What I wanted to communicate in this project is how music can influence our perception and create some sort of emotions when reinforced with a form of visual response to it. Audiovisual Performances are thought to be very appealing and interesting to the audience since they draw two of their very basic senses; therefore pushing them into noticing, analysing and questioning what they experience.
Based on an experiment made by the 'American Psychological Association' on " Feelings and Perceptions of Happiness and Sadness induced in music" on 2010.
* Listeners were put to listen to 30's musical pieces and rate: (a) How sad and how happy music made them feel and (b) How much sadness and happiness was expressed in music.
* Results showed that: (a) Perception ratings were higher than feeling ratings.
(b) Associations between music manipulations and listener's feelings were made by their perception of emotion conveyed.
The clear outcome based on this experiment is the fact that knowledge around music matters to our response to it.
For this project, I am making a visual interpretation to a song by Mills Brothers, "Sweet Georgia Brown".
Based on an experiment made by the 'American Psychological Association' on " Feelings and Perceptions of Happiness and Sadness induced in music" on 2010.
* Listeners were put to listen to 30's musical pieces and rate: (a) How sad and how happy music made them feel and (b) How much sadness and happiness was expressed in music.
* Results showed that: (a) Perception ratings were higher than feeling ratings.
(b) Associations between music manipulations and listener's feelings were made by their perception of emotion conveyed.
The clear outcome based on this experiment is the fact that knowledge around music matters to our response to it.
For this project, I am making a visual interpretation to a song by Mills Brothers, "Sweet Georgia Brown".
30's songs are thought to have a very positive response to the listeners; This is often related to pleasant childhood memories but also to the common structure of such period related songs.
I've made a research on what the listener's response are to music and it's based on various factors:
- Major Keys/Rapid Tempos: cause happiness
- Upward Motion/ Downword Motion: tension/ resolution
- PITCH: Upward Motion/ Downword Motion: tension/ resolution
- TEXTURE: Density/ Sparsity: tension/ resolution
- INTERVAL: Dissonance/ Consonance: tension/ resolution
- TEMPO: Acceleration/ Slowing: tension/ resolution
- INTONATION: Bending Away from the Nominal Pitch/ Returning to it: tension/ resolution
- SUNCOMPATION: Off the beat/ On the beat: tension/ resolution
- BEAT DIVISION: More division per beat/ Less division per beat: tension/ resolution
- DYNAMICS: Louder/ Softer: tension/ resolution
- ARTICULATION: Staccato/ Legato: tension/ resolution
- REPETITION: Repetition/ Variation: tension/ resolution
- ORNAMENTATION: Ornaments/ Simplicity: tension/ resolution
Artists such as Brian Eno, Wassily Kandinsky and Dali have included music within their work and have managed to visually interpret music according to it's structure; the very structure of music is based on "audio" colour and the feelings expressed.
Artists such as Oscar Fischinger, Stan Brakhage and John Whitney have managed to represent rhythm visually in a number of works such as “Early Abstractions”, “The Dante Quartet” and many others. Jackson Pollock’s dripping paint on canvasses is another proof that artists are constantly experimenting on how to visually suggest bass, rhythm and melody.
What I want to do is visually interpet the song and show what kind of feelings could be shown through the structure of the song. The video will be presented as a link below the article of the experiment.
This is the final video I made based on the song "Sweet Georgia Brown" by Mills Brothers
