Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
University of Surrey
Wake Up and Smell the Coffee
Planetarium Movie Score (22mins)
Wake up and Smell the Coffee is a SEEDA and INTECH funded planetarium film with animation and scientific supervision by Dr. Anna Tanczos and Dr. Martin Bellwood. This film uses the planetarium medium as an opportunity to engage creatively with the biological rather than astronomical world, tracking through digital animation the passage of a caffeine molecule from cup to alertness. As composer for this project, I aimed to apply theoretical models founded in jazz and electronic improvisational analysis to film scoring practice. I have been developing the concepts of multi-dimensional musical space (M-Space) and proximity of musical events within it, in the context of jazz analysis, pedagogy and creative practice but they are re-employed here in a reciprocal fashion: the motion and colour of biological entities in the planetarium space are mapped onto a host of consyncronous musical parameters (Mermikides 2010) to form a synaesthetic immersive audio-visual work.
The research aims of this project are to:
i) Explore data sonification, compositional and sound design techniques based on M-Space - an extension of Pressing’s (Pressing 1987) improvisational model - enabled through digital technology.
ii)To explore – through collaboration with Tanczos – compositional techniques informed directly by biological processes (Walker & Nees 2011), rather than adopting a standard anthropocentric film-scoring paradigm.
The film and score has been screened in planetaria internationally, and the developed M-Space model disseminated in jazz, musicological and art/science conference, symposia and public event. Subsequent application and development of these scoring techniques, in collaboration with Tanczos (SciComm Studios), have led to dozens of documentary and education films including the winner of the International Category of the 2010 60-Second Science Competition, as well as a short educational film on Maths and Music for the 2012 Winchester Science Festival.
