Title
Dream diction
Github Link: https://gist.github.com/TheaSang/69a6a812ea307aba1860a9a0bd191c39
Project Description
My inspiration comes from oral poetry, Ursonate, performed by Kurt Schwitter’ in 1926. I was deeply surprised by this kind of art performance. As an audience without any knowledge about oral poetry, I feel a sense of struggle from the performer. A telling stutter, nervous echolalia in Ursonate seem to deliver an illusory story but constrained by huge limitations and obstacles in reality. My project is aiming at simulating the state of chaos when people are half asleep. Primarily, I hope to create a state of distortion between reality and fantasy through combing the sounds of human twitting and a piece of melody with non-repeating and unordered rhythm as well as the video with translucent colors moves easily.
Ultrasonography: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs0yapSIRmM
Perspective and Context
According to the article Synaesthesia, we have read, I think synaesthesia is not only a genuine neurophysiological phenomenon but also an extraordinary genius. I think it can create extremely fantastic works in the area of arts. For example, in my early research, some genius painter like Melissa McCracken, a Missouri-based artist can paint music. She is a synesthete and her situation can turn what she hears every day such as someone’s name or a song on the radio into vibrant, beautiful colors.
When the concept of Synaesthesia comes to the audiovisual, I think it requires high consistency and harmony between audios and videos. On the one hand, for project creators, they should express personal ideas and concepts on both audios and videos. Although in our first project, we can not use external video resources and the transformation of videos follow the transformation of audios, we can still adjust the style of videos through different effects and filters to the overall concepts. On the other hand, for the audience of the audience, they need to interpret the audios and videos as a whole and they can freely develop their own ideas based on their understanding.
For my audiovisual project, in order to achieve this kind of harmony and consistency, I made a lot of effort on trying different kinds of effects on both videos and audios. However, due to my limited knowledge of MAX, I cannot control the audio and video by myself. Thus, to some extent, I did not achieve high harmony between my audios and videos.
Development & Technical Implementation
Before starting actual developing my project in MAX, I reviewed the past in-class examples and tried to find something that I can start with. Besides, I also studied from some online resources to better understand different effects on videos and audios.
These are the screenshots of my final video.
For the audio part, I need to create both melody and simulate the twitting of human beings. In order to simulate the twittering of human beings, I use SEQUENCER and GRANULAR and speed up the audio in order to make a sense of contortions and distortion. But I failed to make the melody I want. The final output of the melody is more random. I tried to use FM, LPF, and VCA to change the style of the melody, but it does not seem to be a success. The connection between twitting and melody was not as strong as I expected. Finally, I used STEREO MIXER to combine them together.
For the video part, I use 3EASEMAPPR to turn audio into video and at the same time explore some other effect functions to change the angle and colors of my video to make it more illusory and like the picture in a dream. I did a lot of adjustments and achieved the final result.
(when I open screen record and MAX at the same time, my computer died so I did not record the demo.)
Presentation
It is a pity that I did not do the presentation in class due to the emergence and I also did not get the comments from my classmates. My presentation was not so formal but more like a conversation as I directly presented it to the professor Eric. But it can also be regarded as a good thing as I have more time to convey my idea breezily and got a timely response. I first introduced the development of my project and then, put forward my confusion and problems. I felt like I lacked the introduction of inspiration and ideas lying behind the project, which made my whole project seem a little bit confused. In the next time, I think I need to add this part and explain my subjective emotion on the projects and my audience can follow me easily. Also, I can still talk about the problems I meet during the development of my project and I can get more useful and possible solutions. Last but not least, I need to practice more on my own project as when I presenting it, I found there still some audio effects did not reach my expectation.
Conclusion
I am glad that I made a complete project by myself and conveyed my personal emotions and ideas in this project. I will conclude my overall projects in two aspects.
- At the stage of research and exploration, I quickly found the topic I was interested in and had a strong passion to build some new things based on the existed artworks. In the later projects, I think I need to keep the passion and curiosity on exploring different kinds of artworks and have critical thinking on these works. However, I need deeper and more detailed consideration of the feasibility before I start making projects. Because during the process of making the project at this time, I sometimes had no idea on the next steps and I was not so clear about what I really want to achieve in the end. If I can plan in advance, the process of the project will be much smoother.
- As a novice in MAX, the most difficult thing for me during the process of making the project is to figure out the effects of different functions. In order to find the most suitable effects for my audios and videos, I did a lot of researches and watched tutorial videos （https://cycling74.com/get-started）. I really enjoyed this learning experience and exploring experience. However, as I pay most of my attention to these detailed effects, I lacked a holistic view on the overall framework of MAX. For example, in my project, some effects did not play their own roles as I lacked some necessary functions. In the future, I will become a more active learner and proactively learned from the professor and my classmates.
- After finishing and presenting my projects, I gained valuable suggestions and instructions from professor Eric. Then, I analyzed and carefully thought about these suggestions and further adjusted my project to meet the demand. I believed that when I rethink my projects after the presentation, I can make faster progress.
Generally speaking, I will make more effects on developing mature ideas and exploring more possibilities in MAX to build coherent and comprehensive projects with strong personal styles.