Members :
Gustavo Almenara : Animation Director >
Romain Blanc-Tailleur: Animation Director, Composer, Teacher > romain-blanc-tailleur.com
Resume :
The Animated Score is an Hybridization multimedia project using digital innovative tools. It proposes a language of signs, universal and sensitive, allowing real-time composition for musicians, actors and all types of improvisers. The Animated Score questions the relationship between the interpreter and music notations and codifications, in an ongoing exchange.
Intentions :
We are an artist collective coming from animation films, digital arts and music creation.
When we first work on the Animated Score project, we wanted to combine our experience of animation filmmakers and our love for live performance, its temporality and its ability to evolve, to excel, to renew itself.
We first developed the idea of creating an "instrument" for playing digital moving images in an orchestra, a group of musicians or actors, dancers ... We quickly questioned the structural role of such an instrument, and then we focused on collective improvisation. We imagined a vocabulary of animated signs which can be used to conduct improvisers through the expression of visual rhythms, variations in size, color, movement in space of an animation loopset. We think that animation films can be designed and built for this purpose, and its offers the possibility to conduct orchestras using instinctive materials, images, representations, atmospheres ...
We first tested a basic device with musicians in residence (see video PA_residence.mp4). Its allowed us to see that this language provides a direct and instinctive approach to music, where each improviser finds personally very free to interpret the images while maintaining a high level of listening. The conductor would build its "scenarios" according to the interpretation by the musicians.
We consider two development directions of the Animated Score project : Firstly we want to design a motion-music language and a numerical tool (software and hardware) which offers ability and assistance to conduct and compose with this language. Precisely we’ll manage the design of a sign alphabet and develop a composition assistant device using IA processes. This direction is our purpose for this residency.
Secondly we want to collaborate with various improvisators, musicians, comedians, in order to create several performative forms. We started yet to collaborate with an animation studio and a performing art compagny in order to find opportunities to develop the Animated Score project for orchestras, chamber ensembles, jazz improvisers, comedians, or to make workshops in music and fine art schools.
description :
Somewhere between animation, digital creation and performing arts, the Animated Score project is primarily a tool for improvisation. It is a language of signs, universal and sensitive, allowing real-time composition for musicians, actors and all types of improvisers.
Signs can be read and interpreted : The Animated Score is a tool for directed improvisation. It consists of a library of motions samples, animated in a traditional 2d drawing, played looped. The score is managed in real time by an conductor trough a digital interface designed to combine motion samples and compose a graphic movement, readable by improvisers. The conductor can use a large panel of signs which can be matched in an wide diversity of sentences. We purpose to make a global language detached from classical music theory or improvising stuff.
These sequences are projected into a multi screen set . Each improviser can follow the part that is intended for it while keeping an eye on the others.
This device questions the large meaning of interaction : interaction between musicians and graphic forms, musicians together, music and graphic composition…
The software can be described first as a dynamic real-time compositing software adapted to animated film, with , allowing light management. It is accompanied by a sound analysis software and gesture enabling the transformation in real time of the partition by feedback effect and a composition assistant device (see above for details).
The graphic language mix artistic expression, readability and combinatorial and narrative possibilities.
For the whole project we started to use the concept of UST (Temporal Semiotic Units) as a structural foundation. UST offers 19 basic units that can describe any type of « movement » in any artistic expression, as well music and animation, then for us it seems to be a perfect way to mix music and motion in a same language (see video PA_recherches.mp4).
The U.S.T. :
Research on Temporal Semiotic Units (U.S.T.) began in 1992 under the direction of François Delalande and followed by the MIM Marseille and researchers Philippe Bootz and Xavier Hautbois. The U.S.T. are sound pattern with musical meaning is expressed in time. They are thought of as analytical tools:
It is generic enough to provide analytical elements to be used (...) that the laboratory Music and Computer Marseille (MIM) has developed what it calls Temporal Semiotic Units (UST)
The model U.S.T. is an open system in the state of research, which can be supplemented and enriched. There’s 19 U.S.T. :
• Fall • Contracted-Expanded • Impulse • Stretching • Braking • Wandering • In Suspension
• In floating • Heaviness • Obsessive • Waving • Turning • Who wants to start • Without direction : information divergence • Without direction : information overload • Stationary • Inexorable trajectory • Suspended
U.S.T. can serve as tools for reading and composition, improvisation structure, nodal alphabet.