The music of sound

Had a good meeting with Dan today. We went over the entire structure, talked over specific areas and spotted music. We're taking a slightly unusual approach to the audio/music. Typically music is spotted after the film is edited. However, a lot of our film is audio-based so we're having to plan ahead. Sound is carrying important narrative and plot information. Further, a lot of the video events are designed around audio events. The bird attack was influenced by a Trevor Wishart electronic composition that Dan played for me. One of the 'spinner attacks' is a dissonant audio event. And the final exposition is a complex sound design piece based on some of Dan's C-Sound work with vocals like Blackbird Fly. By the way, if you want to hear Dan's music, check out his site here.

Dan brings a kind of mathematical logic to the entire film structure. Various events occur in threes (he thinks in threes he said. Maybe they should have another kid?). Certain audio and visual themes appear and reappear through the video. The question: how will everything function together when the audio is so purposefully foregrounded? I told him that some of the audio needs to function like regular movie music, but I've also tried to create interesting and sensible rationales for the more experimental audio sections.

One of the issues that often comes up when I talk to Dan is the way that pop music reinforces a "chunked," modular approach to composition. Music is seen as chunks that can be stacked vertically (e.g., guitars get stacked on the bassline which gets stacked on drums) or in time (e.g., the chorus gets repeated throughout a piece). Dan partially uses this metaphor. But as a trained composer, he primarily thinks in terms of development in time. He writes by conceptualizing music as a linear flow that explores and develops a musical theme. The musical theme changes as it "experiences" preceding sections. So composing is not primarily the process of arranging "chunks" but is a matter of developing musical implications that are then fulfilled or challenged. These implications are really sophisticated, not just things like "call and response" patterns but implications steeped in compositional literacy. This is just another way of saying I have no idea what he's hearing in music half the time. But I believe him when he says something's there.

I remember reading a Keyboard magazine article awhile ago that was insightful. The author suggested that electronic music is the folk music of the present. That sounds right. Folk music of the past is banjos and washtub basses and dobros, but today's folk music is made in Garageband and strives to sound like something off the radio. The chunked, spatial, pop music approach to writing music is so pervasive and ingrained in our thinking (mine anyway) that I always find myself falling into it, even as Dan is working in a musical world that is very different: highly historically- and theoretically-aware. And while I'm primarily hearing the mood or feel of a piece, he's also paying a great deal of attention to the way musical structure reveals itself over time. Despite this background, Dan is really conversant in film music grammar and cliches and he doesn't blanch when I say things like "Dan, this is the part where they'd usually put in high strings to build tension." I'm looking forward to seeing what he comes up with.