daft Punks mashup. What is so great about it is that it shows you the complexity of what it take to layer and build up this song and with a clever colour coded bar at the bottom you can see when layers come and go. Not only does it show you have the audio track was built up but it has also created a beautiful visual art piece that is stunning to watch as the track builds up the layers, its defiantly something to go have a look at for yourself as I am not doing it any justice by just talking about it.

http://daftpunk.themaninblue.com/

WHY VISUALISE MUSIC?

So heres the question, why do I want to do this? Well, since doing my experimental video I realized that out of the entire 3 years I have been at uni it was the only module I got some serious passion, drive and want to actually push myself to do something I have never done before. German electronic music artist Frank Bretschneider is a man who also found a passion for visualizing his music. He uses strong visual styles, in particular his live shows in which visuals are generated by the audio output signals, for example, amplitude, harmonic content and frequency. He is described as :

"abstract analogue pointilism", "ambience for spaceports" or "hypnotic echochamber pulsebeat"

What I like when I watch his videos is that the visuals really enhance the audio and the visual really makes you focus and concentrate on the understanding of the abstract sound.

Here is some examples of his work:

This is also the link to his website for more information:

http://www.frankbretschneider.de/Web-Site/about.html

Week 1 drawing class

Week one of drawing class, we had a life model. Its not directly related to what my final project is, but it was just nice to go back to the basics of being an artist..drawing. Getting back to basic rules that helps your development; line, tone, composition, media, aesthetics etc so here is what I got up to in that class:

Michal Levy- Giant Steps and One

Michal Levy is another person that has Chromethesia. What he has done is made animated videos that visualize what he sees when he listens to music so we too can understand what goes through his mind while listening to that particular music. I think to use a condition that not many people have an turn it into a creative outlet is so wonderful and his videos are full of colour shapes and fun. This is what he has said on his website:

"I see music. As i hear it, it appears. Music for me is a gateway to a synesthetic 3D space full of shape-shifting colours and textures. In my music-animated films Griant Steps and One I invited you to join me on a colourful journey into music"

This is the story board of his video "one" and below is the final piece

Here is another great example of his work

Chromethesia- Case study "D"

This is a case study that went on for five years from 1974-1979 and was conducted by Paul A Haack and Rudolf E. Radcoy from the University of Kansas, Lawrence. The lady in the center of the study was a middle aged woman who was given the name "D" for the case study. At the beginning of the five years they did a study they did numerous tests on D, recorded the data and basically after five years they retested her and her responses where 100% consistent. Here is a link to the journal, I cant read it just now as seemingly you cant access it off campus so I will read more in depth when I go into uni!

http://jrm.sagepub.com/content/29/2/85.abstract


There is also a case study asking the question

"Are Chromæsthesias Variable?"

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1412324?seq=3

Sound making art

Another musician/artist/sound designer that experiments with audio/visuals/art is Yann Seznec. Even though he is more into the technical side I think that his projects are still pieces of art in themselves. My favourite and most appropriate to my project is called "spores". Mushrooms drop thousands of tiny spores that are naked to the human eye so what Yann and mycologist Patrick Hickey did was shine lasers onto the mushrooms so that as they fell you could see them. Adding the audio element they made software and hardware that detected real time movement and with every spore that fell it activated a sound which was to "represent the nature processes inherent in the mushroom". Here is a link to Yann's website that goes into more detail and there are videos too!

http://theamazingrolo.net/projects/spores/

Aphex Twin

While I was Researching Chromethesia I came across Richard David James, a British electronic musician and composer who has Chromethesia but it was not this fact that was particularly interesting. After doing some general reading I found out that he likes to make pictures from sound which is the opposite of my aim. The most famous example is that in his single "Windowlicker" where he has used the sound waves to make a self portrait of himself.

To view this image you have to use spectrographic software which displays the different frequencies of the song as a graph against time.

This is a very interesting technique, and technically would probably confuse me but I like the idea that I could also possibly use sound to make art.

Tutorials to get me on my feet..

As well as doing my honours year I will also be learning new software- Adobe after effects and Adobe premiere pro. It is not that I haven't done editing before, it's just that I have only ever use final cut pro. I found final cut pro so much easier to use but if I want to get a job in promotional videos the I got to learn the other two as well. So here is a tutorial that I followed to help me get started and used to the interface so I can become quicker and more time effective.

Synethesia/Chromesthesia- Very interesting!

Yesterday I got out a very interesting book called Digital Harmony: On the complementary of music by John Whitney and I was reading a section titled "The Role of Color and The Role of Music" which talked about colour association with sounds. Interested about this idea, I started  researching it further and I found out that  Synethesia is a neurological condition which means that when one sense or cognition involuntary triggers another. There are many different types of Synethesia but the one I am interested in is called Chromesthesia which is the term for someone who can "see" colour when a tone is sounded. So essentially these people are doing automatically what I am trying to create for my honors project! This could be really interesting if you got someone who had Chromesthesia and played them a track to which they described the colours the "saw" and you could make a video by what colours they saw, that would be a cool test study! 

Cool examples of different ways to visualise music

Theses are just a different range of ideas that have already been explored and will help give me some inspiration for my own project!
I will be going more in depth into most of these videos and talking about the inspirations behind the video and the artist and what else they have been up to but for now, its just nice to be inspired by what is already out there.

Previous work that I have done that relates to my current project

These are basically some snapshot, media tests of a previous project but still relate to my current project and can still provide inspiration.

Final year, plan of action!

Ok well fourth year has started, first week went well, first lecture did a good job scaring me into doing work so here we go! So where do we go from here? Well to give some background to my topic choice is that last year I had a module called "kinetic illustration" where I was to make an experimental video that incorporated visuals and audio. At first I really struggled as I had only previously made one other video. What I wanted out of the video was to visually represent the audio and it turned out so well that I am coming back for another shot at it.  I think studying how visuals and audio can work together will be good for looking for a job as it can be transparent to different industries like TV adverts, music videos etc. What I want out of my final year is to have a better understanding of  how visuals and audio can work as a package and how, for example they can make together make a product more sell-able by clever advertisement or how they provoke emotion in people by working together. I also want to continue my experimentation with the bass speaker and see where that takes me. Here is the video that started it all off, my 3rd year module..

Also if you are interested more, here is a link to the blog.

http://keneticillusration.blogspot.co.uk/