Dave Payling's Videos (The Visual Music Village) - The Visual Music Village

Diffraction

2012-04-13T09:53:53.019Z

Exploring the relationship between rain and noise, pure tones and brightness, sound textures and colour space. This is a piece of visual music with a deliberate coherence between sound and image

Space Movement Sound

2010-10-11T09:03:13.000Z

This is a short work in two sections exploring the contrasts between colour and movement in both animation and music. Working with the idea that colour relates to space and textural timbral soundscapes in part 1. Part 2 goes on to show movement being more suggestive of dynamics, transitions and spatial position in music. These ideas are somewhat exaggerated in the two parts to emphasise this difference resulting in a quite intense video experience. Although being academically motivated Dave's background in electronic dance oriented compositions exerts a strong influence on the aesthetics of this piece.

Theravada Colour Morph

2009-09-22T18:37:55.000Z

Warning: Contains flashing colour strobes

This piece is an investigation into the relationships that exist between colours and sounds. The flow of the visual composition is heavily influenced by the acousmatic musical structure with the musical gestures reflected distinctly in the quality of the moving images. To a lesser degree the hues, saturation and values of the colours interpret the timbral quality of the associated sounds but the inter-connecting relationships can be seen as a theme running through the piece. The music is not to be experienced as a soundtrack that runs seperately to the visuals. This Visual Music should be experienced as a synaesthetic whole.

Colour Mirror

2009-01-16T21:32:57.000Z

Colour Mirror began as an alternative interpretation of the work already begun in 'Composition 1' (now known as 'Soni-Chrome'). Using further manipulation and transformation techniques on some of the original video captured and rendered for Soni-Chrome the result was an interesting and seemingly more 'synthesised' and geometric piece of video work. The processes applied to the visuals had the effect of transforming the colours into more vibrant and fundamental tones. The angular nature of the forms that were developed and they way they transitioned when cross-faded also hinted towards the purer ‘synthetic’ qualities that were contained in the original pictures. The video wasn't actually created by generative visual synthesis; it was derived from the transformation of photographically produced video in a similar way to the development of the Soni-Chrome video.

In view of this and since it had been decided prior to this that all the audio for Soni-Chrome would be produced from original found sounds and be in the form of an electroacoustic composition it seemed appropriate to create the sound track for Colour Mirror exclusively from synthesised sounds. With the general nature of the video appearing synthesised and having a more 'blocky' defined texture to it, sound synthesis allowed a greater level of precision and ‘belongingness’ to be applied when designing the original sounds. Also as discussed in the Soni-Chrome commentary more of the creative work for this piece was applied to the generation of timbres that would emphasise the colour properties of the video. This was opposed to more energy being devoted to the compositional structure as was required to gel the sound track with the visuals in Soni-Chrome. This piece then acts as a complementary to Soni-Chrome and the name ‘Colour Mirror’ can be seen to have several meanings. One interpretation is that Colour Mirror is a reflection and development of the Soni-Chrome work. It also refers to the kaleidoscopic production techniques used in creating the video.

Soni Chrome

2009-01-16T19:41:36.000Z

Soni-Chrome was the first serious attempt to create a piece of visual music using 'traditional' composition techniques found in electroacoustic compositions and for the music to strongly bond with the video imagery. Prior to this all the works had relied heavily on algorithmic techniques for fusing the sound track with the video. The Soni-Chrome video began life as a series of photographs with interesting colour content and hues that contrasted well with each other. They also produced interesting effects when faded between. To keep the video interesting many more manipulations were performed on the pictures to add movement, contrast, fluidity and evolutionary transformations to create a short piece of dynamic, constantly changing video. The technique of using different colour cross fades between the images created a certain random dynamic quality to the scenes which could not have been predefined in a useful way. The way the pixels and hues interact produces a wide variety of colour hues and textures that would be difficult to achieve by video ‘synthesis’.

Because of the fluid nature of the resulting work it was very appropriate to use a sound track created by found sound manipulation to accompany the video as this allows very complex textural soundscapes to be created. The quality, dynamic nature and spectral diversity of natural sounds ensures they fit very well with the nature of the visuals. Their strength is mainly in their 'timbre' if it is possible to use a single word for the description of the multitude of textures possible. The palette of sounds that can be created via found sound transformation is much greater than when using conventional instruments and to a certain extent sound synthesis. Sound synthesis relies heavily on good programming and allowing the sound algorithm to develop interestingly over time. The method of creating compositions from natural sounds requires the transformation of recordings and gives the composer the structural freedom as to where the sounds can be placed suitably into the musical work. With sound synthesis it could be said that the challenge is greater in the sound definition stage rather than the compositional structuring work. With the original photos being mainly of natural scenes, natural sounds also seemed to be their perfect complement.

Due to the complexity of the video it was difficult to find sounds that fitted and worked compositionally over time. The temptation was to throw everything at the soundtrack to emphasise the density of the visual work. Of course this can lead to an overload of the senses when the visual and auditory channel are swamped by stimuli it may be difficult for the observer to parse the information in a useful way. The answer then was to thin out the sounds and try to focus on the main element of the visual with the use of one or two sounds. Incidental sounds are also used for major transitions or more obvious visual events.