Justin Lewis: Senior Portfolio

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Research #4 - 2.11.10 - Room Acoustics

A big part of my work, particularly on the audio side, is the space in which I create the work. The shape of a room, placement of speakers and combination reflective and non-reflective surfaces play a huge part in how I hear and record sounds when making my work. This is also something that should be considered for exhibition as it will play an important role in how the viewer hears the work. To begin, I am recording and mixing in the extra room of my apartment. It is roughly 9'x14' with high ceilings. Ideally, I would like to be in a perfect acoustically engineered recording studio, but given the space that I have, I need to optimize it's acoustic properties. Fortunately, the room is rectangular, which is not ideal, but in my research I found that a perfect cube is the worst possible scenario. The fewer parallel surfaces the better, so that certain frequencies do not build up. I had covered most of the walls with egg cartons because I believed it provided a better listening environment, but in my research I found that they are really only useful to dampen the sound. This will be good for recording, as it will reduce background echoes, but it leaves me needing panels for sound absorbtion when mixing. For now I will have to rely on my couch as my main place of absorbtion but I have also read that large pillows in the corners are a cheap solution for bass traps. A bass trap is an absorbtion device that prevents uneven bass response so that certain frequencies do not get amplified or lulled by the shape of the room. I read that in a rectangular room, it is best to face one of the shorter walls when mixing. I also read that having speakers in the corner of a room, or right up against the wall are bad choices so I have placed my speakers about 1.75' from the 9' wall placed at 46" apart. I read you want to put yourself in an equilateral triangle with your speakers. Therefore, given the distance between my speakers, I have placed my listening position at 5'4" from the wall which puts my speakers at about 30%. After rearranging for this new set-up, I can already hear a difference and new clarity while I'm mixing. I need to read more on how different environments might react and will have to consider this for exhibition once I know the space the work will be in. Here's a picture of the studio:

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Artist #3 - 2.8.10 - Brian Eno

Brian Eno

Since my latest piece is dealing with a sort of transient minimal ambiant type of music, I wanted to talk about Brian Eno. He was one of the pioneers of minimal and ambient music so naturally, I should have a listen to him as one of the firsts. I have his album, Ambient 1/Music for Airports and from what I have heard, his work is very similar to the sound the I am looking for in this particular piece. It is very airy and open. The first song is most like what I am looking for, with a sort of sauntering piano accompanied by some long triumphant pads. Even though this album has plenty of silence, I feel I want even less driving the song foreward, or fewer, but more intense segments of instrumentation. I do like how the songs stay true to their themes; they focus on a certain melody and allow different instruments to carry that melody, lead into or out of it, branch off from it, and sort of hammock it as well. It seems the most important thing is that the melody can stand on its own in the void that is created by the silence. It doesn't leave the listener waiting for more, it is acceptable simply to be let be and contemplated upon before it begins again and continues. Eno's music theory is very complex which is kind of discouraging, but as far as theory goes, I rely on the colors in the photograph to decide that. I am really only taking notes on Eno's style, which is what I will need to understand in order to accomplish the vibe I am looking for.

Idea #2 - 2.4.10 - Snow

I am interested in the ephemeral and the transient, and the snow has provided me a good means of exploring this. The snow falls and melts over time(at least in our part of the world), and can visually bears a resemblance to sound as well. For example Wassily Kandinsky said that the color white represented silence, but a silence full of hope, like a break in a song or the time between songs on an album. In a photograph of the snow, the shape of the tremendous white negative space becomes the subject of the photograph, I am going to work on a song that is more about what you don't hear than what you do. Not in the way John Cage's "4:33" looks at silence as music, but rather to compare the negative space of the photograph with music dealing with negative space, or white noise. The tones of the music will emerge from the ambiance as the snow-shielded dark areas emerge from the blanket of snow. I imagine soft music of an ambient style. My only problem with this is the lack of color variety, I see some reds and blues, but that doesn't give me much to work with musically. Of course, I do want this to be a minimal song, but I will use Photoshop's color-picker to see if there are any more subtle hues that I can derive a musical scale from.

Monday, February 8, 2010

Artist #1 - 2.01.10 - Mark Mason

At the current state of my work, the visual side is represented in abstract photographs. I feel they best portray the abstraction that is music. My music has no lyrics, so I feel my photographs should have no story to accompany them. I am interested mostly in natural abstractions. These scenes can be found anywhere and each one describes something about life, about the way things work and why they are the way they are. For example, this seemingly random, yet organically structured beauty can be found in the way paint chips and peels off of a wall, or in any given gum-spattered slab of sidewalk. No one created these abstractions, they simply came to be. So today I want to talk about Mark Mason, I came across him while researching abstract photography and was pleased to find that his images are very similar to mine. I have heard from people that these types of images are nothing but cathartic work that you do when you're bored. This always discouraged me because that's the work I like to do, I am not particularly interested in post-modernism. I suppose Mason is doing well enough as one of the top rankers in Google for abstract photographer, so he has inspired me to shoot what I want. Here is some of his work,

Mark Mason, Inverted Paint Splashes: Calgary, AB, 2007

Mark Mason, Swirled Sheet Metal: Near Baker, CA, 2008

Mark Mason,
Poster Scraps: Athens, Greece, 2008

Mark Mason, Smoke Damage: Calgary, AB, 2007

Visually I enjoy his work a great deal because I feel he has very similar sensibilities to me. Something that struck me as being true to my own work was how Mason describes his methods of making his work, "I create when I feel a connection. A subject's shapes, colours, and textures are only vessels, like words in a poem, to help explain what I feel. To this end, I work with my subjects spontaneously, as I find them, and do all of my creative manipulation with traditional optics, in the field." This feels like an accurate description of what guides me in the creation of my photographs. The shapes, colors, and textures are indeed like the words to a poem, or in my case, the melody of a song. I am taking it a step further by trying to understand these elements further by means of connecting them with music.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Research Blog - Sound vs light and some ideas

To more fully define my methods of creating, I am working on understanding the aspects of music and light. On a quick tangent, I found something interesting that John Cage says; that there is no difference between noise and music, it is all just sound. To apply this to the visual realm, I would say that there is no difference between, say, paint buckets spilled on a canvas and a purposely ordered painting. In both cases the aesthetic value is determined by the viewer or listener, like how one cultures music may sound like noise to another and vice versa. This idea opens my mind to broadness of possibilities for creating my music and visual work. It doesn't have to be music, and it doesn't have to be totally structured. It has got me thinking about painting a picture as I play a song on the guitar, where I would hold a brush in my picking hand the movement of my arm strumming would create strokes on the canvas. I could record the song, and then add more layers over top of it in the same way. I know this is another totally different avenue for my work, but I am very excited to try this.
So anyway, here I will attempt to relate as many visual elements to audio elements as I can

Musical element = visual element:
Key=Color
Pitch=Brightness
Timbre=Shape
Dynamics=Size (of shape/timbre or of entire piece)
Texture=Texture
Rhythm=Composition

I am having trouble defining melody and harmony. Melody and harmony are functions of pitch, which I have defined as brightness. This kind of ruins my ideas because right now a melody or harmony would be created by a combination of different colors rather than by changes in pitch/brightness. Perhaps instead of defining key as color, I should allow the color to define the melody and harmony.

Artist Lecture - Amy Hauft

Amy Hauft, Counter Re-formation, 2009
Plywood, canvas, sugar, ABS plastic, polystyrene foam, plaster, epoxy, paint;
32 ft x 27 ft x 35 in

I went to Amy Hauft's talk about her new installation at the Anderson Gallery, Counter Re-formation. The work was based on a Louis XIV banquet table and included sugar sculptures which were supposed to reference times before porcelain when artists would create sugar figurines and sculptures for dessert tables. It also had a tablecloth that seemed perfectly fabricated for the piece. I was disappointed when I found out that it was about . I thought it was an interesting, well crafted sculpture, but I was interested in it for its formal elements and I found the real meaning to be very uninteresting. I had trouble taking anything away from it other than the interesting way that this table was able to seat so many people. The installation also included a stair case for viewers to be able to get a higher perspective to see the whole piece which I thought was cool because it allowed a better view of the strange form of the table. This work is pretty unrelated to mine, but after doing my Sustainability sculpture, I was really noticing the craft and workmanship of this piece.