APD Week 6 - Play and Sound (MonsterBand)

Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6xIyEnjki4&ab_channel=PeterMavro 

Context

Play and sound was an interesting topic for me. I wanted to do something with music this week, but I am not that good at it. However, it did not stop me from experimenting in different applications to see what I could do. The thought of it sounded fun. As my music making skills are not great, I decided to use my lack of knowledge in this field as a strength and opted to create a different world where the music I make is celebrated and glorified. “In an international art world dominated by visual works, sound has long been perceived as a challenging and esoteric medium” (Delany, 2013).  And thus, I have created this project by merging the two components into one and I have given meaning to the sound within the video by associating them to a character. Each character goes off a different musical tune based on their appearance and what I believe they would sound like in this world.  In Play and the Experience of Interactive Art, Brigid Costello explains that there are thirteen characteristics of the play experience, some being, exploration, creation, and difficulty (Costello, 2009, p.10).  I have decided to discuss three of the thirteen characteristics that Costello has discussed as they have been the for the making of this project. I have explored music and different sounds, and different characters during this process. Through this, I have created something somewhat whimsical, and fun. An interesting concept arrived through the difficulty of not knowing the medium of creating sound and having to play around with many different elements and software.

Method

I began playing around in a song editor called FamiStudio (https://famistudio.org/).  I was unable to make anything that sounded nice after a lot of attempts playing with different tunes and melodies. So, I decided to try out Chrome Labs Song Maker (https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Song-Maker). It was easier to make something that sounded decent in this browser software. I was still not happy with the result but opted to make an environment where there would be happiness attached to this type of music. And add an element of the culture that these creatures would have in relation to the song in which they are singing. I also used photoshop to create the creatures and a separate image of them singing. I used HitFilm express to edit these photos in place and used the sound to dictate when they would animate.

Response

This week I created a world of creatures who sing songs in different tunes. I created the song in Chrome Labs Song Maker (https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Song-Maker). I experimented with different instruments and tunes. I am not an expert in making audio and after having many failed attempts in different programs, I thought to myself, what if I make a world in which the music, I make is considered good? This led me on my path to creating a world filled with monsters that can sing in different musical tunes. I decided to give them character and played with shapes and proportions until I got an interesting concept for them. I used play and sound in this project as my workflow consisted of exploration and trial and error.

Reflection

There were a lot of different elements in this production, from making music, to drawing characters, colouring them in, creating a singing animation for them, editing it in the film editor and matching the clips to the audio. Of course, each element of the production could have been more fine-tuned, but I was going for a more conceptual piece as I wanted to get my ideas out there and make a cool concept instead of spending a lot of time on one element and not being able to have fun and experiment with all the options. 

Overall, I am glad I was able to have this opportunity to experiment and explore a lot of different elements in this production and it has aided me in understanding some extra options that I can explore in the future.