Visualising music is really something new to me, I have never thought of seeing sound, not to mention imagining what sound looks like. It surprises me when I know it started in early 1920s!
I like the “Rhythm in Light” a lot because the visual materials flow with the sound effect, which brings a strong impression to me. Also, I enjoyed the artwork a lot because it comforts me with the structures in the visual material and the music. The visual materials in “Rhythm in Light” are made of many shapes with straight lines, such as rectangles, triangles. They moved like they are in shadow, by moving the light, the shapes enlarged and changed along the music, it seems like they are dancing! Even though the visual materials are mostly made of straight lines, unlike most artists applying curvy lines to fit with music, it turns out really good.
Although this is the first time I learn about visualising music, I think it actually was the basic or the initial step of musicals, movies, animations, linking visual and aural artwork together to produce a greater impact to the audience.
I am sharing this short clip of visual music animation from that I enjoyed. I think is short but cool. It makes me want to do a small visual music project myself!!
Taking a sharp left turn away from fine art, I want to discuss how mainstream animation uses music. While experimental film explored the intrinsic qualities of music in abstract ways, mainstream film and animation would use music to the end of creating objective scenery and narrative. The Disney method/style capitalizes on the intrinsic influence music has on an audience, whether it be a musical score or songs with vocals and lyrics. And as a de facto pioneer of all aspects of animation film, Disney’s use of music has become a model for animated films even today.
Though not the first cartoon to feature music, Steamboat Willie in 1928, was the first Disney cartoon with synchronized sound. Walt Disney then produced the Silly Symphonies series, exploring both visual techniques and exercising the use of animation to music: Skeleton Dance (1929) made use of a musical score, Three Little Pigs (1932) was a musical in which the story was told in song. The Old Mill (1937) was also set to a score, and showed Disney studio’s impressive use of the multiplane camera in immersive scenery coupled with atmospheric music.
But I think the culmination of Walt Disney’s personal conviction of music’s importance to film and animation, was the anthology film Fantasia (1940), a 126 minute behemoth with a concert-like program of 8 musical acts or segments. It was built around a longer Silly Symphony, starring Mickey Mouse as The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and using the symphonic poem 1897 by French composer Paul Dukas, based on the German poem by Goethe.
It was a very daring production, for reasons ranging from its departure of traditional narrative based fairytale features like Snow White, to the production costs that were difficult to make back as Europe had plunged into World War II. For the music in Fantasia, the studio developed the stereo sound system to reproduce the most immersive audio experience, which they aptly named ‘Fantasound’. This makes Fantasia the first commercial film with stereo sound to ever be shown.
The first segment, set to an orchestral arrangement of Fugue in D Minor by Bach, changes from live action footage of a strongly lit musical ensemble into abstract scenes of patterns and shapes moving across the screen, highly reminiscent of the abstract visual music filmmakers usually associated with fine art more so than commercial animation. In fact, Walt Disney was inspired by Len Lye, a New Zealand experimental filmmaker, to create this segment, and hired Oskar Fischinger to work on the special effects with one of Disney’s top FX men, the Chinese-American Cy Young. However, Disney rejected Fischinger’s contributions, finding them too abstract. Although no doubt drawing from abstract animation, the segment is visibly more objective; the bows of string instruments, undulating waves, mountains and cathedral windows can be seen. The overall concept remains intact, and some of the visual vocabulary is similar to the works of ‘true’ visual music animators like Fischinger’s Studies. Watch this section of Disney’s homage to visual music below:
As my parents said to me when they showed me this film as a child, ‘Disney was teaching kids how to listen to music’. I think they were right, and, at least in teaching me, Disney succeeded.
In Class 5 we delved into the strain of animation known as ‘visual music’, which made me begin to think about music’s relationship with animation. To do that, it turns out we must first look at music’s relationship with art in general.
A handful of visual artists and designers were the visual and conceptual forefathers (foreparents?) of the group of animators working in visual music. French painter Leopold Survage was the first to suggest the idea of merging cinema and abstract imagery, and his series Rythmes colorés (1913) was concieved with the intention of being animated. Sadly, he did not have the funding to put this project into action, and so did not become the first pioneer of visual music. That privilege perhaps goes to Swiss Dadaist Viking Eggeling, who sought to create a vocabulary of shapes and symbol to be usd in visual abstraction as with the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, which he demonstrates in works like the 1924 film Diagonal-Symphonie. The term ‘visual music’ was in fact used to describe Kandinsky’s paintings. Kandinsky began as a figurative painter but rejected depicting objective visual “reality” and became a staple of the abstract painting tradition. Thus the rejection of figurative forms in animation was the abstract, or ‘absolute’ animation. Another important influence of the visual music aesthetic was the Bauhaus school of design in Germany, which saw modernist design and concepts like color theory consolidated under a systematic method.
Called the ‘Father of Visual Music’, Oskar Fischinger’s filmography explores the ways of creating moving design around music. Though a narrow niche it may seem, he explored many techniques to achieve his artistic goal throughout his prolific career: progressive cross sections of wax/clay building on Ruttman’s wax slicing method as in Wax Experiments (1922), drawn/painted animations like in his commercially successful series The Studies in the late 20’s and 30’s, documenting the gradual progress of a semi-abstract painting in Motion Painting (1947) and even stop motion as in Composition in Blue (1935) and the Muratti Privat commercial in 1935.
Another visual music artist whose works were discussed in another class but are undoubtedly the continuation of the visual music tradition, is the inimitable Scottish-Canandian filmmaker Norman McLaren. His works done with the method of drawing directly on film, such as Boogie Doodie (1940) or Hen Hop (1942) have a charming simplicity and rawness that matches the rhythm of the music very well. McLaren’s styles of work are very highly varied, also including stop motion (La Merle, 1958), progress of chalk drawings like a sort of Motion Painting, and using the ‘pixilation’ method, or animation using the body, such as in the Oscar-winning short Neighbors (1952).
Visual music continues to be an active art form in the 21st Century, though undoubtedly somewhat overshadowed by mainstream ‘visualization’ of music with music videos, let alone animation. I was very much captured by the 2008 short AANAATT, created by Hong Kong based new media artist Max Hattler. He describes it on his page as ‘the ever-shifting shape of Analogue Futurism’, which seems quite apt. While similar to Fischinger’s Composition in Blue, in that it is abstract stop motion animation set to tone-defining music, the resulting visuals are highly different. Where Composition is whimsical and pure, AANAAT seems alien and otherworldly.
We were introduced to the beginning of visual music and the “Father” of Visual Music; screening Oskar Fischinger’s abstract animation, which was a concept first explored respectfully by Leopold Survage. Fischnger’s earlier pieces remind me vividly of the ‘sound visualizer’ of the old default screens of Windows Media Player back in the early 2000s.
This is stuff I grew up staring at when I had all the time in the world, and confidently believe in Fischinger’s influence on this too.
I especially enjoyed the more colourful experiments of Fischinger’s like The Composition of Blue (1935), which was made in a 3D stop-motion format. The style in terms of colours, composition and timing is still very much done in the present – showing a piece that feels timeless.
Similarly, Walter Ruttman, who started off with painting and who had helped produce backgrounds for Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed using Wax Slicing Machine (licensed from Oskar Fischinger), moved towards abstract animation . Ruttman specially looked at visual music with colour – by tinting his films with dye. I thought it’s very innovative and admirable of his efforts to explore the broader potential of his mediums.
Extra notes I want to keep: “WAX SLICING MACHINE 1922” (synched vertical slicers with movie shutter) “Allegretto” (1936) “Motion Painting #1” (1947) O.F
ANIM223 - HISTORY OF ANIMATION - FALL 2019 