...what sound does silence make?

So, Music Class huh?

I don't like classes like this for a few reasons -

1) They get taught to 'animators' not 'musicians' - I did music way before I did art so I find it hard looking at sound from a new angle. This is, however, a personal challenge I have to work on and not a failing in the class :D I need to reteach myself how to analyse music and soundtracks for their companionship with the visual side of things rather than just making music to sound good.

2) Because it's a secondary subject, i.e Animation with a Music side project - I don't think there's enough that I've learnt in regards to sound editing. It was more a case of, here's a computer - go play. I know that I could play around with all sorts of music software but if I don't know what it can do as a basic lesson, I have no chance of making a soundtrack good enough for the MASSIVE amount of marks it gets!

In this class we were taught about soundwaves and pitch, timbre and wavelength etc and how the ranges of these affect the sound produced. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how that has helped me in making a piece of soundtrack as when it comes to it you listen to the sounds you don't LOOK at them. It was interesting to a degree though.

We also created graphic scores - using symbols and shapes to denote what sort of sound you are imagining. To start with this was hard as I'm used to writing 'music' on sheet paper with notes and such but at the end I really liked how it made me think about how to represent a sound VISUALLY. Now, I don't think I ever want to animate in such an abstract way but I definitely think it's helped in terms of creating compatible combinations of sound and image.

Off to play with Ableton now (which I'm not loving and will be reverting to something else when I get home :D)