KIM & SYMPATHIA
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I am making weekly few-minute long videos of my meditative music with meditative watercolour paintings that slowly roll together. My hope is that for the viewer/listener, this will be a kind of gentle meditation. For me, it will be a chance to learn the whole process of recording and editing, and by the end of the year, I imagine that I'll be pretty good at it.
So kindly follow me as I work on these, if you are interested in seeing the progress of someone plodding away at their work, and/or if you would like to have relaxing music and images to meditate to, or put on while you're working.
The music of this video is make without using any flute. I was originally planning on using flute but I liked it as it was. The music is, like in the last video, made with the sansula (you can do a search) but this time instead of playing it in the intended manner, I used a mallet to sound it like a drum, which called all the little tongues to sing in harmony. Later on in the video, I used the rubber mallet directly on the tongues, moving the mallet around to get different notes.
And now here is another horizontal one - haha. In the visuals for this video I was experimenting with having a limited pallet and no horizon line. In this video more than the others, I laid the colours out to create a gradual progression. The colours begin simpler and become somewhat more complex because I wanted to see what effects these different ways of progressing would have.
The music of this video is made with the sympathia and a Guda Drum, which is a kind of tongue drum derived from a hang drum which is derived from pan drums. I will let you do your own google search. I had my own made custom with the notes of my selection and also with my own design that was engraved on it. It is a thing of beauty.
This was going to be another horizontal one, trying out a technique, and I decided to do it vertically. I did actually paint it that way. But the colours were picked with the idea of the surface of water. A few people have told me that it looks something like a forest to them.
This sound for this video is made with rain that I recorded out my studio door early one morning. I heard the rain, got out of bed, opened the door and set my equipment up there, and went back to bed. I continued to listen to listen to the beautiful rain, partially because it was so lovely, and partially so that I could rescue my equipment from getting wet if the wind picked up.
This is the first time that I recorded the music while thinking a lot about the visuals. The shape of the disk was made with a tiny singing bowl, which I chose on purpose because of its weight, and so it would be more likely to hold still while I painted around it. I originally thought that I would position the disk to be in the same spot every time but as I was editing, I thought it was interesting if it shifted a little bit, and so the difference between the paintings made an effect that I like. For the sound, I was experimenting with different noise filters in the editing process, I found that I liked the smooth sound that it gave to the flute. That's not it's intended purpose but I liked it so I kept it. Part of what I'm doing is developing my ears. I am loving how the sympathetic strings sound in headphones but I am disappointed in how they sound on computer speakers after they have been run through the YouTube process. This time around, I actually did a lot of my editing on my MacBook speakers (as well as on my professional editing headphones) because I figure that this is how people are often listening. But if it's never possible for me to get the sympathetic strings ringing audibly enough on computer speakers after the music has been put on YouTube, then I will just need to make sure that I'm not reliant on the echo sounds of the strings to make the music good.
I was trying to think up a different sort of shape that would be super simple but also let me try things and explore the details. I try painting with different ideas in mind, and then see what the results are when I load them into the video editor and see what I can do with them. To me this is a leaf shape but it is really so abstract that it could be interpreted as many beautiful things. With all of these videos I am trying to give a feeling of constant rolling change, but while continuing to see the particular form and so it isn’t just randomness (which could be lovely but not too long.
I was curious what would happen with another horizontal design but with more of a defined horizon. So the colours change but the design stays the same. What I am would like to work towards is an understanding of how I can control (in a good way) the images, so that I could have things that move.
In the visuals of this video I was thinking about so much beautiful pottery that I have seen recently and I think that really made it’s way into the paintings. The music is more or less the same tune as the first video but in the upper register. A lot of what I want to do with this project is to take on small challenges so that I can focus on certain elements of what I’m doing and learn in each case. If there are two many elements in one thing that I’m doing, it will be more difficult for me to figure out why I am getting certain results or certain difficulties. With time, I will slowly add more and more things.
For a long time I had been trying to think of a way that I could make my music regularely, to have a project that would push me to improve but in a way that would also prevent me from being perfectionistic. Perfectionism is absolutely the death of art because we are always improving, so even if we define our perfect as doing our best, our best is always what is just out of reach. The trouble with that is that so much wonderful art that has been created but never sees the light of day because the artist can never decide that it’s good enough.
The leaf shapes are made with rubber stamps that I cut. The orange colour that you see is something that I am particularly proud of. Oranges are difficult to achieve in watercolour, as the yellows and oranges tend to create a muddy catsup and mustard effect - or, there are oranges that are way to bright and artificial-looking for my preferences in my own work. This orange is a mix that I created years ago and I worked very hard to get it, and I am pleased every time I see it.
The music of this meditation animation is composed of the sympathia, the sansula - a kind of mbira/kalimba/thumb piano - I'll let you do your own google search but this version is derived from a beautiful class of African instrument from various regions - and a metal tube with a hole that you can cover with your thumb to make a wah-wah effect.
This video definitely benefits by having the quality turned up.
The visuals are made using a silicone coaster. I used it as a stamp, painting watercolour paint onto the coaster and then pressing it into wet watercoloured paper. I was hoping that it would make this kind of rotational effect, which it did.
The sound was primarily me trying to make the sympathetic strings sound as much as possible, and let them ring out without clobbering the sound with my breath. It takes me holding my breath (out) after I've played a note or a phrase so that I don't inhale during the ringing sound. Then, having held my breath out for several seconds, I take in a big breath of air which I then edit out.
The visual effect in the watercolours is made with salt. I actually thought that these visuals might be quite ugly but I wanted to try anyway and I actually love the result.
In the music in this video and the other early ones, I am really developing my recording ability. I played music that I thought would work with the images but I am not trying too hard to make them a perfect match. Over time I may do so, but in the effort to learn things in bite-sized chunks, I am not placing these demands too high on myself for now. In this music towards the end I start playing two of the sympathetic strings to see how they would record.
I have always loved artistic animation. There is not much of this, but I would count ‘The Logdriver’, ‘Ma Merle’, and especially ‘Walking’ as beautiful examples that you can look up. All of these are productions of the National Film Board of Canada which means that I saw them as a child on TVOntario. I can’t imagine the hours of work involved in these works. Animation is an artform in itself and an incredibly time-consuming one, but for at least a year, I was rolling around in my mind how I might be able to make some kind of animation to provide simple visuals for videos, where I could practice recording music and have something done, and let it out into the world even before I felt like it was any good.
I started imaging slowly moving, slowly changing shapes and colours, that would be meditative to go along with my music. I decided to start out with an abstract horizon landscape. I decided to start with square, because calculations of what this could cost were high and if I started with smaller pieces of paper, I would have more room to experiment without too much worry. (Basically, if I were to do my whole year’s worth of videos at this length and size, if would cost $1000 for the paper alone.
For this first video, I decided to just go for it, and paint in different ways that I could imagine might create interesting effects. I did one test to make sure that the concept was viable, and then I sat down and painted 50 little paintings, one after the other. When I had painted them all, I began the process of figuring out how to take photos of them all and put them into a video editor, and create the long blending transitions in a way that I liked.
For the music, I did something similar. I sat down and played and recorded what I played the best I could, and then I put it in the editing software and edited it as best as I could. My music has the added challenge of recording the ringing sympathetic strings. I want them to be audible in a YouTube video, on cell phones and laptops, and also the strings ring right when I want to breathe, which creates a lot of noise in the recording. Over time, I expect to get better and better at coping with this. There is so much I can learn from others, and to a certain extent, I just need to experiment.