music and video
[Originally posted on 10/11/2021 at birdbyrocket.com]
MUSIC
Music has been deeply intertwined with my writing for as long as I can remember. This seems pretty common for writers, who nowadays even go as far as to make playlists of their inspirational songs as a kind of book promotion.
But a few years ago, I started to feel that music had too much of an impact on my writing. The ideas I had were not novels, but they were not movies either. They were basically elaborate internal music videos. Without the song, something so essential was missing that the idea could no longer stand on its own. (For a second I even considered dropping everything else to become a music video artist—perhaps it was my real medium.) Instead, I focused more on the act of writing and the words themselves. I’ve been able to give prose more inherent value—within the form of prose fiction—by creating a bit more space between music and words.
Music remains critical to my sense of “creative energy” or “inspiration,” especially for fiction writing. I’d venture to say that most of my ideas occur to me while listening to music, in transit or in bed, in a sort of half-meditative state. This is a deeply personal kind of music-listening. It's not a shared experience, like a concert. It’s just me, a pair of headphones, and a device. I’m noticing a pattern as I write these reflections: something about privacy. I never liked listening to music with my family in the car, for instance, because I was often powerfully affected by it (my internal music video began to play), and it was too personal to experience that feeling in “public.”
So what about making music? I’m not trained as a musician, beyond a year or two of piano lessons as a kid. Improvisational piano-playing became an occasional hobby because of my lessons, but I didn’t get many opportunities to play because there was no way to do it privately. The keyboard we had at home didn’t have a headphone jack. If I couldn’t play freely, without the possibility of others listening, then I didn’t want to play at all.*
[*Sometimes I was secretly recorded if I played when others were home. This created contradictory feelings in me. On the one hand, perhaps the recordings would be useful; maybe I could return to certain songs in the future. On the other hand, something about the ephemerality was what inspired me. And wondering if I was being recorded impacted how I played. Now I would say that this practice is supposed to be generative, not archivable.]
When I did play (home alone), exciting things happened. As I started to sink into the melody and chords, after a few minutes of warming up, images appeared in my mind—the song was becoming about something. Rarely did these images create a discernible “narrative,” but I remember one time when they did. Something about a tower… a girl… the images began to build on each other; the music created their tone, color, speed, and eventual conclusion. This was similar to the internal music videos that songs I loved had inspired (though the images that came with finished songs often had more concrete narrative arcs). It was exciting to think that I could create the images and the music that inspired those images.
Technology eventually filled a need in my music-making life. Maybe tech is useful for something after all. GarageBand allows you to play with a huge variety of sounds, which is great if you lack experience with a real instrument. The Musical Typing tool turns your keyboard into a digital piano. When I discovered it, I was suddenly capable of private music-making—extremely private, because no one can tell you’re making music when you use this tool.
VIDEO
Recently, I decided to make some videos. The idea was that I could use them as a basis for music: the opposite of what I usually do. Instead of music creating images, I would put together some images and then create music.
The first thing you have to do when trying to make videos is put to rest questions about optimization. We all know what a “high-quality” video looks like. Our world is video-inundated. I also know that I don’t have the tools to make a video like that. Rather than pine after expensive gadgets and software, I became attached to the tools I already had: my phone and my laptop. And really, you can do a lot with what we now consider the most “basic” tech.
Making videos is fun. It lets you see your surroundings in a new way (looking for interesting things to capture), which feels especially necessary after the last year and a half.
Here’s what I did:
I went for a walk and took a short 10-20 second video of anything interesting I saw. I held the phone sideways to avoid the black bars that appear on each side of a vertical video.
I imported all of the videos into iMovie.
I looked through the videos and cut out segments that were the most interesting. These choices have to do with angle, light, wind, etc., as well as what feels like the right length of time for a clip to appear. I don’t end up using every video.
Rearrange the clips if I need to. Make them shorter, longer, choppier, etc.
Detach the natural audio from each clip and delete it. This is a single-button function on iMovie. (Maybe someday I’ll gain a better appreciation for lo-fi audio; but not today!)
Go into the color settings and play around with the saturation, contrast, and brightness. Usually I just make one subtle change for every clip.
Once the silent video is done, I use Musical Typing to make up a song for it. This takes much longer than the video. Since my method is improvised, I have to do a lot of takes. So far the songs have been almost double the length I need for the videos. I export the song from GarageBand as an MP4 and import the MP4 into iMovie. I use the second half of the song so I can get that conclusion-y note at the end of the video without having to do any awkward audio editing.
If nothing else, this is a fun way to spend time. From the walk to the finished video, I probably occupy a solid 3-4 hours of a Sunday. It’s a good antidote for nervousness and melancholy. (I’m intentionally using words without clinical connotations to give more emphasis to the emotion than to the various diagnoses.) Maybe I don’t even want to say antidote. It’s a good movement for nervousness and melancholy. Put simply: times are strange and sad, but making videos is fun.
Here are the two videos I’ve made so far:
9/26/2021: morning walk
10/10/2021: in which i try to capture a spider web beaded with water, but it just looks like water spots on the lens