Wednesday 14 November 2018

Synchrony in Slow Motion

One of they key issues in making Video Art is how to synchronise the video track with the audio track. This is particularly important in music videos. And it is particularly difficult when the audio is slow.


This short video loop illustrates some of the problems. The audio is very slow and the events in the audio are separated by unequal intervals.

There are events in both the audio and the video that I wanted to synchronise. Since both tracks are generated, I was able to choose the durations of the intervals between events to some extent.

The outcome is that the events (attack in the audio, change of motion in the video) have been adjusted so that they happen with satisfying juxtaposition. They don't exactly happen at the same time but at clearly related (ie adjacent) times.

Cage and Cunningham noted that it wasn't necessary to synchronise dance movements and music, for a satisfying performance to be achieved. The extreme of this is when they composed their separate performances without contact with each other and where Cunningham hadn't heard (or studied) the music before dancing to it. The audience would see relationships between the events in the music and dance that were not designed.

I haven't gone that far. But I have relied on  the fact that precise alignment is not necessary, and probably isn't even desirable.