A large focus on our group’s project was on the music being used for each video which I have been making over the last 4 weeks, which was a challenging but rewarding experience. It was a refreshingly unique experience of music creation as I was forced to look at it from a content creation standpoint, that focused on concision of each piece of music working within the confines of the videos, as well as being diverse and interesting enough to maintain the attention of the audience.

My background in creating music has always focused on improvisation, being loose with structure and length, and it was interesting to compare the process of creating music and the process of online media creation that we have been exploring this semester. While there are direct comparisons in music and online content creation between possible unregulated lengths, and the amateur nature of both platforms, as through the internet the avenues available to content creators is limitless.

The ideas I really struggled to grapple with trying to match between music creation and other forms of online content creation were notions of non-linearity, variability, and modularity, which are all ideas that are the major elements of online creation softwares like Korsakow.

The main thread I saw that went through all of these characteristics was this idea of having content that is constantly changing and evolving, but stays grounded to a centralised idea or theme to prevent the project from becoming a mess of varying, conflicting ideas. I explored this idea in the context of our central theme which is the city of Melbourne, and how it is perceived, with the general thesis of our project being can music greatly influence how we view the city, and this idea made me explore forms of music that I felt draw greatly from the cities or places that they are grounded in. This led me to groups like The White Stripes and LCD Soundsystem, two groups that are very much staples of their hometowns of Detroit and New York respectively, and so I focused on their styles of music for two of the pieces of music and whether that influences how we view the city of Melbourne, both aesthetically and through an emotional connection. Another main genre/musical style that I drew from for another piece was traditional folk music, specifically from Ireland, which I replicated with the use of an Open E tuning on a hollowbody guitar to emulate their traditional sounds, as I felt this musical style is vital to the image of Ireland as a whole, and the city of Dublin specifically, and I feel that is the piece that will garner the strongest emotional response as the feeling of tradition and place is incredibly present in the music.

What I would love to explore further with this idea of modularity in music that comes from the Italian composer Stefano Vagnini who coined the term ‘modular music’, which is the idea of overlaying seperate compositions onto each other to create a completely new piece of music. Writer, painter, and art theorist Gian Ruggero Manzoni described the modular music of Vagnini’s compositions as “circular like the existence, his works are not finished, but merely stimulus for new voices”, which sounds exactly like what is created in a lot of online works, especially with projects made within Korsakow. This is something I would like to try and achieve in future projects at some point, most likely using the Korsakow software.

 

““I’m Irish!…When I feel well I feel better than anyone, when I am in pain I yell at the top of my lungs, and when I am dead I shall be deader than anybody.”  – Morgan Llywelyn.