Author: Tianyu Zhang

My favorite film is Studie No. 7 (excerpt) made by Oskar Fischinger in 1931, Studie is a series of abstract studies that were synchronized to popular and classical music, and in a sense, they are the very first music videos. As for the artist, Oskar Fischinger, who was an expert in the field of abstract films and film making. The film was accompanied by sound on record, the soundtrack is Hungarian Dance no. 5, which is a symphony full of happiness and enjoyment. He used the etchings as the subjects of the films, aiming to pass on his understanding of the music. And at the same time, he was working on “new and different techniques, including multiple projector performances.” This film may be a way for him to promote his way of film making.

The synesthesia between the vision and the sound attracts me a lot. The artist used the flying and dancing lines and squares as tools to convey the visual performance following the rhyme and tone of the music piece, sometimes rush but sometimes silently rest. And I especially like how the lines turn into a circle, just like the butterflies flapping the wings in the sky along with the music. One issue is that the whole film is in black and white, thus, the synesthesia between colors and music is absent. Another thing is that there is a small gap between pitch point and the pause point of the moving lines and squares, which leads to a feeling of awkwardness.

References

Moritz. (2004). p. 22

Moritz. (2004). p. 207

unknown, http://www.oskarfischinger.org/OF_Filmo.htm

“Oskar Fischinger.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Fischinger#cite_note-3

https://gist.github.com/tz1201/9795533753d1b4abf6275dac226ee560

Since the original one is more like a piano and classical music piece, I want to make the second one more electronic, to make a special combination of different types of music. From my perspective, except for the choice of objects themselves, changing patches is very important as well.

I first listen to the piece without reading the article, thus, I feel a little confused at the beginning. And I can hear the speaker’s speaking with a stutter. I don’t know if he means to be like that or not, but as for my first impression, I don’t think it will turn into a beautiful music piece. But with the time passes by, at the point around 20 minutes, I can hardly hear the exact words, instead, the echoes enhance and frequency becomes clearer.

It is a brand new way to me that making music pieces simply through speaking. As stated in the article, “rather than using traditionally musical means to create sounds, Lucier used a technological process to reveal naturally occurring acoustic phenomena”. This piece provides people with a new way of generating the music, just like what we have seen in the class, the man uses items in life, like the bathtub, bottles, oven and so on to create a piece of music performance. 

It reminds me of one light and sound show I saw this summer vacation. It is a show that uses light and sound to make you feel in different places. A part of the sound is a record of thunder, raindrops, and the sound of birds and winds. Also, as mentioned in the class, we will never be in a 100% environment because we breathe, the blood flows, all these make sounds. We live in a world which is full of sounds, therefore, even though the music made by instruments are great and beautiful, sometimes it is good to go back to the origin of nature, to enjoy a different type of music.

https://gist.github.com/tz1201/61447cd899d9890ce1aae19c52dea169

this is my video of max project, I first tried to connect TWIDDLR and SCRIBBLR together, but then I found that these two can not operate at the same time. Then I changed the SCRIBBLR into another GENERATE object WANDER,  at the beginning the output video still can just show the result of TWIDDLR only, then I discovered that the WANDER will turn off per few seconds. Thus, when I was recording the video, I held the mouse on the switch so that the WANDER would keep working.

From my perspective, musical play is one of the best representation of synesthesia. It is more than simply acting or music, but is a combination of vision and listening. Thus, you see through the music, you listen through the performance becomes an undivided whole. For example, in one Chinese musical play named Jinsha, the song beyond the horizon uses the flute to present a vision of white snow, and the actor strings out the note to make the audiences to feel how the snow is flying and wandering in the sky. There is not exactly real snow on the stage, but we can feel the scene.

 

The screenshot of the video, source link: https://www.bilibili.com/video/av63168526/?spm_id_from=333.788.videocard.1

This is also mentioned in the reading material. The author cites Locke’ s work in which he “described a blind man who associated the color scarlet red with the sound of a trumpet” (Locke, 8-9). Through this art piece, I get to know better about how the sense of listening and vision can be linked and communicated. I can use different colors and shapes to present the sharp or soft, high or low musical pieces, I can use different notes to present bright or dark vision view as well.

As for me myself, I strongly agree with the idea mentioned in the reading material that “the occurrence of synesthesia is substantially influenced by early childhood experiences” (Emrich, Neufeld, Sinke, 418). I do believe the synesthesia varies from person to person because everyone has different life experience. Listening to a piece of long high music, some may see the snow flying in the sky, some may see the dolphins jumping out of the ocean. Like one of my favorite music piece I Love You, I see the floating river while one of my friends says that she just see the tears in one’s eye. That is because we have different experiences, thus, we have different understandings.

Emrich, Hinderk M., Janina Neufeld, and Christopher Sinke. “Synesthesia, a Neurological Phenomenon.” In See This Sound: Audiovisuology a Reader, 414–23. Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walthar Köning, 2015.