Major Project

00:00:01:01 - 00:00:43:21 commentary So what I'm doing is now putting music to the video I made. The video is a around five minute video mashup of the year 2000. So it all comes from one digitized videotape. And I went through that and found the moments that I myself am in frame and took out those moments and put them all together and then standardized the length of each clip to around 10 seconds. 00:00:44:10 - 00:01:29:01 commentary And by doing that, the and the rate of the frame and the rate of the sound changed with the duration. So some of the clips are sped up and some of the clips are slowed down to fit the ten second duration period that I gave to each clip. So to make the music, I'm going to sample a Gypsy Kings song and which is playing in one of the scenes of the original home video. 00:01:30:01 - 00:02:00:21 commentary The song is called Pedir Corazon, and I'm dancing to this song in the original video. So I'm going to sample that. And for the drums, I just shuffled through my iTunes library and to find a track by Purple Disco Machine. I'm going to slow it down to 90 bpm terms and make a drum beat out of it and then see where that goes. 00:02:02:15 - 00:02:48:22 commentary So I used a variety of samples or bits from this Gypsy Kings song and say, I went through and took out a few different bits of it that I liked and used those. We pitched them to a different key and put them in the sampler in Ableton and put around, played around with those. And I used the purple disco machine drums and this the drums from the track Dramatic. 00:02:49:20 - 00:03:38:15 commentary And I also used the boom bap kit, drum kit and Able Tin to create a separate drum beat, a couple of different beats that are mixed in throughout. I didn't do any thinking of music and video, and I just started the audio where the video started. So first I made the video and then I made the audio and chose the tempo at 90 bpm and then didn't do any further sinking. 00:03:38:15 - 00:04:22:21 commentary So all the sink points are coincidental. One thing I struggled with was extending the music to the full length of the video, so the roughly five and a half minutes of video that I was working with, I was trying to fill that duration with music. And because I was working with just a couple of different phrases and beats and I was struggling to create enough variety and to extend the piece of music all the way throughout the video. 00:04:24:00 - 00:05:05:06 commentary So the way I managed this was just adding things and removing things every 816 bars to create some movement, some build up, And but I think it would have been perhaps easier to create two different, almost two different tracks within this. And so to have had two separate musical ideas and then join them to get one thing I'm thinking about is the idea of the process as the product. 00:05:07:01 - 00:15:18:18 commentary So the process of making this music and that being the product and thinking about ways to to show that and and one way of doing that musically is to build up a song layer by layer, as I do when I'm making the tracks, is starting with one, one or two things and then building on top of those and adding layers and showing that in the composition, the final composition.

00:00:00:18 - 00:00:38:16 commentary Today, I'm going to work with the video of me holding the video camera. I'm so showing my perspective or how I used a video camera. In this video clip, there is a shot of the sheet music for this, the song Rubber Ducky. So I think when they try to to recreate that or to play out that that song on the piano and use that as the base for the music. 00:00:39:16 - 00:01:18:18 commentary So what I've done thus far is recreate the melody and harmony of one of the sections from the Rubber Ducky song and added some bass, created a few different drum patterns with two different kits. And then I also went through the audio of the original video and pulled out samples from different members of my family and added, added those to the drum racks that I've been creating and adding to. 00:01:19:11 - 00:02:01:21 commentary And now I'm going to put all the pieces together and try to make a song. And then afterward, play with the video. So once I made the music and put the music together into different sections, I then edited the video to match or sync with the music, and I was working with a specific length of video because it was the video where I'm holding the video camera. 00:02:02:12 - 00:02:31:14 commentary So I just cut up those bits, loop them, spliced them together and to react to the music. And I purposely didn't show the full clip of the sheet music for Rubber Ducky until the very end, because I didn't want to give that away so easily throughout the song. 00:02:34:16 - 00:03:14:08 commentary One cool thing rewatching these videos, or in this case watching it for the first time and editing it, is realizing that the things that I was filming when I was six years old are the same things that I'm filming today. For example, filming along the wire or cable across the the hardwood floor and following that cable with the camera along the floor is something that I still do today. 00:03:14:11 - 00:15:21:11 commentary So without even realizing it, I have these more static tendencies. When I pick up a video camera.

00:00:00:21 - 00:00:50:15 commentary So for this project, I started with the image and video. So it was the hot tub sequence of my sister Madison asking to see the video camera. So I started with that clip and I was trying to manipulate the video in a way, so I wanted to corrupt it. Modulated by removing some of its code. So I was trying to find a way to efface the video by removing its code. 00:00:51:18 - 00:01:30:09 commentary So I tried a few different programs that would convert the video into coded language and then delete lines of code. But that didn't work. I didn't know how to re encoded or to translate it back to a video. So what I ended up doing is a process of data matching and finding a software called a video Vitamix that would allow me to delete certain frames from the video to delete certain what's called iframes. 00:01:31:11 - 00:01:54:01 commentary So I deleted iframes from the video and that gave me the resulting data matching glitch effect where it skips frames and loses information, which creates a pixelated glitchy effect. 00:01:56:04 - 00:02:40:23 commentary So I did that. And then after that, I was just playing around with like a midea drum pad that my housemate Tiernan had in his room. He let me borrow. It's playing around with that. And making a drumbeat and playing the piano on the pads of the mini drum pad. And I was playing around with that and created a little tune and started developing that tune and then wanted to combine the data matching project of the hot tub sequence with this little piano. 00:02:41:15 - 00:03:31:16 commentary And in a way, a drum rack tune. So for the audio, I was using a two way drum rack and just a a built in piano and instrument plug in with an Ableton. And it's developing song and added some 88 bass. And I also used the drum racks I've been creating with the voices of myself and my family of seven or eight different drum racks with the voices of my family, my sisters, my dad, my stepmom and myself. 00:03:32:01 - 00:04:10:08 commentary And for those drum racks I just translated, I use the same MIDI sequences from the piano tracks and applied those to the drum racks of the voices. So they're playing the same sequence of notes or rhythm that the piano did. Different piano tracks or playing. I'm also using the the glitched or data matched audio from the hot tub sequence video. 00:04:11:07 - 00:04:50:21 commentary And so when I data matched the sequence, it created this glitch effect for the video for the visual, but it also created this glitch and echo effect for the audio. So that comes in periodically throughout the this song as well after making the audio. So making this track the song I was playing around with how to to show the video or how to this to match the audio in the video. 00:04:51:02 - 00:05:34:11 commentary And originally I had the data matched video and on a loop such as this the thing going through and then looping back to the beginning. But I wanted to play around more with this idea of scoring an image and putting music on top of a still image and exploring this idea of can you make an image move with music when it's still so how can a still image be made to move with music? 00:05:34:17 - 00:06:07:09 commentary And also using frame holds. So I took the the data matched video and put it into Premiere Pro, and then I added a frame hold for the image that we see in this final cut and extended that frame hold for a few minutes and then exported that from Premiere and brought it back into Ableton and had that frame hold as a video. 00:06:08:05 - 00:06:47:00 commentary So it's not just one, it's an image, it's a frame hold. So it's a video, a video file that's in Ableton. And you can see slight movements because of the frame hall effect and premiere, that there's a slight movement to this still image, this otherwise still image, this image slash frame hold. Video file is a product of the data mashing so it has this glitched and appearance to it. 00:06:48:03 - 00:07:27:22 commentary And I wanted to explore this glitched image with music that includes all of these glitched sounds from the voices, all these fragments of voices from my family, which become clear at the very end of the track when all the other music fades away and we're left just with the drum racks of the voices. I wanted to overlay that on top of this glitched image and try to create movement that way. 00:07:29:00 - 00:08:09:18 commentary And the end of the final cut also reveals the full video sequence. So we we finally see where the the still the glitched, still image comes from. And we get more perspective or more of a view of where this fragment came from. So I guess the main questions that I'm asking or was asking and am still asking are can you score a still image? 00:08:10:10 - 00:15:21:03 commentary What happens when you score a still image? And what difference does it make if that image is data smashed?

00:00:00:22 - 00:00:45:18 commentary Today I'm going to play around with using a still image to score. Thinking about this idea of can a still image be scored in the same way that a moving image can? What happens to a still image in a freeze frame when music is put on top of it? First, I'm going to go through the original video from 1996 and find the bits that I can add to the drum racks that I've started to make. 00:00:46:00 - 00:01:24:12 commentary One thing I'm doing is collecting whenever someone says my name. So I'm taking those samples and putting them into a drum rack. So I'm playing around with taking a stills from the video and using the mouse zoom function to move the frame around the image. I'm exploring the image, zooming in and out with a song from my iTunes on top of it. 00:01:24:22 - 00:01:46:16 commentary The first song I used is called Collage of Dreams by John Beltran, which was part of the Fabric Presents Bonobo album from 1996. 00:01:50:01 - 00:02:23:24 commentary I'm going to bring that screen recording of me moving around the image and bring that into Ableton and put a few different songs on top of it to see what the different effects are. Thinking about this idea of making in an image move. Making a still from the video move in some way and adding movement to a still. 00:02:25:17 - 00:02:54:11 commentary And then on top of that, what happens when that movement is sent to music, preexisting music, In this case? And what's the difference when the music is mine, when I make it versus using a preexisting song? In this case, I'm using spontaneity by Bahamadia. 00:02:56:18 - 00:03:53:07 commentary Is it more significant when I make the music? I also was playing around with soloing the original audio from the original video soloing that at certain points throughout the track. So kind of cutting into the Bahamadia track, kind of injecting the original audio into more on top of the spontaneity track, kind of like a deejay does one playing one record and then cutting in at certain times... 00:03:53:07 - 00:15:19:16 commentary Another record.

00:00:00:15 - 00:00:39:18 commentary Today, I'm going to keep adding to the vocal drum ranks and taking slices, vocal slices, and adding them to the drum rocks I started making yesterday. As part of this archival process and I'm thinking for myself, I want to collect all these samples of me speaking and then feed them into a text to speech algorithm so that I can create my own artificially intelligent voice. 00:00:40:16 - 00:01:22:22 commentary Because this home video was made in 1997, I'm going to go through my iTunes library and pick out some tracks that I can sample and make a few beats. Also, using samples from the home video, I'm becoming aware that it's hard to take clean samples of the voices if there's lots of background noise. So in this case, in a auditorium, sports hall with bouncing basketballs and people shouting, it's almost not worth it to take the vocals samples from my family members. 00:01:23:13 - 00:02:02:05 commentary I think I'm going to wait until a cleaner video comes, until I work with the cleaner video where it's easier to take, extract and exploit audio samples. I'm going to make a kick drum out of multiple samples of the. I also added some samples, some Foley samples because I wanted to create the impression that sounds were coming from the video even when they're not. 00:02:03:24 - 00:03:04:06 commentary So I added some sounds of kids playing some samples of sticks breaking, which sounds like a candy wrapper opening. I use some samples of basketballs bouncing and also downloaded a sample of commentator or commentating during an NBA Finals game in 1997 between the Bulls and the Jazz. So that comes in at different parts. I was noticing how the addition of string lines, like a cello string, makes the video feel more nostalgic and so when watching the video and hearing the strings, there's this nostalgia that's created by the cello string. 00:03:04:08 - 00:15:21:11 commentary And I'm curious if that's just my perception or if that would be the perception of a listener. So I'm going to send the song and the video to a friend and see what they say. I'm learning not to use too many samples in one individual track because it feels like too much is going on. There's not enough focus on one sample.

00:00:00:12 - 00:00:52:23 commentary Today, I'm going to work with the Halloween 1996 home video. I am thinking about the archive, the home video as an archive of memory and moments. And what are other archives potential archives from this project. So I'm thinking about classic drum breaks that hip hop samples and an archive of voices of my family members and myself. I'm starting to make drum racks with different samples of the voices of the members of my family. 00:00:54:20 - 00:01:34:05 commentary I'm also going to try to make an instrument rack using a variety of samples of my voice to start with. Perhaps I can create a a single instrument rack with all of our different voices and create this collective voice. To hear what that sounds like. So what I did for this sequence was I sliced the original audio from the video to to Midea. 00:01:34:16 - 00:02:16:06 commentary So I sliced the melody to Midea and that created a long midea sequence sequence of notes. I then inserted onto that a few different instruments, three different instruments, a piano, a flute and a trumpet. And I had them, each instrument triggered by different notes. So low notes by the piano. High notes by the flute. And in the middle. 00:02:16:08 - 00:02:17:02 commentary The trumpet. 00:02:19:09 - 00:02:36:01 commentary So the three instruments are playing the same sequence, but are triggered at different points. I also sliced the original audio to a drum track and then inserted a high hat and a kick drum. 00:02:39:02 - 00:03:16:02 commentary So the instruments and the music are following the original audio from the video. So they're playing along to the original audio. And this becomes apparent at certain points of synchronization when we can hear the original audio come through and follow the pitch of the instruments and the rhythm of the high hat and kick drum and exploring what scoring is. 00:03:16:20 - 00:15:20:06 commentary I'm thinking about this direct translation of, let's say, diegetic sound audio from the scene. Translating that into music in the most direct way I can think of at the moment, which is converting it into notes, converting the original audio into notes, and then playing those notes, having instruments, play those notes. So the score and the musical score is a computation from Ableton, a translation of the original audio.

00:00:01:04 - 00:00:34:00 commentary So I made a beat using a couple of different samples from the track car wash by Rose Royce, which was released in 1976. Although in my iTunes it has the year as 2002, which is the same year that this home video was made. So that was the reason why I started to work with it in the first place. 00:00:35:01 - 00:01:19:01 commentary But it's an older song, so the first beat I made with samples from Car Wash, everything's a sample except the kick drum and the bass. And now I'm going to transition via a drum break into a new beat using samples from another track in my iTunes from 2002 when the video, the home video was made. So now I'm going through the audio of the home video. 00:01:19:01 - 00:01:53:08 commentary I put it into a sampler and I'm finding bits that I want to sample as part of the drum beat, as that includes some of the music pick bits that are in the original home video and also my sister Madison's voice. So the second beat I made using samples from the home video and samples from the Zephyr Song by Red Hot Chilli Peppers. 00:01:54:09 - 00:15:18:11 commentary And I put this together over a drum break with some extra percussion from the first beat. And I'm going to put it all together on the timeline and put it on top of the video and see what that looks like.

00:00:00:23 - 00:00:41:19 commentary So today I'm thinking about working with the freeze frame or the frame hold and potentially composing an entire video of just frame holes and doing that in Premiere and musically thinking about the musical or sonic equivalent of a frame hold freeze frame. So in the original home video, uh, my sister Olivia is singing maybe from Annie the movie. 00:00:42:20 - 00:01:22:20 commentary So I'm, I found I downloaded a couple versions of that song from the Motion picture soundtrack and from the Broadway soundtrack, and I'm going to use it as a sample to make a beat and see where that goes. I'm also going to screen record part of my screen and to show what I'm doing when I'm making this beat and I'm going to hold off on working with the video. 00:01:23:04 - 00:02:04:11 commentary I'm just going to use the make the audio, make a track potentially using some audio samples from the original video. But I'm not going to work yet with the video. It's actually my sister Dylan, who is singing maybe in the original home video, not Olivia. So I'm trying to record some lyrics, just like little poems, raps that I wrote, but also a transcription of the poem about Dad's medicine read aloud in this video on Christmas Eve. 00:02:04:13 - 00:02:16:14 commentary Christmas Eve. I might try to just take that sample of her reading the poem and make it a rap and try to play with it. So that sounds like a wrap. 00:02:18:21 - 00:02:55:12 commentary So after I made the song and composed it into different sections like two, two main sections that are different have different energies that then sort of come together at the very end after making all of the musical bits and the audio. I then went in and edited the video within Ableton, so I kept the original video mostly intact, especially at the beginning. 00:02:57:00 - 00:03:47:19 commentary But then toward the end I started cutting in certain video bits at like on the downbeat so that there is more thinking between the audio and the visual. I also included in the musical elements part of the audio from the original video. So occasionally the audio from the original video will appear or will sound within the song and those bits sync up the most in terms of you're hearing what you're watching on the screen. 00:03:48:18 - 00:04:27:03 commentary So after I did all of that editing in Ableton, so editing both audio and visual stuff in Ableton, I exported the video and the soundtrack and brought it into Premiere Pro, where I wanted to combine it with a screen recording that I took of me making this track in Ableton, which includes going into Spotify and iTunes and downloading music and going on the Internet. 00:04:27:03 - 00:05:04:14 commentary So I wanted to include that screen recording somehow. So it's about 2 hours worth of a screen recording of me of the process of making this whole thing. So what I did is I brought that screen recording in to premiere and place it on top of the original video that's been edited and just based on formatting the screen recording showed up as a smaller square on top of the larger square of the home video. 00:05:05:05 - 00:05:38:01 commentary And I like that look. And then I started to just cut the screen recording at different bits where I wanted the home video to show through without the overlay of the screen recording. I also condensed the screen recordings down to the length of the home video. Edit So from 2 hours down to say, five and a half minutes, 6 minutes. 00:05:38:17 - 00:06:19:16 commentary So it's sped up and it's showing that process over a compacted amount of time. In doing this, I was playing with this idea of the process or the method sort of getting in the way of the final product. So it's obscure bringing the final product in. And in ways here it's obvious because you have the actual box of the screen recording that's obscuring the finished product, the finished video edit. 00:06:19:24 - 00:06:58:14 commentary So playing around with that idea, the process getting in the way in the process, kind of ruining the effect, the immersion of watching the final video, edit you can't quite get into it. And then the on and off of the screen recording, showing over the the home video. So sometimes it's there and sometimes it's not. And sometimes I let you see the full video and sometimes you can only see the edges. 00:06:59:00 - 00:07:49:18 commentary And so there's this this blocking effect that I find happens a lot with memory where you remember only certain bits. You can only visualize certain elements of a place, but not the whole picture. So you only have part of the frame, which is in itself part of the full picture, if you will. While watching it back after I finished making it, I was thinking about the discussion with Annika ah, to our last tutorial in which we talked about the themes of American capitalism and going beyond that materialism. 00:07:49:18 - 00:08:35:23 commentary And I think this video touches upon that because it's of Christmas. So we're, you know, excited to open gifts that Santa supposedly brought to us. Um, there's one piece where Maddison is showing off a watch. I think it's a like a g-shock or a baby G watch that she had received for Christmas. So there's this presentation of, of gifts, of things, of material, things that seem to bring us happiness. 00:08:36:19 - 00:09:49:01 commentary Um, and that, that theme of that sort of Americanness, I think, comes through, uh, especially in this project. I was also thinking about the connection between the film and the story of Annie the Orphan, and this video which features my sister Dylan singing songs from that movie and the music itself features a few samples from the track, maybe from the movie and the Broadway play and there's this kind of weird connection, or almost like Paradox of us seemingly happy kids and a happy family with parents, albeit, you know, both divorced parents and step parents. 00:09:50:05 - 00:10:41:16 commentary The connection between that and Annie as an orphan and and singing about the song maybe is Annie singing about her parents maybe coming back for her and she's wondering what they're doing, what they're into. She's imagining their life and imagining why they would have left her in an orphanage. So there's this eerie to use and of course, term relevance of being an orphan, but also having two parents and two sets of parents at that. 00:10:42:06 - 00:11:39:20 commentary So a whole extra family that an orphan would have. I like the play between this happy sounding song and this happy looking scene of Christmas and dancing and vacation holiday. Between that and the sadness of the song, maybe there's there's a tension there that is maybe exists below the surface. And the last few lines of maybe from Annie are so maybe now this prayer is the last one of its kind. 00:11:40:05 - 00:12:29:19 commentary Won't you please come get your baby and the orphans are singing? Maybe. And so there's this plea and this wish and this hope. And of the lyrics of the song that are mixed in with the home video scene that has a different feel to it. But there's somehow there's a connection there and somehow there's this feeling of that children have of, you know, being alone and wondering where their parents are when they're not together. 00:12:31:05 - 00:13:16:14 commentary And there's this this longing that I think becomes a part of this project. And I think the last shot of my stepsister, Dylan, kind of staring off into the distance while my sister Maddison reads a poem about hearts, is a good distillation of those feelings, and also the camerawork from my stepmom of like the slow pulling away and the slow zooming away to kind of and and wrap up this this video. 00:13:16:14 - 00:14:04:01 commentary And one last thing. The the lyric that I sing that I bring into the track is me sort of half singing, half speaking, half rapping. Santa slips his fat ass down the slim chimney with a bag of blank that the parents worked for. So in that, I think what I was trying to express are what came through while making this song is, you know, this illusion of Santa that we at that age still believed in. 00:14:05:07 - 00:14:48:12 commentary And and the, you know, the recognition that all these gifts were coming from our parents who worked to earn the money to buy them and always gave us so many presence at Christmas. And there's this also this imagining of Santa trying to come down such a slim chimney, which feels so ridiculous as an adult, yet so plausible as a child. 00:14:50:07 - 00:15:23:05 commentary So I think what I was playing with with those lyrics is kind of this yeah, the maybe the illusion of Christmas of Santa, but also that the imagination of children behind all of that is sort of the hard work of parents to maintain the illusion and to afford the gifts and yeah.

00:00:01:00 - 00:00:56:20 commentary So I've chosen the video of us ice skating and up in upstate New York, and I was playing around with screen recording the selection process, but also the filming. So bringing and just pieces of the video into the frame of the screen recording so that you can only see little bits, little square bits of the original video. So I'm going to play around with different chords and on the piano to see how they affect the video in different ways. 00:00:57:00 - 00:01:50:19 commentary And I'm working from the book Music Theory for Dummies, and and I think I'm going to pick a single scale or multiple scales, and I'm not sure yet. First, I'm going to choose a tempo based on the rhythm of the video, so I'm going to tap out the time to choose some drum loops now that I have a tempo, some drum loops, and then going to work with some taking drum sample loops from the B Lab sample pack folder that I have and just warping them and trying to fix them to the grid, which creates kind of a nice uneven rhythm because it's not all fixed perfectly to the grid and they use the skate 00:01:50:19 - 00:02:20:10 commentary sounds as part of the beat. So I make a little drum rack with the skate sounds. So I've picked different drum breaks, loops and for each loop I'm playing a different chord within the G scale. And so starting with G major, then G minor and G augmented. G diminished. G major. Seven G minor. Seven G dominant. Seven G minor. 00:02:20:10 - 00:08:07:23 commentary Seven flat five G diminished. Seven in G minor Major seven. So I'm going to go through all of those and create little like arpeggiated rhythms with the notes in each of those chords, and then for each different drum loop and chord structure, I'm also creating a new bassline.