Soundtrack by Daniel Thompson

I met Daniel at the Mopomoso event at The Vortex and we discussed the triptych project. He offered to help as he is involved in improvised music and wanted to explore the interrelationship of sound and image. As he lives in London and I am based in Norwich we knew that any collaboration would have to be maintained by remote means. We communicated via e-mail and decided to take quite an experimental approach.

Here is Daniels explanation of the process that he went through:

"When asked to produce some music for an animation soundtrack the first thing I thought was that I want the music to work and be able to stand alone without the animation, just as the animation stands alone and works without music. I feel the strength of individual elements determines the strength of the totality, an idea analogous to many forms, thinking of nature, body forms, the triptych itself having three individual elements but existing as one, buildings, machinery, the oceans, the planets ecology, the universe and many many others. I hope my music lives up to these demands.

As soon as I heard of the project I immediately considered the idea of recording the improvisations I play whilst watching the animation for the first time, concentrating on an individual panel for each improvisation and remaining true to the integral, spontaneous nature of this music whilst using the animation as a graphic score. These pieces became the improvisations entitled 'During the Animation'.

The ideas came a plenty and I then immediately developed the idea of recording improvisations prior to even seeing your triptych, the idea that a collaborative effort like this can work in this way is intriguing, the accident of purpose becomes possible and the correlation of mediums becomes accented. I hope the music speaks for itself in this matter (even when a piece is worked re-worked and then re-worked again (the 'traditional' composing method) certain elements react and work stronger than others anyway). These pieces became the improvisations entitled 'Before the Animation'.

Finally, I also produced improvisations after seeing the triptych many times and thinking a lot more about the work. Within this project this is probably as close to a 'traditional' composing method as I achieved, the improvisatory approach is still very much integral as I didn't use the animation whilst playing but used my memory & recollection of the images as a compositional/graphic/memory score.

All these methods are centred around utilising improvisation as the creative working method to work within, a method I work almost exclusively in. I tried to acknowledge the omnipresent three by playing three improvisations within each of the three ideas, concurrent with the three panels for the triptych. They were all recorded whilst the moon was beginning its third quarter! Each improvisation was a 'first take' real time recording, recorded in the order they appear.

I have been studying my instrument (the guitar) for about 9 years. I was raised on music, being woken up in the mornings either by Monk, Lacy, Mingus, Webern, Bartok et al or my father playing saxophones and clarinet, he became my first influence and tutor and remains that way today.

I have been studying with John Russell for about 7-8 months which has been invaluable. He is an incredible musician and artist and one of the most generous people I know, he has an unbelievable subtle intelligence, fantastic work ethic and wonderful sense of humour. Every lesson I have with him is a lesson in music, philosophy, politics and everything else in between. I am extremely lucky to study with him and my music is reaping the rewards. My musical studies will never end."

Once Daniel had finished his recordings he sent them to me (9 in total) and I listened to them alongside the animation while considering what kind of process would be needed to get the best out of the tracks. As some of the improvised tracks had been made before viewing the animation I was quite surprised at how there were quite a few moments when the musical improvisation and animation met and complimented one another. It reminded me of the way that some of the improvisers at the Mopomoso event interacted while they played together. There would be periods of relative musical chaos out of which would come starkly contrasted moments of harmony. This reflects some of what happens in the animation but instead of using sound I have used movement.

There was some minor processing that needed to be done in order to clean up the tracks so I did that before looking carefully at how to make the composition work. I didn't want to change things too much. This soundtrack was more about a process than an outcome so I left all 9 tracks on the time line and used the volume automation to bring out a few sounds at a time and deaden the tracks that didn't fit what was happening on screen. I enjoyed this process but I think it may have worked better with a different instrument for each panel as it would have had a better range of sounds.

Daniel made some very interesting sounds with his guitar and had I cut out clips and placed them on the time line I'm sure I could have developed a soundtrack that was more traditional. When dealing with some forms of animation I'm sure it would have been quite appropriate to take a conventional approach but I after watching the Mopomoso performances I knew that I would like to collaborate with this type of musician and that I might have to change my attitude towards sound design if I were to do that. The unplanned nature of my animation and the improvisation of music seem to go well together, theoretically.

It's not my aim to to find a resolution on my first attempt, I think that only empty resolutions come about in this way. There's not much in life that you get right first-time around, trial and error is a huge part of the learning process so this first collaboration with an improvising musician is very important to me. I think that I could use my Mopomoso contacts to develop all kinds of collaborations as I find the style of music creatively inspiring.

Daniels soundtrack didn't separate as well as Phil's did but this meant that I could have Daniels soundtrack on the show-reel for the MA show where it didn't need to be broken into 3 segments and Phil's soundtrack in the installation.

I intend on taking the triptych to other musicians to see what they can do given the right amount of time. Now I have a couple of working examples of what can be done it will be easier to present the brief to others.

More post production!

So less than a week before the work is due in I have decided to start the post-production from scratch!

I started this process such a long time ago that I have lost files along the way. When looking at the FCP project that I had been working on as my 'best' output I found that one of the files was compressed using the H.264 codec, which is rubbish. I must have saved the wrong version at some point as I am pretty sure that I have a version somewhere which is much better quality. I had been saving files using the Apple Intermediate codec but after having a word with one of the technicians I have decided to re-export all of the single movies (ego, shadow and persona) and compile them in FCP.

We are using a batch process to rotate and resize the images in Photoshop before putting them together in FCP as the images are much bigger than I need them to be for the composition. I will then need to crop each movie so that it is 16:9 and not it's native 4:3. I really wish that digital camera companies would start to acknowledge the 16:9 format as there really is no need to stick to a film-based ratio anymore.

Once the 3 individual films are laid out to form the triptych, I will need to alter the speed of the films until the panels are timed in a way that matches the current export, as this is what the music has been edited to. Once this is done I will have to colour-correct, add the sound and re-export using the animation codec.

I hope to get all of this done today...

Update 7

It's looking likely that I will now have 2 soundtracks for the animation. I have the soundtrack that Phil produced and the one that Daniel and I produced.

Phil's soundtrack

Phil used software to track the shapes and movement and to manipulate the sound accordingly. When that was finished we consulted, I made some suggestions and Phil built another layer of sound that corresponded with the figurative parts of the animation, then changes were made to alter the mood of the sound towards the end. He then split the sound into 3 for the individual animations.

Daniel's soundtrack

Daniel performed 3 guitar improvisations before he had seen the triptych, 3 during his first viewing and 3 after. I edited the 9 soundtracks in Logic mostly by automating the volume to vary the amount of tracks that were heard at any one time. This ensured that there weren't 9 tracks playing at once and isolated the sounds that were appropriate to what was happening on screen. I didn't cut or paste any parts, just left the tracks where they were as I felt that this was part of the improvised process. I tried to make it work when separated as well as when the triptych is complete but this proved problematic.

There were a few other people that would have liked to work on soundtracks for this but due to the timescale they weren't able to complete anything. I'm feeling quite relieved that I managed to get 2 soundtracks out of the possible 9 musicians that originally volunteered, it just shows that sometimes it really is a numbers game when relying on other people. If I had only approached one person about this I would be struggling by now.

Morton Feldman quote

"At this first meeting I brought John a string quartet. He looked at it a long time and then said, "How did you make this?" I thought of my constant quarrels with Wolpe, and how just a week before, after showing a composition of mine to Milton Babbitt and answering his questions as intelligently as I could, he said to me, "Morton, I don’t understand a word you’re saying." And so, in a very weak voice I answered John, "I don’t know how I made it."

The response to this was startling. John jumped up and down, and with a kind of high monkey squeal, screeched, "Isn’t that marvelous. Isn’t that wonderful. It’s so beautiful, and he doesn’t know how he made it." Quite frankly, I sometimes wonder how my music would have turned out if John had not given me those early permissions to have confidence in my instincts."

pg 4-5 Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman edited by Bernard Harper Friedman Exact Change,U.S.; illustrated edition edition (9 Mar 2001)

I'm used to people looking at me as if I am insane when I try to tell them about my ideas or when I am trying to express what I want to achieve. I am pretty sure that when I originally told the first person that I wanted to produce a sound/animation triptych that they had no better idea of what I was doing after I told them my ideas than they did before the conversation.

Could it be that I don't really know what I am doing or how I am going to do it? It's there in my head and cannot be communicated to anyone else in any way other than in its intended form.

People who can just accept that something just 'is' are hard to come by or maybe the education system has made it hard to come by this kind of freedom. If I asked a student how they had made something and they replied that they didn't know their marks would probably suffer. It's hard to get out of this way of thinking. I guess there is a need to be an established artist with a proven track record before you can just admit that maybe you don't know how you have created something, that it just came out?

Sometimes when I look at my life drawing I can't remember drawing it, I just remember finishing, standing back and thinking "Where the hell did that come from?"

Morton Feldman

Morton Feldman, "Rothko Chapel" (1971)


Part 1


Part 2


Part 3


Part 4

I have been looking at Morton Feldman's work this week as tom recommended it. Feldman, unlike Cage didn't embrace the newer music technologies that were available at the time opting instead to use traditional instruments. He was interested in Colour Field painting and The New York School of artists and probably shared more of an affinity with visual arts than Cage did.

His work is certainly in need of more investigation, but my time is running out so I will have to do that another time!