Reflective text
Many songs have a deeper meaning within their lyrics, the overall ambiance that they make when in a room or their synchronization with certain media because of a certain reason. These reasons can be. An intertextual link with the lyrics of the song, a visualization of the songs beat structure, or a combination of these two with additional media added to create something new combined from different pure forms of media. This process is similar to a journey but not a journey from one place to another but a journey of an artist experimenting and delving into the meaning of music and trying to visualize it inside his head and then express that. If you have ever though “Oh that song is beautiful” I try to think why it’s beautiful and how can I express that using multiple sources of media. To create something significantly different from the original that it can be classified as new media form representative of the songs meaning or form translated into a visual sense. There are many different DJ’s that are starting to delve into the art of song visualization and each do it in their own different way. My project was to find and show the way I delve into my own process or journey of creating this visualization.
My first attempt at creating a music visualization of a song was in 2010 and the result was If We Ever Escape.
I created it completely from two pure forms of media. A song and a film but what I did and tried to do was link specific scenes within the film to the theme of the song through intertexual meaning linkage. By this I mean that what is being sung about in the song is happening within the video. By taking short extracted clips using Fraps I was able to reconstruct a different shorter narrative from the original that suited the feel, meaning, beat and visuals to the song. It was all then put together and colour corrected in Sony Vegas which was the video editing software I taught myself to use. I was quite happy with that as my first piece of work and did not intend for it to be released as a commercial product but was a chance for me to learn to edit and also I wanted to create an installation to house music videos of this kind made from found footage and thus spawned the four screen installation similar to what I created last year. I continued to remix and experiment with different visual editing techniques to create other pieces of hybrid media because what I was aiming for was a 1-4 hour long compilation of videos that could function as a playlist for the installation when set up inside a club for people to enjoy as they danced and it would give them something to look at and talk about if they weren’t dancing. This theory unknown to me at the time relates very well to the premediation theory by Richard Gussin (Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 , forthcoming Palgrave 2010) It also is in essence remediation (1) of old media into a new form of media for people to experience in a new way.
That was a goal of mine to make my art for not only keeping alive the old but expressing it in a new way. I hoped to combine different media forms such as music visualizations like this:
(2)to help express the beauty of music in visual form. The picture above shows one of the song maps I created using the polynomial space map creation tool I wanted the songs complexity and structure to show in the map I built for that song. These maps are meant to be explored and flown in to appreciate how they animate the music to the beat and melody.
I was hoping to be able to create a multi screen visualization of something similar but all around the user so that they are surrounded by the music and the visuals. Also I imagine a song as big wavelengths pulsing with the beat and since I enjoyed creating small loop video installation videos. I often think of a song as a loop and that occurs in my maps. I some of the maps are more suited to more complex song types but this is just a matter of personal aesthetic taste and it takes quite a while to find the right numbers to create the shapes I wanted the maps to be like for the game.
I also created a cross visualization by mixing the footage from Polynomial with footage from my first video If We Ever (The Fountain 2006). I layered the music visualization into the eye to show visualization of the music. I wanted the videos to be played on separate monitors with a loop on the two videos and the polynomial maps in the main screen so that people could interact with the music and the visuals and thus provide a hybrid media experience with an example of remediation, hybrid media and convergent media in one video installation piece.
I would have liked to create a large-scale mode for the interactive polynomial maps so that they could be experienced in a larger 2-3 screen installation or in 3D so that it would be more immersive but did not have the time to create this.
There are also two tracks created for this project from samples of many different songs each.
SkyMixeDub: Track Listings of songs used in a sampling remix in order of their playing:
Mad House (Dead Money Mix)
World Looking in (DZ Remix)
Jenova Project by Datsik
Cozza Frenzy (Bassnectar’s Mega Bass Remix)
Used and Mixed on: 18/11/2011
Sometimes when we hear a song or a beat we think it can be improved or dislike certain parts or things about the song. I took the parts I liked from the different songs and replaced the other parts of the song with other song parts. Editing it together and blending it with Audacity to create a beat I liked the sound of or that fit the theme for the song I would like it to be.
Beat Modulation:
Pendulum by Another planet: Hold Your Colour Album released in 2005
Datsik by Galvanize
Cookie Monsta by Muscle Man
Fasten Your Seatbelt by Pendulum feat. Freestylers
Remixed on: 23/03/2012
Bibliography:
(1)Richard Gussin - Remediation - (Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 , forthcoming Palgrave 2010)
(2)Pictures from Polynomial – Screenshots by Sonan Kempadoo captured 24/03/12
(3)