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rbedgar
Joined: Dec 20, 2005 Posts: 110 Location: Sunnyvale, CA
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Posted: Sat Jun 16, 2007 11:17 am Post subject:
Sound and also Visuals Subject description: Thoughts on having visuals with music |
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This topic came up both years during and after EM 06 and 07.
If there's interest, this discussion could dig a bit deeper.
First full disclosure: I have a history making films and videos, and personal computer performance systems for live audio and visual performance. My performance systems include "Living Cinema" (1987) and "Sand" (1994). Examples from performances are on http://www.robertedgar.com/RBEGrid/RBEGrid.htm
So given that, I tend to think of each sensory channel as an equal partner to the other. Not that they are always used that way. Just that they can be. You can compose as carefully with visuals as you can with sound. Same for text, spoken and sung words, and the same for interactivity itself.
What I'd suggest, though, is that when you add one channel to another, the compositional elements aren't just doubled...you have an exponential complexity available to you. You can have rhythms between a visual rhythm and an audio rhythm, and juxtaposition between color and timbre, where one doesn't express the other, it can conflict with the other and produce a new area for meaning. This isn't esoteric, almost anyone who has done much video editing has played with this on some level.
My main point is that adding visuals to music isn't 1 + 1. And if you approach it that way, or in a way that reduces the compositional options to that, it will be disappointing. One will seem in the service of the other.
When you edit sound to visual you're working with single frames, 1/30th or 1/24 of a second placement of events, and again this isn't esoteric, you know if you're off by a frame. And it's not just matching events, as I say you play movements and rhythms and saturations against each other.
So my suggestion here is that the inclusion of visuals with sound composition shouldn't stop with whether to have them or not. The strategy of how to juxtapose them is its own decision.
If there's interest, I offer this topic for that discussion. Apologies if this is already a discussion elsewhere, this is a big board and I may have missed it.
Robert _________________ Robert Edgar
rbedgar@stanford.edu
www.robertedgar.com
The present day composer refuses to sleep... |
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rikardgrankvist
Joined: Jul 07, 2007 Posts: 6 Location: Stockholm
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Posted: Sat Jul 07, 2007 1:46 pm Post subject:
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I find your talking points extremely interesting. As far as I'm concerned intermedia creations is where modern art is heading, and it is my prime interest as a composer. I feel like a composer in a general understanding of the term; "one who puts things together". I'm primary schooled in music, but have a keen interest in video, design, sculpture and photography. When I'm composing, I'm always relating between different medias, and I always wish I was a versed in video editing and photography as I am in music composition and design.
Another media that interests me greatly is the internet. I plan to base most of my future composition around presentation via the internet through interactive websites. A website is a revolutionary medium for art presentation because of its accessibility, reach and affordability; both for artist and audience. A piece of art designed to be viewed with a web browser and broadcast on a website can instantly be appreciated in full quality by billions of people, for a very low cost (internet café or dialup connection), or (relatively) for free (broadband connection in home).
How do you present your audiovisual compositions? As regular movies? Have you toyed with online presentation at all? |
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rbedgar
Joined: Dec 20, 2005 Posts: 110 Location: Sunnyvale, CA
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Posted: Sat Jul 07, 2007 3:59 pm Post subject:
Sound and also Visuals Subject description: juxtapositions |
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Hi Rikard,
You write "When I'm coposing, I'm always relatingbetweendifferent medias".
Sometimes I think that I hear with visions and see with sounds, a couple of channels worth of synaesthesia. And the closer I listen, the more articulated my visions. I think dance is often how many dancers listen to music (but not Merce Cunningham...I'm not proposing this as a rule, just something for myself...).
To answer your question, my earlier work in film, video, and my live cinema performance systems (Living Cinema and Sand) were done previous to a broadband web. Right now I'm programming a system in MAX/MSP/Jitter for local performance, not unlike my "Duchamp Examinations" piece, but with both audio and video triggered and modulated by my MIDI guitar. I can imagine programming browser plug-ins that provide local synchronized visual for audio (well, of course there are geometric visuals in MediaPlayer and for Quicktime), but that'll be for someone else to do. Go for it!
As I noted in my earlier post, you can see examples of LC and Sand at my website http://www.robertedgar.com/RBEGrid/RBEGrid.htm . For an early example of a musical (but silent) 16mm film, go towards the bottom of the screen and watch "simultaneous opposites". All single framed.
-r _________________ Robert Edgar
rbedgar@stanford.edu
www.robertedgar.com
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mosc
Site Admin
Joined: Jan 31, 2003 Posts: 18197 Location: Durham, NC
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Posted: Fri Jul 13, 2007 2:45 pm Post subject:
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This is a great topic.
I find most of the music/video art combinations to be underwhelming, but there are certainly exceptions.
IMHO, music doesn't necessarily need or benefit from visual accompaniment.
The "bandwidth" of visual input seems to be much higher than audio. If you are listening to music and suddenly shown a photo your brain will stop focusing on the music until the image is identified and integrated. If video art is changing several times a second, then I usually find that very distracting. I often find myself watching video art with my eyes closed.
Film music is intensionally composed to take this into account. Often, when you listen to filmscores they aren't all the interesting. (There are marvelous exceptions, of course). _________________ --Howard
my music and other stuff |
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rbedgar
Joined: Dec 20, 2005 Posts: 110 Location: Sunnyvale, CA
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Posted: Sun Jul 15, 2007 10:20 am Post subject:
Sound and visuals Subject description: attention |
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It's as if visuals leech attention from listening.
I think that it is a matter of synchronizing (not necessarily duplicating) changes in multi-channel work. (a channel being audio, or video, or text etc.).
If the visual is relatively non-changing, or has a non-changing rhythm, then a sound that suddenly changes can steal your attention. Same with a new visual and a fairly static music bed.
The visual often has a recognition aspect to it, a new element requires time to recognize it (is that a leaf or an elbow?). Whatever stimulus engages your language channel is the one that has your current attention. This brings in problems of spoken word, and music concrete.
Of course, your attention is not your emotive state, which can be affected by plenty of things you're not paying attention to. So dragging the audience's (or your own) attention from one channel to another is not the only thing going on in a multi-channel composition. _________________ Robert Edgar
rbedgar@stanford.edu
www.robertedgar.com
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mosc
Site Admin
Joined: Jan 31, 2003 Posts: 18197 Location: Durham, NC
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Posted: Sun Jul 15, 2007 11:02 am Post subject:
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Of all the video for music techniques, I like the automatic software approach the best. It makes the most satisfying visuals in many cases. For example, the many visualizers that come with Winamp, or the gforce visualizer. _________________ --Howard
my music and other stuff |
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Antimon
Joined: Jan 18, 2005 Posts: 4145 Location: Sweden
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Posted: Sun Jul 15, 2007 1:45 pm Post subject:
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I remember seeing an abstract film set to one of the tracks (probably the second) on Philiph Glass' Glassworks in the 80s. It was lots of simple geometric shapes appearing over each other. I remember I loved it. That simple style appeals to me, and I think there is more there to explore.
Do you know any interesting examples on the web (in addition to yours, rbedgar) of video/audio compositions or performances?
/Stefan _________________ Antimon's Window
@soundcloud @Flattr home - you can't explain music |
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rikardgrankvist
Joined: Jul 07, 2007 Posts: 6 Location: Stockholm
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Posted: Fri Jul 20, 2007 9:49 pm Post subject:
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I'm not that interested in automatic visualization based on soundwaves (as in Winamp, WMP etc.) It is more interesting to me to combine pictures (or slide shows), as well as true video with music. The hard part is, as you mentioned, controlling the attention of the listener/viewer. However, I think it's ultimately impossible (and therefore irrelevant), since I'm convinced every audience member will react differently, and have their focus triggered or diverted in different ways, all depending on their personality, interests and current mood. I find myself that when I watch these kinds of presentations (or any audiovisual creations for that matter), I have a very different kind of focus depending on my mood at the time. Sometimes I can't concentrate at all, missing both music and vision, other times, I'm more visually oriented, and at other times more audio-oriented. Also, when discussing a piece you just with someone, yours and that persons experiences almost always differ.
However, it's clear that you can catch attention with tools such as complexity, speed of change, or, as you mention, playing to the "language center" of the brain.
Here's a piece of net art, that is centered around visual text messages with an audio backdrop. The music is repetitive and minimalistic, while the text messages are provocative and sometimes displayed in very quick succession.
http://www.tate.org.uk/netart/artofsleep/
If you like it, take a look at some of the other net art exhibitions at the same website, the online version of the Tate Museum. |
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Nth L0gik
Joined: Jul 07, 2007 Posts: 71 Location: near DC,USA
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Posted: Sun Sep 09, 2007 1:16 pm Post subject:
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music videos ? always a good thing IMO |
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Wayne Higgins
Joined: Aug 16, 2007 Posts: 270 Location: Greenville, FL
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Posted: Wed Sep 12, 2007 10:10 am Post subject:
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Good topic. My sister mentioned to me that my music was good for "watching." I asked her what she ment, and she said that she likes to play it on the Windows Media Player and just sit and watch. Matt Larner in Tallahassee had a piece on his website (which is gone) that had a Computer video piece that was made up of flat colors taking up the entire view and white dots that would appear and grow in size and then disappear. Very nice. I have a Tangerine Dream video called Luminous visions which consists of computer animation set to TD music. Trippy.
What I am aspiring to someday is play and have the music set up through a computer which controls a video projection onto a screen. Something similar to certian setups on the Windows Media Player, but different. (copyright issues with computer software could possibly incure legal nightmares which I would not even want to investigate.) Problem is, I don't know jack about video programming. |
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Inventor
Stream Operator
Joined: Oct 13, 2007 Posts: 6221 Location: near Austin, Tx, USA
Audio files: 267
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Posted: Sun Oct 21, 2007 4:28 am Post subject:
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Antimon wrote: | Do you know any interesting examples on the web (in addition to yours, rbedgar) of video/audio compositions or performances?
/Stefan |
I am just beginning to do some work along these lines, if I understand some of what you folks are saying in this thread. I am programming in ChucK, and I want to have ChucK generate the video directly from the music itself. To this end, i have just recently produced two very crude little quickie-tests. I posted them in the ChucK forum under a title similar to "Making Music Videos with Chuck / A lame but promising example" so you can go see them if you like. I can't figure out how to make the forum repost them here.
One is a "linkage chain" of FFT values and the other is a fly-over of an FFT time series. They are only a few seconds long each. The way I do it is I have ChucK collect up some FFT data, then after the data collection is over I make ChucK output the data encoded into primitives that another program called POV-Ray understands. Then I just tell POV-Ray to animate the sequence and it makes a little movie file.
There is already a music video made with POV-Ray and you can find it on the POV-Ray web page here: http://www.povray.org. It's on the left side of the page about 1/3 of the way down. I saw it and there is music and motion, but they are not really correlated that I could tell. Still, it is pretty cool to make an entire video just from a program file.
I am interested in ideas about how to encode the music into video animations. The easiest thing to do is to change position, rotation, color, size, etc. as a function of the clock variable which is a floating point number that varies from 0 to 1 throughout the video. Things can appear and disappear or move around. A more advanced technique is to encode numeric sequences into what they call "splines", and drive the above attributes with the splines, but the syntax for doing that is beyond me at the moment. Any ideas? |
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Antimon
Joined: Jan 18, 2005 Posts: 4145 Location: Sweden
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Posted: Sun Oct 21, 2007 4:36 am Post subject:
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Inventor wrote: | Antimon wrote: | Do you know any interesting examples on the web (in addition to yours, rbedgar) of video/audio compositions or performances?
/Stefan |
There is already a music video made with POV-Ray and you can find it on the POV-Ray web page here: http://www.povray.org. |
Combining ChucK and POV-Ray is a great idea. I've been thinking a lot about how to set something up in POV-Ray as a kind of visual scenery to music, but I've never really found a way to know where to start. ChucK might be a good piece in that puzzle. It's inspiring to watch your experiments.
/Stefan _________________ Antimon's Window
@soundcloud @Flattr home - you can't explain music |
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Low Note
Joined: Jul 20, 2007 Posts: 146 Location: New Jersey
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Posted: Sun Oct 21, 2007 8:30 am Post subject:
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Max Richter is coming to NYC this year for the Wordless Music Festival, and I saw somewhere that he's bringing visuals along with his moody music. I'm wondering how much of it will be generated live, how much will be prerecorded, and how abstract it will be.
But I'm not even sure I can make the gig, so I may never find out.
I've seen some performances of musicians playing along to a video tape essentially, with a linked audio reel and movie reel. Those performances have always left me underwhelmed. I want to see someone pushing knobs, but if you have this awesome video reel, I'd probably want to see it at home than in a music hall. |
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HolmesMonaco
Joined: Oct 21, 2007 Posts: 2 Location: MD
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Posted: Sun Oct 21, 2007 8:58 am Post subject:
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i think music and visual art go hand in hand. but it can be done in good ways and bad ways. |
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rbedgar
Joined: Dec 20, 2005 Posts: 110 Location: Sunnyvale, CA
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Posted: Sun Oct 21, 2007 10:40 am Post subject:
To synch or not to synch Subject description: An example |
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I meant to add the link to Memory Theatre Two in this discussion, but created a new one instead. Oops.
Anyway, I offer MT2 to this discussion as an example of sound and visuals juxtaposed but not synchronized. There's a flavor that holds together though...I think the piece coheres well enough as everything seems to hang there, the sounds and the visuals, the images and the texts. And while they can refer to each other, they don't duplicate each other.
If ya go to far with this, you lose the cohesion, and any power. It's like suspending something between two magnets. If the meaning floats...you've done it right. _________________ Robert Edgar
rbedgar@stanford.edu
www.robertedgar.com
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Inventor
Stream Operator
Joined: Oct 13, 2007 Posts: 6221 Location: near Austin, Tx, USA
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blue hell
Site Admin
Joined: Apr 03, 2004 Posts: 24079 Location: The Netherlands, Enschede
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Posted: Sun Oct 21, 2007 11:13 am Post subject:
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Inventor wrote: | attached as a *.mov file. |
Something went wrong with the attachment I think? the file seems a bit short and both VLC and QuikTime can't handle it in a sensible way here. _________________ Jan
also .. could someone please turn down the thermostat a bit.
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Inventor
Stream Operator
Joined: Oct 13, 2007 Posts: 6221 Location: near Austin, Tx, USA
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Posted: Sun Oct 21, 2007 11:39 am Post subject:
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Blue Hell wrote: | Inventor wrote: | attached as a *.mov file. |
Something went wrong with the attachment I think? the file seems a bit short and both VLC and QuikTime can't handle it in a sensible way here. |
Oh dear, not sure what it is, it works on my Mac just fine. I was curious, though, as to why the file size was so small. I generated it as a *.mov file and then put it into iMovie to add the sound, then "shared" it and when I closed iMovie it left behind the *.mov file. I put a copy of it on my website, if that is viewable, here: http://www.freedomodds.com/music/.
I just tried it again in QuickTime and from my page and it worked OK. Maybe there is something cached in my RAM that didn't get in the file? I did have to mess with the expert settings in iMovie to get it to preserve the 8 samples per second, maybe that's the problem? I'll reboot and check again. |
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seraph
Editor
Joined: Jun 21, 2003 Posts: 12398 Location: Firenze, Italy
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Posted: Sun Oct 21, 2007 11:44 am Post subject:
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mosc wrote: | Of all the video for music techniques, I like the automatic software approach the best. It makes the most satisfying visuals in many cases. For example, the many visualizers that come with Winamp, or the gforce visualizer. |
I downloaded at http://www.soundspectrum.com the demo version of gforce, whitecap and softskies and tried them out with iTunes. amazing the Standalone version of all of them "visualizes any sound source supported by your computer, including line-in audio, CD audio, microphone input, etc. You can use it to visualize live performances or streaming radio broadcasts."
it sounds cool _________________ homepage - blog - forum - youtube
Quote: | Don't die with your music still in you - Wayne Dyer |
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Stream Operator
Joined: Oct 13, 2007 Posts: 6221 Location: near Austin, Tx, USA
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blue hell
Site Admin
Joined: Apr 03, 2004 Posts: 24079 Location: The Netherlands, Enschede
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Posted: Sun Oct 21, 2007 12:18 pm Post subject:
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Inventor wrote: | OK, I went back |
Thanks for going back into the iStuff, it works now. Simple, I like that _________________ Jan
also .. could someone please turn down the thermostat a bit.
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Antimon
Joined: Jan 18, 2005 Posts: 4145 Location: Sweden
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Posted: Sun Oct 21, 2007 12:20 pm Post subject:
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Inventor wrote: | OK, I went back into iMovie and published it to my iDisk this time, the file size came out to be a more reasonable 750kB, so that much is good. Plus this time I didn't mess with the "expert" controls at all. Hopefully you can view this one, sorry for the mix-up! |
Hee hee. Cute!
/Stefan _________________ Antimon's Window
@soundcloud @Flattr home - you can't explain music |
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seraph
Editor
Joined: Jun 21, 2003 Posts: 12398 Location: Firenze, Italy
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Posted: Sun Oct 21, 2007 2:04 pm Post subject:
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Inventor wrote: | spheres get larger as frequency increases. |
may I know how you choose which pitches to use _________________ homepage - blog - forum - youtube
Quote: | Don't die with your music still in you - Wayne Dyer |
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mosc
Site Admin
Joined: Jan 31, 2003 Posts: 18197 Location: Durham, NC
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Posted: Sun Oct 21, 2007 3:03 pm Post subject:
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seraph wrote: | mosc wrote: | Of all the video for music techniques, I like the automatic software approach the best. It makes the most satisfying visuals in many cases. For example, the many visualizers that come with Winamp, or the gforce visualizer. |
I downloaded at http://www.soundspectrum.com the demo version of gforce, whitecap and softskies and tried them out with iTunes. amazing the Standalone version of all of them "visualizes any sound source supported by your computer, including line-in audio, CD audio, microphone input, etc. You can use it to visualize live performances or streaming radio broadcasts."
it sounds cool |
Yes, I shelled out for the standalone version of Gforce. Haven't had time to try out the scripting language though. It looks very powerful.
BTW, they frequently come out with free upgrades. _________________ --Howard
my music and other stuff |
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Stream Operator
Joined: Oct 13, 2007 Posts: 6221 Location: near Austin, Tx, USA
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