An Explanation

I suppose, since I didn't get to in class, that I should explain my video selection.

We were told to find videos that use electronic music, and also some how fits into our major. Since my major is psychology, that ain't easy.

With the MIDI animation videos, it's easy to see what the basic idea is. Different color dots coordinate with different MIDI voices, and the pitch of those voices is higher or lower as the dot is higher or lower on the animation plane. These dots are often times used to make little pictures. And, by some miracle, these pictures seem to make music that fits in with the rest of the song on first hearing.

This is where the psychology kicks in. Especially in the fourth one on the bar, the pictures are quite ornate and it seems that it's impossible that the notes that coordinate with each dot could be part of the song. That's because it is impossible. Especially the picture of the Choccobo (wierd bird looking thing.)

The pictures are made, most likely, without regard to the pitches that they will be creating. There are some exceptions, such as the line in the side of a campitalized "F". Those can easily be made into chords. But, the more complex pictures can't have any place in the music. It is made to sound as if they do by reducing the durration of the pitches. The notes in the pictures go by so fast that it's hard to keep track of them. Underneath the picture, or above it (or both) is the actual peice. By keeping the actual peice going, the mind focuses more on it's pitches and more on the pictures rather than on the sounds that the picture makes. The pictures are associated with the video game, and that games music is surrounding it, so the mind doesn't pay much attention to the picture's pitches and fills in the rest of the song so that it's hard to tell that something's missing.

This plays on a person's attention, and plays on the mind's automatic desire to fill in the gaps.

First Post

This is supposed to be a short Paragraph about "What music technology means to me today." Generally, I don't like these sort of prefabricated thoughts that are given to me to write about, but since this is for a grade I suppose I'll make an exception.

Music technology, to me, is simply another outlet for artistic expression. Duh. The thing is, it's new to me. It's new to everyone, relatively speaking, but I've not had a lot of personal experience with music technology. The closest I've come to it is watching some one else take recordings of some cheesy stuff I've written, record and mix it, and then set it to a movie that we made. That movie, btw, is Once Upon a Time in Japan Two, Son of Once Upon a Time in Japan: The Musical. It won "Best Musical" at the film festival that we submitted it to. It's got a very small, but very dedicated cult following. It's a sort of jacked up comedy version of "The Prodigal Son," which as most people in the Bible Belt know, is one of those stories that Jesus told people. Music has always had two faces in my life; that for pure enjoyment and that for worship, and in a weird way, that movie is a form of worship. I follow Christ, and so I dedicate some of my music to him. I'm sort of interested to see how that will play out with sound synthesis and music technology. So Music Technology is just a new way for me to enjoy life and worship.