sound to light

Vivaldi’s La Primavera

Video | | Paul Greer




BDH produced a series of films to accompany the performace of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons by the Emerald Ensemble.

This is the Largo from Concerto No. 1 in E major, Op. 8, RV </wiki/Ryom_Verzeichnis> 269, “La primavera” (Spring).

Vivaldi wrote sonnets for each concerto in the Four Seasons. For this piece he wrote:

“And now, in the pleasant, flowery meadow, to the soft murmur of leaves and plants, the goatherd sleeps with his faithful dog at his side.”

Each musical element clearly illustrates this scene and the shapes in the animation aims to reflect that.

http://www.emeraldensemble.co.uk/

this links is about the piece in general

http://classicalmusic.about.com/od/baroqueperiod/ss/fourseasons.htm

Newton’s colour circle

Image | | Paul Greer

“In a mixture of primary colours, the quantity and quality of each being given, to know the colour of the compound.”


Newton's colour circle

from wiki – Throughout Opticks, Newton compared colours in the spectrum to a run of musical notes. To this purpose, he used a Dorian mode, similar to a white-note scale on the piano, starting at D. He divided his colour wheel in musical proportions round the circumference, in the arcs from DE to CD. Each segment was given a spectral colour, starting from red at DE, through orange, yellow, green, blew [sic], indigo, to violet in CD. (The colours are commonly known as ROY G BIV.)

The middle of the colours—their ‘centres of gravity’—are shown by p, q, r, s, t, u, and x. The centre of the circle, at O, was presumed to be white. Newton went on to describe how a non-spectral colour, such as z, could be described by its distance from O and the corresponding spectral colour, Y.

Here We Go Magic | “Tunnelvision”

Video | | Paul Greer

“All of the footage was captured on the edge of a large lake in the Catskill Mountains. “The temperature had dropped the night before and the lake was starting to freeze. Everything was half-frozen,” recalls Peking’s Nat Johnson. A lot of the footage was recorded with Snejina’s homemade kaleidoscope fastened to the lens of the camera. The footage was then manipulated by hand, projected and filmed again. “Super-8 projection has an anxious, hypnotic effect that we thought served Here We Go Magic’s song well. We wanted something simple and transcendent,” Snejina explains. “Look closely and you’ll enjoy beautiful patterns in the seemingly random imagery,” notes Peking co-founder, Greg Mitnick.”