VISUAL MUSICALITY

Visual Musicality

Visual Musicality

Introduction

The terms musicality and visual-musicality have traditionally been tied to the expressions derived only from pure musical experiences and have always been defined as: sensitivity to, knowledge of, or talent for music. In other definitions, musicality also refers to the quality or state of being musical. A person that is musical has the ability to perceive differences in harmonies, pitch and rhythm. On the other hand, the term visual-musicality describes how well the visual effects compliment the musical soundtrack.

If you draw a line on a piece of transparent leader and then punch a hole in every alternate frame, the line seems to go through the hole. But if you draw the same line and then punch holes in two successive frames out of every three, then the hole appears empty. For a year I explored the possibilities of these simple juxtapositions. I also tested colours to see how they could interact over a series of successive frames. What's the point of all this? There's a lot of talk about the smallest unit of cinema being the frame, but in fact, that's not the case at all. As these experiments demonstrate, pieces from different frames can make up what you're seeing on the screen. In other words, you can construct an image on the screen with bits from different frames. You can change very slightly parts of a frame or several frames--change the colour, the thickness of the lines, whatever--and a completely different thing happens. If I draw a line on every single frame and then punch each frame, the circle will appear as a circle with no line through it. If you leave a frame between each punched hole, then the line can go through the circle. And if we put two frames of the line between each punch-out, the hole is much whiter on the screen and the line looks darker.

Aim of the Research

The research will scrutinize and examine how visual-musicality is presented in the European Avant-garde heritage of filmmaking, and will argue that it is an essential element in the success of films as creative pieces. This research will also examine equivalent elements in both film and music languages.

Research Question and Theoretical Framework

Film is a visual form of entertainment that enacts a story by sound and a sequence of images giving the illusion of continuous movement. Music, on the other hand, is an abstract artistic form of auditory communication incorporating instrumental or vocal tones in a structured and continuous manner. But both artistic forms: film and music, share at least two elements on which they depend on to convey feelings and emotion: they are harmony and counterpoint also known as rhythm.

In films harmony is realized by the informed juxtaposing of shots and/or by employing the Long Take (il piano-sequenza), while the creative process of editing obtains rhythm, which is based on the idea that montage originates in the "collision" between different shots in an illustration of the idea of thesis and antithesis (Eisenstein, ...