AMEN: ANIMATED SCALE & NOTES

From investigating ways of interpreting music visually I decided I wanted to try the most obvious first and to visually animate the musical notes on a scale by changing their colour to link them to the drums and cymbals on the drum break. The purpose of this is two fold as mentioned in earlier posts. Firstly to provide some visual clues to what exactly the nature and purpose of the piece is. To put it simply visually show the drum beat (Amen break) happening to help the audience put two and two together and show that the drums in all of the tracks are actually the same. The second is to add some visual interest to the installation.

I chose to use the scales because they are an instantly recognisable symbol, associated with music and the audience even if they cannot read music are familiar with what they represent. I wanted to exploit these cultural symbols as not only would it help the reading of the piece but give it more credibility and cease it being just a piece of popular music but also elevate it towards art and validity. Also the colours, patterns or symbols would add an extra layer of interpretation to be processed in my opinion at this stage. By animating these notes on the scales and bars the audience would be able to see what is happening irrespective of their ability to read music. Audiences are familiar with the concept of changing colour to follow the music from such pop culture sources as karaoke and bouncing balls on the song lyrics or changes of colour to signify which]lyric is next to stay in time with the music.

Here is the completed animation for the Amen Break score.

AMEN SCORE FINAL from Jon Saward on Vimeo.

The process to create the animation although not really complicated was time consuming as it meant using a couple of pieces of software I am not all that familiar with or comfortable using. Firstly it meant building all of the assets that I would need for the animation. I had researched and tracked down the musical score earlier so had this but needed to build all of the assets that I would need to animate them. I could have done all of this in photoshop but from research decided that Adobe After Effects would be easier and give me more control of the timings and animation. The process is outlined below.

• In photoshop import and then cut out all of the different musical notes/symbols assets I would need on a transparent alpha channel. There were about 10-12 of these.
• In Adobe Illustrator import in all of these musical notes/symbols assets and convert then into vector graphics rather than raster graphics. This would allow lossless and unpixelated re-scaling if needs be.
• Also in Adobe Illustrator I constructed the musical sale lines once again as vector graphics.
• Once all of these assets had been constructed they were imported in Adobe After Effects which is a motion graphics package. These were then scaled, copied and pasted and used to construct a replica of the original musical scales BUT every note was a separate layer and asset so that they could be animated.
• The music was then imported and viewed as a wave form so timings could be given to animate the musical notes to.
• It was then a process of changing the colours

My final thoughts are that it worked pretty well and did give a pretty good visualisation of the Amen break. It was a little flat, un-adveturous and could be more visual though. It is a little perfunctionary and more creativity and imagination may possibly strengthen but it is obvious and to the point and with the music does certainly create a visual interpretation linking to the drumming. Next time I would certainly make sure of the following though.

• Bring in a longer stretched version of the music as it is only 6 seconds long. This meant animating to exactly when the drums/cymbals were nit was tricky. By stretching it to 12 seconds it would make the process easier and could then be sped up again afterwards to it's original length.
• Some of the musical notes represented double drum hits or even many cymbal hits and my animation was only able to show this as one note and not reflect this. Next time I would break the double hit not into two parts to reflect this.