21 The Creative Process: Making Connections

Professional musicians consider themselves as musicians and artists. The idea of being an artist extends to mediums such as theater, film and of course painting, sculpture and photography. Digital arts includes music production, graphic design, multi-media and film making.

Let’s look at how the elements of music and the process of music composition can be related to graphic design, photography, and multi-media creation.

Form

When working with musical form, we have thought of ‘sections’ that help the sense of repetition and contrast. A form of ‘AAAAA’ will probably not be as interesting as ‘ABACA’ or even ‘ABCDE’. Because music exists in time, the sense of a song’s form takes time to understand and enjoy.

The same is true for video and film as an aspect of story telling. Repetition and contrast are important aspects, especially for longer durations.

Very often, you’ll want to mirror the musical form with the visual form. If a piece of music is ABA, then a very effective approach would be for the visuals to also reflect ABA.

The elements/factors that create differences between sections could be very different. For example, each row represents a visual of “A B A” but with differences in the amount of contrast between the “A” and the “B”.

You may want to consider more of a relationship (rather than an exact copy) between the form of your music relative to the form of your visuals.

Form: (visual) ABCDE against (music)AAB

Rhythm

Rhythm involving duration as an aspect of time allows you to work tempo as both musical and visual (think about the rate at which visual items change, move, or have a sense of pulse. Rhythm can involve sub-divisions where various layers can be combined and varied. Here are two examples where the same video is scored with pieces varied by the rate of rhythm motion (same tempo, just more sub-divisions of the beat in the Guitar with Arp on vs. a single note per clip.

Arp Synth – one note per clip

Classical Guitar with Arp on

Melody & Harmony

Often we think and hear melody as the ‘main tune’ or the aspect of a song that we end up humming or singing to ourself. When paired with visual aspects it is suggested that your tune be ‘front and center’. Most of your compositions to date have not involved lyrics but that is something to consider when working with multi-media. Lyrics by their presence highlight the melodic element. We perceive melody primarily due to its contour so think about the shape of your melodic line. Also the texture of the rest of the music can help present the melody as being prominent. A good exercise is to see if you can set visual elements against a single voice/melody without other voices/tracks present. Obviously your choice of instrument/timbre will have an impact on how you craft your melody. It is good to write in an idiomatic manner – given the instrument what are the features that make certain types of melodic content ‘make sense’. Strings and guitars have specific notes that fit since they have ‘open strings’. Brass instruments since they produce pitches based on overtone series will sound idiomatic if your pitch choice aligns with that series (see the earlier chapter on “Harmony as Implied Melody”.

Melody only texture with focus on contour

Texture & Timbre

Many of the timbres that are digital in nature seems to portray visual images quite well, especially those that involve panning as the left to right movement of audio space translates well to lateral movement in physical space. Use of layered tracks also can aid in creating interesting musical/visual works.

Focus on timbre and texture

Genre & Style

Often the visual style, especially in film, is captured and/or reinforced by the music. Historical periods often help bring together the visual and aural. Of course you may want to create contrast between these elements (a digital/electronic looking set of visual animations set against acoustic music from the Baroque or Classical era is such an example.)

Focus on genre & style