Hearing Colours, Seeing Sounds
Inspiration is a versatile creature that often appears in a completely different form than what it inspires within us. For me that creature emerges in the form of music.
Whilst my art has always manifested within the realms of the visual (photographs, prints, video, mixed media, etc.), a constant source of inspiration for those creations has been music. Sounds create images in my head far more poignantly than other visual art can, as voices breed characters, melodies bleed colours, and beats define edits. A primary reason my music library is so diverse and inconsistent is to allow all manners of narratives to be created in the space between my ears and my fingertips.
Music videos thus exist in a special space for me. A sacred space, if you will. They exist as the relationship between an audio inspiration and its visual manifestation. To me this means a good music video will be great, but there is no middle ground. Either the visuals compliment the music, or they are arbitrary and meaningless. The relationship must be something like ones heart and lungs; inseparable in function.
Enrolling in Egg Hunting I wanted to better explore the relationship I have with my main source of inspiration and understand the industry behind this hybrid form. The possibility of working in this industry into the future isn’t really of importance to me as the marriage of sound and visuals is incredibly important for a wide range of media practices; it is simply within the medium of the music video that this relationship is profoundly exhibited. I would consider myself more interested in scores and soundtracks than necessarily pursuing singular music videos in the future, however exploring this marriage in possibly its purest form I believe to be key to mixing audio and visuals in larger bodies of work. The trend of Visual albums may well be something I want to pursue as that allows for a better development of narrative, whilst still keenly focused on the union of music and film.
In creating a music video over the Spring period I hope to continue enhancing my skills as an artist whilst developing a deeper understanding of how my art is conceptualised. Through the six weeks I will be exploring how and why it is that I can hear colours and turn sounds into images. A part of this process will be blog posts in which I will embed the music I have been listening to throughout the week. This will be a diary of sorts to document the sounds that inspire images and narratives in me.
Through exploring how others have adapted sounds to images and documenting what sounds inspire me, I hope to conclude this 6 week program with a better understanding of myself as a media practitioner through better understanding the media I create.