Monday, August 5, 2013

A "Song" About the Five Senses

So, this started out as a funny idea and turned into a really elaborate music video project.

Anyhow, it was meant to simply be a(n honorific!) Daft Punk parody about the five senses, but realizing that I didn't know how to make any kind of synthesized music, I took a page out of my middle school music teacher's book.  Mr. Moody, as those of you who were lucky enough to attend Cutler Middle School in the early 90's know, was the class music and choir teacher there, and I just thought he was the coolest guy ever.  At any rate, he told us the story of how he had to use a synthesizer in college for a music composition class, and at a loss to make the confounded thing work, he instead recorded acoustic sounds (a rubber band stretching, dragging a quarter across the steel string of a bass guitar, etc.) to create kind of synth-y sounds.  He played us the composition, and it was amazing the kind of electric sound that was achieved using entirely acoustic recordings.

So the memory of that story gave me the idea to do a similar creation.  With the exception of the digital metronome (which I left in because it sounded like an old Atari game) everything you hear is either vocals which have been affected with pitch changes and vocoder, or me banging against a coffee cup with an eggbeater (also affected with pitch changes and  vocoder).  At any rate, I don't know if what I made is exactly music, or even pleasant to listen to, but it sure is interesting and it sure was time-consuming to make (as was the video, which is essentially a slide show of heavily edited photos, with the exception of the short video toward the end where I pay homage to 'daft hands').

I hope you enjoy watching it.  I sure had fun making it.



--P.S. --  Props to my longtime colleague, Stephane, for the idea to use an apple.

No comments:

Post a Comment