Interactive music video

http://donottouch.org/?fb_action_ids=10152758234215230&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=288381481237582


This is something, everyone should have a look at. Basically, it is an interactive music video in which your cursor movements are recorded. I know its not exactly visualising music, but I could help but post it on my blog because its video ideas like this that turn viral and get a lot of attention so its a video to learn from!

P.S 80% of people did touch the model!

Real Ones - Separation Blues

So I came across this music video recently and I think it is just fantastic. I love there are just little hints of visualising the actual song ie the cd racks moving up and down and the milk moving up and down for example. But what its fantastic is how they have visualised the words. Yes the have to the exact word but they have done it such a fun and creative way that it that it is not boring. Lets not forget that one of the first music videos of Bob Dylan holding up cards with the words on it, and look what happened to that! what I think this video shows is that visualising music doesnt have to be every beat has a visual equivalent, they have done it very subtly, its not the main focus but it adds character and light heartedness!  

Russ Chimes - Turn Me Out

I have just came across this music video. WOW I really love the use of colour as well as the movement. It kind of makes me wish that I could have found this before I did my hands and feet video to say it was inspiration.. but ahh well. I love the use of the hand gestures and the repetition. Even though it is a dance song the set and location has a not very night club atmosphere but I really like that, its a nice contrast. I love the us of the bold colours also. I think it really compliments the overall tone of the video.

Some apple adverts that relate to my project

Since doing my hands and feet video, and looking at the apple advert, I started looking at other apple adverts and I found two that I was really really impressed with how they combined visuals and music and how well they worked together

WOW! This advert is amazing in relation to my project. the video is dynamic, fun and exciting, I could quite easily go on. The way this advert has been created is utterly amazing. The way the ipods move and bounce and split with the music is just great. The way in which the audio and visuals connect on this level just makes the advert so much more engaging and attractive to watch

I love how the use colour like with what I kind of did in my video for "fur elise" The classical piano playing in the background and the ever changing and moving around colours on the ipad covers is just beautiful and how they move and change in time with the music makes the transitions effortless.

Similar adverts/videos to my hands and feet video

Well since doing the hands and feet video, I admititly didnt do very much research for that video. I literally just went with what I visualized in my head when I first heard the song. I think that even though its not the conventional way to create things especially at uni but I thought what the hell, lets just do it. I thought it tied in nicely with synthesia that I was talking about in first semester so I would give seeing what I heard a try! So Im doing a little bit of backwards research and having a look at videos in the past that are similar to mine and how they have approached the visuals to the song.

1. The Superbad (2007)- title sequence

Firstly, the song and visuals have the same era feel, vintage and funky. The use of repetition is similar to what I created at the end of my video with the wiggly arms. The use of block colour and outlines work well with the tone of the song.

2. The ipod adverts (not sure on the date)

These adverts were so well received, I remember everyone talking about them and looking back on them, they are still fresh and fun as when I first saw the adverts. The visuals work very good with the songs and I think it was just such a simple idea of people dancing to the songs but with this really fresh and edgy graphical style to it.

Some orchestral pieces

Here are some piece of music that I quite like and could be used as my final track

Clavilux 2000 - Interactive instrument for generative music visualization

I have just came across this beautiful piece of visual music. I love the reference to the color organ (previously discussed in 1st semester and lit review) and through just the use of colour it has been created, no fancy frills. just lines of colour representing each note, the length they are played and the pressure in which they are played.  Here is the description for a better understanding:

"The Clavilux 2000 is an interactive instrument for generative music visualization, which is able to generate a live visualization of any music played on a digital piano. The setting of the installation consists of three parts: A digital piano with 88 keys and midi output, a computer running a vvvv patch and a vertical projection above the keyboard.

For every note played on the keyboard a new visual element appears in form of a stripe, which follows in its dimensions, position and speed the way the particular key was stroke. Colours give the viewer and listener an impression of the harmonic relations: Each key has it's own color scheme and "wrong" notes stand out in contrasting colors.
All stripes stay and overlap each other in an additive way, so at the end a kind of pattern remains – a summary of the music – which will be always unique since the notes of the composition aswell as the interpretation of the piano player are influencing the outcome. Furthermore the piano player can switch between the standart 2d view and an additional 3d view of the visualization while playing."

Clavilux 2000 - Interactive instrument for generative music visualization from Jonas Heuer on Vimeo.

Water speakers

Dont ask me how I came about this but this is AMAZING! such a great visualization and only for under £30!!! Take a look for yourself, but I am probably going to buy some..I love how dynamic they are and they visualise the music in a fun and AFFORDABLE way!

Possible songs..

So I have been doing a ton of music listening the past few days, even listening to classicalFM... yes I know, it was research.. and here are some of my favorites that I thing have a nice textural and dynamic feel about them. The more I listen to songs the more I think that probably finding just an instrumental or the song without singing would be better than with.

Great website

I have found such an awesome website with the top 100 classical music list, its fantastic! This is great for my project, could maybe try my hand at using a really famous song?!?

http://www.kickassclassical.com/classical-music-popular-famous-best-top-100-list.html

Bert Schutter

While doing some research into composition for tv installation I came across this one which I felt needed a bit more talking about. It is fabulous! Take a look at the video here:

When I first watched the video, there was just something so fascinating about it. I had never heard of Schutter but this installation was so captivating and interesting that I had to add it to my blog. I love how you see the still shape of windmill and the movement of it at the same time? If you get what I mean. I love how you can hear the swooshing sounds of the windmill as it moves round and round. 

Some inspirational tv installation

Having a look at composition and how I could arrange the tvs

sonia falcone video installation

WOW this is amazing! I love the installation! The music and visual integration and how graceful it looks. I love how its not just filmed on a wall or something and its actually physically broken up slightly.

Some more inspirational videos/installations

I absolutely LOVE this kinetic installation, its so elegant and graceful in the way it moves. the sculpture is an artistic visualization of the process of form-finding in different variations. 

You can read more about it from here: http://www.artcom.de/en/projects/project/detail/kinetic-sculpture/

installation inspiration

Here are some nice examples of installation that infuse together audio/visuals together

http://vimeo.com/45914252

Essay Grade!

I am SO happy, I got my essay grade back on Thursday and guess what!! I got a A-, 18/20. That's pretty darn good, I am over the moon as I have never managed to achieve an A in my essays, so to get one in 4th year, I picked a very good year to get an A in my essay. To be fair though, I did work really really hard on that essay and obviously it has paid off. Gives me great hope for my dissertation as has motivated me even more!

Love and left- an interesting transitional video

I've known about this video for a quite a while but I forgot A. about the video B. that it relates to my project and c. when I remembered about it to blog about it earlier. But anyway. Love and theft is an amazing video, that you have to spend 6:50 out of your life to watch. The way in which the visuals and music work so well together is great. The video visualize the mood and feel of the music at the time, some times its ditsy and sweet and goes into full aggression and through the use of colour, style, timing and content the visuals follow along this roller coaster of a song.

I think it would be really interesting to try a transitional video to follow along with a diverse musical composition and to try and reflect the mood and feeling through visual means.

Possible locations

I took a walk tonight for some possible night shoot places.

essay writing time!

Well this is the time that I have to put down my camera and pick up lots and lots of books. I've actually been really good this year, I've been taking books out every since first week of classes so I'm feeling quite prepared. I have been mostly concentrating on the literature review and I have decided to split it into 3 sections that I feel are the most important factors in creating my final outcome.

Section one
I think I am going to start off with the theory of the association between a note to a specific colour.
Starting from the very beginning, I have been reading a lot about Pythagoras and Aristotle who "speculated that there must be a correlation between the musical scale and the rainbow spectrum of hues" (http://www.awn.com/mag/issue2.1/articles/moritz2.1.html). Also when I was reading Goethe's "theory of colours" book, I read in the notes that Aristotle also said that "it is possible that colours may stand in relation to each other in the same manner as concords in music, for the colours which are (to each other) in proportions corresponding with the musical concords, are those which appear to be the most agreeable" (page 418)
I have also been reading a lot about Sir Isaac Newton and his theories of the association between a musical note and colour. Newton was "the first to observe a correspondence between the proportionate width of the seven prismatic rays and the string lenghts required to produce the msucial scale D,E,F,G,A,B,C."(http://rhythmiclight.com/articles/InstrumentsToPerformColor.pdf)

I will probably take about goethe's theories and then lead on to Louis Bertrand Castel.

Castel in 1730 created an Ocular Harpsichord which was founded on the Newtonian Doctrine. The colour organ was wired up to 60 different coloured panes of glass that corresponded to a individual note. When the sound was played, a curtain would lift the pane of glass and reveal the colour to match the sound.

Before Castel built the colour organ he posed the question " Can anyone imagine anything in the arts that would surpass the visable rendering of sound, which would enable the eyes to partake of all the pleasures which music gives to the ears?" (D.Conrad, 1999. the Dichromaccord: Reinventing the Elusive Color Organ.)

Section two

In the next section, I want to focus on the similarities in characteristics of music and visuals. 

I will probably start off with a quote from William Moritz that I have previously mentioned. 

"Just as many different techniques create moving images, so do many different instruments create musical sounds. Images (ie colors, form, materials, juxtapositions and contrasts etc.) and sounds (ie. tones, melodies, rhythms, orchestral colors, harmonies and counterpoints) function the same in different media"

Then I will talk about Leopold Survage as I feel his "Colored Rhythm" is appropiate to this section. As a painter, he had a problem with space so he wanted to create an animation so that it was as free and fluid as music. So he took a characteristic from music and applied it to visuals

Then I will carry on to Wassily Kandinsky. Why he is in this section it that he had an interesting relationship between Arnold Schoenberg. They were both similar in the way that Kandinsky wanted to create new abstract art and schoenberg wanted to create a new harmony in music. Schoenberg's work "seemed without rules, random, based on "aimless wanderings"". The way Schoenberg composed his music helped Kandinsky convey his ideas on compositional structure for abstract painting.

Section Three

In the final section I plan to talk about how you create an aesthetic for both the eye and the ear. In this section I will talk about the study I found in that the conductor found that:

“Although information from the world enters our heads via different sensory organs – the eyes and ears in this instance – once they are in the brain they are intimately connected with each other. Impressively, they are connected in non-random ways, so hat some combinations of sound and vision go together better than others.”

then I will most likely talk about a modern visual music artsit, I am currently torn between Netia Jones and Maura Macdonnell. 

Music video workshop day in Glasgow!

I'm just back from a rather strange workshop, strange not as in it was boring but I was basically the only person that turned up so I had an entire day of skilled people talking to me!!

First of all the day started with a history lesson on music videos. The funny thing is that for my module last year 'digital media project' I chose the music video industry as my chosen area to talk about. So I had already did an extensive research into the history but it was good anyway to go over it and I found a few videos that I had missed it so it was still worth listening and taking notes. The talk was taken by Blair Young who has a music video/ promo company in Glasgow so it was really interesting hearing how he started out to where he is now. After the talk I asked him about graduated programs and talked to him about my fourth year project ( I gave him a link to my blog), unfortuantly due to the small size of the company they do not have a graduate program but he said if I wanted to come for some work experience I should get in contact with him... CONNECTIONS!

Then we closed for lunch and the second half of the day was held by Film G representatives (who organized the day). They have a competition on currently for passionate film makers and one of the section is a music video. Even though the songs are in Gaelic, that doesn't mean that I cant enter. I listened to a few of the songs and met a few of the songwriters who talked about their inspiration for their songs. It was really interesting having that one to one talk with the people who I could potentially be creating a visual representation for their music.

I would really like to enter as I think it would tie nicely into my project as well as a chance of winning £500 AND a day on a set of a music video, which lets be honest for a student is INVALUABLE! I'm not going to say I am defiantly going to do it because as I progress I might get some really good ideas that would be better to develop further, but I'm hopeful I have time for both!

Here is the link to Film G to find more:

http://www.filmg.co.uk/en/competition