This project focuses on making an animated visualizer for one of my favorite pieces of techno music: "Montage (Edit)" by Function. It's a large checkpoint in my journey to explore ways to bring music to life in visual media. Prior to this project, I'd been making smaller animation experiments that find different ways to visualize different pieces of music in After Effects, available here. The goal was to eventually produce a full-length visualizer, which this project achieved.
(Note: I did not make the music - just the visuals, so I'm presenting only that in the above video. A separate video showing the animation with the visuals can be accessed at the bottom of this page.)
The abstract design for the piece is a digitized form of "ABS-12" from my ABS series. I picked this design to use as a stage for the visualizer because the color scheme and amount of dynamic, jagged shapes warranted pairing with a particularly driving and aggressive song and motion environment. I knew I wanted to do something with animating this piece in particular long before I had figured out which song I wanted to pair with it.
While my previous audiovisual experiments focused mostly on pulling one or two instruments from the music to replicate in visual form, this moving piece tries to take advantage of as many different sounds and samples as possible in "Montage" to give every part of the composition its own unique animation. The ending result aims to use the composition as a visual avatar for "Montage" itself, properly communicating the different timbres and tones of the instruments via appropriate animations and visual forms.
The animations in this piece can be grouped into two different categories. The first category reads keyframe data from edited full-length "Montage" audio files that isolate the target instrument, and this keyframe data directly affects the animations. (Examples include the wiggling circles at the composition's "head".) The second category are "manual" animations that I constructed myself and looped with expressions, when the raw audio file itself was not enough to inform actions like moving back and forth at specific times. (Examples include the shaking white "feathers" at the bottom of the composition.)
Both categories of animations are also controlled by a series of slider controls that work with expressions to grant the ability to turn animations on or off as instruments fade in and fade out of the song. This leads to a mixture of activity and passivity to the different parts of the composition and helps to direct the viewer to explore its different parts.
In several ways, I see this way of working with abstract animations representing different parts of a musical piece to be an extrapolation of childhood inspirations, such as the work of Animusic. Animusic was renowned for building 3D animations with instruments that play their own music, and the sense of automation is very concrete and directly seen, though the instruments themselves often exhibit small hints of person-like character.
I see my project's concept as a way of similarly visualizing environments for music where the instruments are not as easily recognizable; the electronic world is made up of sounds that I oftentimes feel like I recognize, but cannot adequately match with instruments from my personal knowledge and experience. Therefore, building abstract compositions with elements that appropriately convey the moods of each sound is a way to visualize what those sounds may look like.
The next steps to take this concept further are to build more examples, and I have several ideas that I explored in my Inktober 2019 series (example 1, example 2, example 3). In these, I paired most of the drawings with music that allows for many subjective interpretations of imagery, and drew what I saw as I listened.
Eventually, I also want to break out the rigidity of pre-rendered After Effects animations and pre-assembled audio tracks, and be able to use software such as TouchDesigner to make real-time animations informed by real-time compositions.
Made with Adobe After Effects / Audition / Illustrator.
Watch the visualizer with full music below.
Watch the visualizer with full music below.
