Animation: “Terms of Rhythm”

Short clip which combined the use of Max MSP instruments we created to correspond the actions of animation created using Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Flash. This was a group project whereby my main responsibility was to create the composition that plays throughout the animation. The composition was created within Max MSP. Further edits were later made to the piece within Logic Pro, just to add an effect or two such as fade ins, volume control, reverb etc. We all shared the workload evenly with others focusing on the animation and sound effects.

Concept

Terms of Rhythm’ explores the emotional aspects of the human psychological and psychophysical responses to events at different time scales. The word rhythm is taken in both its traditional musical sense of ‘regular recurrence, esp. of stresses’ (Chambers 20th Century Dictionary) and also in the broader sense of patterns occurring on scales which lie outside the span of perceptible rhythm where—ordinarily—’the perception of the rhythm, objective or subjective, disappears if the intervals are either too short or too long’ (Fraisse, 1982). It is a study of the human experience of time exemplified in the special case of an astronaut manning a launching space shuttle. The event of the launch is played at 3 different time scales: normal, 1/20th speed, and x50 speed respectively. It is observed that the experience of tension is diminished on those scales far removed from normal human perception raising the question of whether or not the metaphysical essence of the event (as a whole) is maintained invariantly across different time scales. A musical composition characterised by having both slow, serene sections alternated with contrasting fast, frenetic sections is layered over the 3 time sections such that each rate of time is experienced with both slow and fast dynamics. This challenges the viewer’s assumptions of what the astronaut is experiencing emotionally.