How do our brains process music and video together? What makes a soundtrack to a piece of media fitting, or not? Depending on the angle one takes, these questions have innumerable answers – in some ways, they are the questions that any participant in the Hyperscore Challenge sets out to answer when they compose a piece to accompany a video clip.
Near the end of the January edition of our Second Saturdays Hyperscore composing workshop, we raised these questions ourselves. We played our composition simultaneously first with the prompt video that inspired our piece, before then comparing to how it sounded alongside other videos. Surprisingly, the music fit disparate clips very well, in ways that illuminated different sides of the composition each time. The audio and video mutually transformed each other and our perceptions of them just by playing at the same time. This fascinating effect highlights the exciting power of engaging with creative practice. Just by, for example, dropping in some notes and playing them back, you can evoke worlds and scenes that unfold and transform over time with subsequent listens. Using Hyperscore, getting started with this practice becomes all the more accessible.
In our January workshop, we started with inspiration from the Challenge prompt of undersea scenes, and built out several melodic and rhythmic themes that for us represented each “player” we saw. The kelp had its own percussive backdrop, and the silver school of fish was accompanied by overlapping plucking guitars. Like this, we arrived at one answer to what soundtrack might be fitting for the video we saw. Any other group of composers would surely arrive at a different answer – how thrilling! Perhaps to those people, our composition might bring different images to their minds, and so the process of creative inspiration continues…
Express your creative inspiration at our judgment free, no experience required composition workshops – register here! Watch our full workshop, as well as the full composition “Hyperschoool” created during our session, in the videos below.
