The abstract audio exercise in particular got me thinking about what it would be like to be blind. How would I go making sense of the world purely through reception of audio and my other senses? I was at the bus stop the other day and noticed the braille on the signpost. I believe it was a phone number to call for assistance. I commend those severely visually impaired who remain mobile and able to catch public transport.
With my vision still intact though, I respect the ability to see. As for hearing, it’s hard not to appreciate my ears when I spend a lot of time making music. The music I have been writing of late is on the experimental side – featuring synthesisers and drum loops. It is music that I could potentially add footage to. This class is pushing me to thoroughly explore the connection between audio and visual.
Some artists have attempted to recreate audio as a visual experience. One example that I was directed to is Oskar Fischinger’s An Optical Poem. To quote the video: “To most of us music suggests definite mental images of form and color. The picture you are about to see is a novel scientific experiment – its objective is to convey these mental images in visual form.” These ‘mental images of form and color’ are mostly depicted as circles, squares and triangles. I wouldn’t say that these shapes specifically come to mind when listening to music, but I do acknowledge that visuals can be produced.
This piece blew me away. Fischinger has done extremely well to rhythmically match the visuals to Franz Liszt’s 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody. Without the aid of a digital production suite such as premiere pro this would have taken an extraordinary amount of time. The description states it was “made entirely with paper in stop motion fashion.” According to the Wikipedia page Fischinger “received no profits due to studio bookkeeping systems”. If I toy with the idea of making videos to fit audio or vice versa, and I plan to, I don’t expect to make money, but poor fella… At this stage it is all about experimenting.
Going back to the Braille I noticed at the bus stop earlier, I want to apply Fischinger’s circular design to create a visual alphabet using out of focus lights. Something like the footage I shot over easter (below) but with more emphasis on the letters themselves.
Combined with this:
Eastern Lights from Gabriel Strachan on Vimeo.
Will hopefully end up being something. The shakiness of the footage adds to the swirling effect, but using a tripod would probably have worked just as well…
– Gabe