Author: Joyce

I enjoyed Synchromy by Norman Mclaren a lot. I looked up the Chinese meaning of the title, which is “color symphony”, a very direct and vivid interpretation of the video. From the National Film Board’s website, “This animated short by Norman McLaren features synchronization of image and sound in the truest sense of the word.” There seems to be no board or causal relationship between the sound and the image, they are syngenetic. The color, length, width, distance, and frequency of the different squares represent the frequency, timbre, and rhythm. By making this film, Mclaren shows the synchrony intuitively.

“To make this film, Mclaren employed novel optical techniques to compose the piano rhythms of the soundtrack, which he then moved, in multicolor, onto the picture area of the screen so that, in effect, you see what you hear.” To be honest this explanation is really out of my expectation. I thought that Mclaren made the music according to the video or the other way around, but I didn’t expect them to be the same thing at all. Mclaren did a great transformation between the sound and the visual effect. And the color-matching is amazing. This video teaches me more about synaesthesia and how to produce relative beautiful work.

https://gist.github.com/Joyceyyzheng/d8ed3060b123b104dd1b7a58665408b2

Below is the audio of my assignment.

I checked a few filters and effects and connected them one by one into the circuit until it makes a sound that works. Since I am going to mix them eventually, I don’t want the new one to be similar to the first one, so I produced sounds like beats for the new one and mixed them.

I need to be honest that I almost fell asleep when I listened to the audio since I really found a comfortable and quiet place (my bed). For the first 8 minutes (I checked the time because I was almost asleep) I have been trying to distinguish what Alvin Lucier is saying, from the audio that is getting more and more ambiguous. After a while, I heard a regular sound, I don’t know how to describe it, but the frequency of the wave should be a very regular arc. And then the audio gets more and more ambiguous, all I can hear is the arc, no words anymore. 

Popular music is almost what I listen for audio arts. But popular music can be replayed and remade for so many times, but I Am Sitting In A Room cannot be replayed. It is like the saying “a man cannot step into the same river”, the architectural particularity of a given space, the rhythm Lucier talks, the time, they all matter too much. Maybe my level is not high enough to appreciate such a kind of art piece, but it does give people a precious experience to hear, to understand how the sound is produced and what is its nature, what it will be like in the ending end.

https://gist.github.com/Joyceyyzheng/654e79adfa5ca3069b26d92934488926

I recorded two versions of my final output since the final version doesn’t look that good — it is too dimly discernible and I cannot see my face anymore :(. For the output I tried to use HUSALIR, but I found that the value cannot be changed, thus I added an ATTRACTR before it. What’s more, at first I put them at the wrong place between PATTERNIZR and CHROMAKEYR. It didn’t work so later I changed the place.

Different versions of my assignment are attached below. 

https://youtu.be/E2RS_GvRcpY

https://youtu.be/wCBEumPHm3Y

French Musicals is an independent and special category among all kinds of musicals — not only because of its language. Its music has a very strong rock and roll style, and the beat is often very sharp and strong. For example, Le bien qui fait mal  in Mozart L’opera Rock and La gloire à mes genoux in Le rouge et le noir (The Red and the Black). Both songs give people a strong emotional impact, even if you can not understand the language or see the show can imagine the protagonist (singer)’s strong emotional struggles. According to the reading, there might also be synesthesia between “volume and size, volume and brightness, and pitch and size”. I don’t know if the synesthesia listener may see a grand scene.

Before school started I went to watch the Tikhiy Don(Silent Don). At the very front of the stage, there was an arrangement of a real river — the designer used the tin foil as container and created a river, which is the Don River. Audience in the front row even had to wear raincoats to avoid being spilled during the show. Through the real touch of water, the audience would have a strong sense of being on the scene and being by the ton river. Additionally, the Don appears in the drama as a symbol of the change of the Cossack, having this river could also bring the audiences back and having them experience the change of cruel history.

Stage Photo of Silent Don     

Source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/s-bxPcbxfprVwkpKv5i7GA

To be honest I am still confused about synesthesia since I have never experienced it myself. I wrote two examples because I think they are all very good instances of combining people’s different senses. What confuses me is that are these really representative examples of synesthesia or it’s because drama/musicals itself is a kind of art that has multiple forms of artistic expression, while both of them seldom use color — especially use color to express sound, like the colored hearing in the reading. The causal relationship between them is bewildering.