Which day is it again?
Body clock confused. The zeitgebers are, have been, and will be all over the place. This is due to little dalliances off to the city in the middle of the week, and returns on the weekend, instead of the other way around. Oh yeah, and weddings. One wedding. A wedding located temporally twenty minutes away from the time at which I slipped up the driveway. Automotive lessons learned today: 1) I380-by-Scranton is full of cars and single lanes, especially on Saturdays 2) It’s really easy to get lost looking for petrol in Rockaway (but the scenery is nice) Happily, spatially, the wedding was only a ten minute drive away.
While on this edition of semi-vacation me and G dipped our (my, minimally) virgin feet into the application of soundtracks. For her architectural adventures, G created a stunning little video showcasing her building, and it needed musical accompaniment. It’s quite fascinating setting mechanical stuff to music. You automatically read intent into the motions of the building, when it fits the pulse.
Motion and music are intricately bound together. A musical crescendo is such a natural sibling to a physical crescendo: a rising mass of pillars, for example. Thinking about this makes me immensely intrigued in how people have illustrated music. Not so much the automatic visualizations, but more the Fantasia style interpretations. Has anyone famously built a short film around a symphony, for example? I feel like that has to have been done about 5,823 times already, but don’t know of any iterations of it. Perhaps my more-cultured-than-I (i.e., all of you) readers can tip me off.
August 18th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
Not quite the same thing (as in not visualisation of music), but you’ve made me think of Hitchcock editing or even filming around the soundtrack - this happened in Vertigo I think, as well as other films. There’s a quote where when asked how a scene will go/look, he says “that will depend on what my composer gives me”. (Apologies, reporting all this from memory, so details may be off.)
The orchestra in Sydney built a slideshow/film around VW’s Sinfonia antartica (ironic since this was created from film music in the first place). The film was constructed from Ponting’s still photographs from the Scott expedition. Not animated, because of the nature of the source images, but still created with the intent to match/mirror/support the music.
As you say, there must be many others. And better known instances too.
August 21st, 2008 at 11:31 pm
Yvonne,
I need to watch more Hitchcock. That editing sounds like the kind of thing that I would have absolutely and completely missed when watching his films before. After having gotten into classical music the soundtracks of movies stand out a lot more.
Actually, I just realized that one of the best examples I know of synchronizing action with music is that Tom and Jerry cartoon with the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody.