Author: Yu Sang

Oskar Fishfinger was a towering figure in the area of motion graphics and animation and he was best known for his ability to combine impeccably synchronized abstract visuals with musical accompaniment. I was highly attracted by his Optical Poem as it perfectly demonstrates his skills in his area of expertise. In the first half of the video, Oskar used different dynamic circles to represent running music. For example, big circles always means strong beats and accentuation. Besides, the circle gets bigger or smaller reflect the change of sounds. In the latter part, the music sounds more varied and there comes to appear many different timbres. At the same time, the visuals also change. I can see the new image such as triangle, rectangle and many other polygons that represent different timbres. I felt the beauty of harmony which caused by the consistency between visuals and sounds in Optical Poem.

Optical Poem was listed as a1938 film. Circles pop, sway and dart across the screen, all in time to Franz Liszt’s 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody. It might be relatively simple to manipulate a shape in a computer, but Fishfinger’s technique was decidedly more low tech. This work was made before the days of digital. He Used bits of paper and fishing line, individually photographed each frame, somehow doing it all in sync with Liszt’s composition. Actually, this is an experiment in conveying the mental images of music in a visual form and it reflects a time capsule on the social attitudes towards modern artists in the 1930.

Reference:

https://www.google.com/doodles/oskar-fischingers-117th-birthday?hl=zh-CN

http://www.openculture.com/2014/09/optical-poems-by-oskar-fischinger.html

Link: https://gist.github.com/TheaSang/da45d1c178a15f4a728a9053206071b1

This is a piece of rigoroso sound. I want to create something different from the piano sounds which we created in class. Thus, I tried different INPUT modules to find what I want. Then I followed the instruction, Oscillator(s) -> (Mixer ->) Filter(s) -> Level Control -> Effect(s), to combine them together. During this process, I tried various Modules as I wanted to explore different possibility caused by different modules. But I was still confused that sometimes I changed the parameters, the final outcome did not change a lot. Also, I am sorry that I cannot record sounds successfully on my computer but I have taken the snapshot.

According to what he said, I can basically understand the process of making this video and I was also curious about the final output. At first, I can clearly hear each word and each sentence of the speaker. Gradually, I felt a sense of space when the sounds come up. It seems that simply though the piece of audio I can image the speaker sit in a big room. With time went by, this sense of space becomes stronger and stronger with the repetitive record. At around 11:00, the sounds of the speaker become muddled and at the same time, the environmental sounds become louder. I cannot clearly hear what the speaker exactly said. But I still wander the following change of the sounds because the sounds now have no literal meaning. At the end of the audio, I felt that there is no person in the room and the sounds are also no longer made by the speaker but by the room itself.

When I listen to this audio without reading the article, I was confused about the true purpose of the artist. Instead of using traditionally musical means to create sounds, Lucier used a technological process to reveal naturally occurring acoustic phenomena. It seems that he wants to cancel the subjectivity of human and create real environmental sounds. But this is only my personal guess. Overall, this audio really brings me in a room and relaxes me.

https://gist.github.com/TheaSang/d4f24f0f2808b630b9919b636bfbe7d1

This is my project video. I use two videos from the folder and one screen record video. I use XFADR to combine the first two videos and use CHROMAKER the third video. But I was still confused about the use of other video objects.

Explained by some researchers and scientists, synesthesia may have a pathological origin. In other words, synesthetes may be regarded as patients or abnormal people. Personally, I think synesthesia is not only a genuine neurophysiological phenomenon but also an extraordinary genius, especially in the areas of art. I was surprised that there exist such a group of people who have active and sensitive perceptivity. For example, they can turn spoken words, letters, numbers, voices, or sounds into visual impressions like colors and figures; they can turn teste, smell into emotional feelings. It can be said synesthesia offers various possibilities for art.

Melissa McCracken, a Missouri-based artist can paint music. She is a synesthete and her situation can be described as colored hearing. The sounds that she hears every day such as someone’s name or a song on the radio all can be translated into vibrant, beautiful colors. Her vivid paintings stem from her desire to capture her daily experience so that others can understand the brilliant, saturated world she inhabits. Realizing her unique perception, she started combining painting with different kinds of music. McCracken explains that her brain is cross-wired and she experiences the ‘wrong’ sensation to certain stimulation; Each letter and number is colored and the days of the year circle around her body as if they had a set point in space. She said to her audience, “The most wonderful ‘brain malfunction’ of all is seeing the music I hear. It flows in a mixture of hues, textures, and movements, shifting as if it were a vital and intentional element of each song.” Indeed, her artworks bring me a strong personal emotion. No matter the choice of colors or brush strokes shows great passion and aesthetic values.

Actually, there are a lot of famous artists have such kind of extraordinary genius. Van Gogh once declared each note evoked a different color. The Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky also thought music and color were inextricably linked. He once said, “The sound of colors is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would express bright yellow with bass notes or dark lake with treble.” Although I cannot totally understand their ideas through their artwork, I am still moved by their passion and strong emotions demonstrated by these works.