Etude de la Musique

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A study of music….

Music is a powerful force that can change the mood and even the meaning of a video. I’ve been wanting to illustrate this concept for awhile and when I saw the tweet and original video created by Brian Bennett I knew this was my opportunity.  Because of the video’s simplicity with one on-going activity (Brian painting a room) as the viewer moves through different styles of music one can feel the effects of each piece as it relates to how the video is experienced emotionally.

Watch & listen to the original video by Brian Bennett & read his blog post here.

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“A Study of Music” illustrating the power of audio.

Brian  and I talked about the power of music and we both thought there was/should be a ds106 audio assignment that did this, but we didn’t find one.  I tweeted Brian (@bennettscience) that I had wanted do this sort of video and put up an assignment, but didn’t have a good illustrative video to use as an example yet.  I asked if he’d mind me using his.  It was no problem. Now one of us just needs to write up and submit the assignment.[UPDATE: AudioAssignments1193 has been created and ready for you to try.]

This music video was very simple to make. I knew that I wanted a variety of music styles: soundeffectish, comedic, dramatic, simple, complex, ect.  Figuring out how to search on the freemusicarchive.org site took a little time, since this was only my second time visiting.  But once I had my key words down I was able to locate about 15 songs that I thought might work and downloaded them.  I was able to keep track of the artists names and songs for later attribution from their file names.  That was a nice bonus, as properly siting my sources can be a real headache and time hog as I try to rekindle my search logic when I found them the first time around.  HINT: To keep track of sources pulled from the internet, create a new post, keep it in draft mode, and copy & paste all of your links with a summary of what they are into the awaiting post.  When it comes time to write up your post you already have a big chunk completed, and no retracing your steps.

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B. Bennett painting room time lapse video

Once I had the songs it was a matter of placing them onto the timeline and seeing what fit where. (I used Adobe Premiere 11 as my video editing software.)  Making effective transitions between the pieces of video and music are important so that the viewer is not distracted or irritated, but instead able to easily go with the flow.  Fortunately, I didn’t have to resort to my first plans of chopping into the video and adding fade to black transitions with each change of music. As I worked with the media I noticed there were natural transition points that I could use instead.  That made it an even more powerful illustration because there was a continuos visual flow.

Having Brian’s original music, My One True Love by Ben Saretan remaining at the beginning, middle, and end of the video was important to me. As with many of my projects, I continue to be amazed at how things can miraculously fall into place.  And that was certainly the case here as I noticed and worked with the natural transitions. Brian’s music remained in the locations I had intended and the music selections on either side “made sense”.  There is a nice flow both from a visual and auditory perspective.

Did you experience the video segments differently as I had intended? What emotions did they bring up? Which music selection(s) did you enjoy more? [Start time links provided below.] Did you feel that one song was more suited to Brian’s video throughout? Why? I’d be very interested to hear your reactions and comments to the piece.

All music licensed under Creative Commons from freemusicarchive.org

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