Storytelling Through Composition
By: Dale Messer
When planning what my final project for this course could be I wanted to do something that incorporated a skill of mine outside of the scope of music and create something unique as many in previous classes have clearly done on the website. What I had ended up doing was combining the compositional skills I learned in this class and others and my storytelling mind from my English classes and hobbies to create a musical piece that tells a sort of story without words but relies on the listener’s imagination and interpretation of the piece. I explain in greater detail in the video of me playing the piece and later talking about what I did, however a brief overview is the song is intended to sound like someone switching through their television and as they do so they go through several motifs and timbres that sound like various styles of tv show intros by genre. As they go through the channels though, they eventually start to hear the same melody bleeding into each different “channel” and as the piece progresses this gets more and more common until the last channel where every show has bled into one another and are all playing the main motif all together and the television is turned off. I wanted to see if I could convey this narrative through the music itself so that it could be understood to some degree without an explanation and after asking some of my peers over the final days of production, I am pleased that those I have polled usually grasp what I was going for to some degree.
Before starting this project, I had modest composing skills and experience with DAWs, and as the course progressed both skills were strengthened both through practice and through new learned techniques in our lessons and readings. For this project I had to learn how to articulate my thoughts and ideas for a narrative in the media of music, something which I have tried in the past but worked much better here than it had before. I also learned several new audio editing techniques and facts about spatialization that I attempted to apply in my mixing process.
The final deliverable for this project is my 5-minute musical composition along with a video explaining my idea for the narrative in more specific terms and highlighting important details in the design process. I think this project’s intended audience is those who grew disillusioned at some point in endless channel surfing looking for something to watch at some point in their life only to realize how similar all that is on cable television can be, and this causing them to seek other forms of entertainment.