About

This fall we are once again working with Voice instructor Reginald Pindell and his students. Work on this project will culminate in a piece to be screened in a mid-semester, public performance. This project is an exercise in collaboration with artists from a discipline other than your own, and its goal is to encourage you to find ways to communicate and successfully engage with another artist.

On your "About" blog page, you are asked to describe the music chosen with your partner and your artistic goals for the piece (why a particular aesthetic approach was chosen, the way you will interpret it, and how this project serves as a means to learn the language of music and how to work with a musician on a collaboration).

What does it mean to work with a musician? What is their process, their vocabulary, and their sense of the final result? How long does a musician spend on a particular piece? Consider elements such as speed of feedback (when you perform, you get immediate feedback; animation takes longer), being in front of an audience rather than being represented onscreen, and other characteristic elements contained within each discipline.

What is a musician's vocabulary? Ask your partner about how they think about harmony, melody, dynamics, keys/modulation, consonance/dissonance, phrasing, rhythm, etc. Explain animation terminology to your musician: the intuitive physics of animation principles: ease-in/out, silhouetting, arcs, squash and stretch, etc. Can you find creative ways to bridge concepts? Here are some starting point topics:

1. Melodic Contour/Silhouetting
2. Phrasing/Ease-in, Ease-out, Squash and Stretch
3. Harmonic Structure/Keys and In-betweens
4. Tension/Anticipation
5. Sonata Form/Storytelling
6. Tempo and Rhythm/Timing and Pacing

Both music and animation are temporal forms, requiring movement through time for anything to occur. Both are, to varying degrees, abstractions of experience. Rather than simply making a music video that merely illustrates a song's lyrics, make the effort to dig below the surface to investigate the links between these two forms to create a work where each element is interwoven and necessary rather than just pasted on. This is not an illustrated song, and it is not an animation with a soundtrack.

Good exploration!

Chris