Please enjoy a preview of Jellyfish in the Sky. It is now available on iTunes!! (you can click on the download arrow on the right of the player for the link) or you can find it here!
Jellyfish In the Sky Preview by DIGITALLUSH
It’s been a long and busy semester, but I’ve grown by leaps and bounds at CalArts. At the beginning of the semester I created an independent study to work with four of my friends in the experimental animation program. We developed the sound for the animations over the course of two months as we prepared for recording, spotting and editing. I will be posting the videos as soon as they are web ready and cleared! Until then, please enjoy some pieces that were created this semester including some original music, design, photography and some excerpts from a paper on post dramatic theatre (not so…hidden in the design section…)
CalArts Mardis Gras March 18 2011 by DIGITALLUSH
Something that has been on my mind a lot lately is how music is composed, notated and interpreted for performance in this day and age. We have the image. We have the timeline. We have waveforms and automation lines. I wonder, as digital music progresses, if we will start to see a merge of both design and composition. The ability to communicate clusters of information visually has been around (I’m assuming) even longer than classical music notation. I take notes on musical staffs all the time because they are so helpful in notating change overtime, however, I am curious to see what we can do that goes far and beyond the limitations of pencil and paper. How to make and organize relevant visual languages to digital musicians will be an exciting new frontier in the musical world.
Below I’ve taken screenshots of the automation lanes of the same sample over time. Notice the peaks and valleys – these peaks and valleys have a direct relationship to how one should adjust their nob over time. Providing a template with more designated variables to multiple performers would allow you to compose DELAY, REVERB, DISTORTION and a HI-CUT, for example, for another musician to understand. Providing additional designations would be necessary to ensure that the musicians fully understand the language system. Luckily, Ableton Live is a fairly popular DAW amongst laptop musicians, and can hopefully provide enough standardization that would allow consistency between composition and realization.
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I do wonder, as new forms of composition surface, if these unique systems offer any future modularity. Can these systems be built upon and expanded? Can they be reused by other composers? As the tools to compose in visual media continue to develop, our collective communication concerning electronic music has the potential to increase dramatically. Just as classical notation served (and serves) its purpose, a new form of composition will begin to develop to fit the needs of a new media.
Hippolytus is a Greek tragedy written by Euripides. Like many Greek plays, the work lives in one scene where the majority of the action is actually told through the main characters’ stories and monologues. Most of the dramatic events take place elsewhere, but this provides an excellent opportunity to integrate rich and dynamic, sound design to aid, not detract, from the performances.
My first reaction, after absorbing the play, was to find images as some source of inspiration. I had found some images of the main two gods. They were crumbled statues, and my mind immediately went to textures. I decided to find some textures that reflected the mood of the play. My first section, coastal love, was inspired by the placement of the play, but also this feeling of a coastal breeze near by
“Spontaneous creation comes from our deepest being and is immaculately and originally ourselves. What we have to express is already with us, is us, so the work of creativity is not a matter of making the material come, but of unblocking the obstacles to its natural flow.”
Stephen Nachmanovitch author of Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art