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SYNCHRONICITY AND VISUAL MUSIC A Senior Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Department of Music Business, Entrepreneurship and Technology The University of the Arts In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of BACHELOR OF SCIENCE By Zarek Rubin May 9, 2019 Rubin 1 Music and visuals have an integral relationship that cannot be broken. The relationship is evident when album artwork, album packaging, and music videos still exist. For most individuals, music videos and album artwork fulfill the listener’s imagination, concept, and perception of a finished music product. For other individuals, the visuals may distract or ruin the imagination of the listener. Listening to music on an album is like reading a novel. The audience builds their own imagination from the work, but any visuals such as the novel cover to media adaptations can ruin the preexisted vision the audience possesses. Despite the audience’s imagination, music can be visualized in different forms of visual media and it can fulfill the listener’s imagination in a different context. Listeners get introduced to new music in film, television, advertisement, film trailers, and video games. Content creators on YouTube introduce a song or playlist with visuals they edit themselves. The content creators credit the music artist in the description of the video and music fans listen to the music through the links provided. The YouTube channel, “ChilledCow”, synchronizes Lo-Fi hip hop music to a gif of a girl studying from the 2012 anime film, Wolf Children. These videos are a new form of radio on the internet. Music Artists release new music as a visual package in recent years known as a “visual album”. Frank Ocean’s Endless and Beyoncé’s self-titled album are examples of visual albums. Visual and musical synchronicity has existed between the silent film era to the contemporary digital age. The process of synchronizing pre-existing media to music serves as an example of visual music and the concept of a visual album produces an effect on the listener, viewer, and music market. The idea of “synchronicity” was introduced by the renown analytical psychologist, Carl Jung. Jung defines the concept of synchronicity as, “temporally coincident occurrences of Rubin 2 acausal events” or in other words, a “meaningful coincidence”. Dr. Bernard Beitman, the founder of coincidence studies, explains Jung’s concept of synchronicity and breaks down the word itself as he writes, “He invented the word synchronicity from the Greek syn—with, together— and chronos—time’ Synchronicity means moving-together-in-time. Its fundamental characteristic is the surprise that occurs when a thought in the mind is mirrored by an external event to which it has no apparent causal connection”. Jung developed the concept of synchronicity in the 1920s, but he did not introduce the concept in detail until he gave a full statement in 1951. The examples Jung provided were related to peculiar events such as telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, poltergeists, apparitions, divination, and astrology (Beitman). Jung’s examples of synchronicity did not relate to visual and audio media. Whether Jung realized it or not, his definition of synchronicity, as it pertains to unrelated events moving together in time, sounds like the concept of playing music to a moving visual. The earliest instance of music synchronization with film in early cinema is the introduction of the Phonoscène. The Phonoscène was the first form of music videos. The Phonoscène mimicked sound moving with film and it pre-dated the first motion picture with sound, The Jazz Singer, by twenty-five years. Léon Gaumont presented the first Phonoscènes in 1902 in France and presented the last Phonoscène at the Gaumont Palace in 1917 in Hammersmith, London, United Kingdom. The Phonoscène involved the use of a chronophone. The chronophone is a device that allows a filmmaker to synchronize their camera to a disc phonograph. The chronophone works with a switchboard. Léon Gaumont patented the chronophone in 1902 and the United States developed a rival version of the device called a “cameraphone”. Phonoscène screenings and the chronophone were also the earliest examples of Rubin 3 creating content, editing film with music, distributing it to a large audience, and entertaining people with visuals less than a hundred years before the digital age. One of the first film directors to utilize a chronophone is a French woman named, Alice Guy-Blaché. Not only was Blaché the first film director to utilize a choronophone, but she was also the first female film director, first female film studio owner, and the first narrative film director. Blaché started her career with Gaumont in France before she opened Solax Studios at Fort Lee, New Jersey in 1910. Alison McMahan, the author who wrote about Alice Guy- Blaché’s biography in 1997, writes, “…by 1906 Alice had directed over 150 films for that system. The sound was recorded first and the image then filmed in sync with the sound afterwards”. Blaché innovated many other techniques in the film industry. Blaché separated the role of the film director and the director of photography since she was not able to operate a camera herself. Blaché also developed the process of color tinting film, filming on-location, utilizing special effects, using the close-up shot, casting an all-black cast, and focusing on the journey of the lead character. Blanché was a pioneer in the film industry and she would not have normalized music synchronization for video editors without her use of the chornophone. By 1917, the chronophone died out because filmmakers did not take full advantage of the technology and by the 1920s, more film studios used the Vitaphone system. The Vitaphone system is like the chronophone because filmmakers can synchronize recorded audio to film, but the Vitaphone system was the last system to use the sound-on-disc system with a phonograph. Warner Bros. was one of the first film studios to release films and animations that utilize the Vitaphone system until 1961. Warner Bros. produced The Jazz Singer in 1927 and the Loony Tunes after the 1930s which both utilize the Vitaphone system. The Vitaphone system stands the Rubin 4 test of time as another improvement to modern video editing, sound improvement, and the art of sound mimicking actions portrayed on screen. Walt Disney Studios developed a technique that was often utilized between the late 1920s until the 1940s. The technique is called “Mickey Mousing” and it is the ability to sync accompanying music to the actions portrayed on screen. Lea Jacobs also writes that Mickey Mousing is the musical imitation of physical movement like when a glissando note plays the same time a cartoon character slides down a rope (58). The term was coined from Steamboat Willie, the first Disney cartoon to include synchronized sound. Mickey Mousing was a common technique for not only Disney but other animated studios because there were fewer difficulties and less emphasis on recorded human speech. Live voice actors were not available and it would have been more challenging for animators to draw lip movements to dialogue. Early animators also viewed that sound within a film is more “constructed” or “synthesized” rather than recorded. More resources and time were spent on creating a narrative with music to accompany the animation. This technique builds more engagement from viewers. Before sound and recording technology advanced, animation studios like Disney synchronized combinations of music, effects, and speech in single takes during post-production. All decisions concerning tempo, rhythm, and other musical techniques were made during the pre-production of silent-film animations. Over time, Mickey Mousing has become melodramatic among the animation industry, but the technique has evolved in film and video games. Mickey Mousing is also an important technique in visual music. Visual music is defined as, “A visualization of music which is the translation of a specific musical composition (or sound) into a visual language, with the original syntax being emulated Rubin 5 in the new visual rendition. This can be done with or without a computer. This can also be defined as intermedia” (Keefer 84). Historical figures such as Pythagoras, Aristotle, and Isaac Newton developed the concept of visual music which involves the color spectrum, music, sound, and light. These core elements in visual music play vital roles in film, animation, and digital video. Visual music by the 20th century was presented through abstract animation. Abstract animators such as Jordan Belson, Stan Brakhage, and Norman McLaren have made important contributions to the art form, but the most important figure in abstract animation is Oskar Fischinger. Fischinger synchronized music to color abstract films and animations between the 1930s to the 1940s. Fischinger also worked on oil paintings and television commercials. Fischinger’s animations typically display shapes that float around on the screen and the shapes move rhythmically to the music. The music is pre-recorded and it consists of orchestral covers of classical music. Fischinger worked for Paramount, Disney, and MGM studios; however, he did not gain any success in those studios. Fischinger’s work in abstract animation broke the rules. Fischinger did not need to create a narrative or have voice actors record lines; instead, he created an aesthetic that inspired people to enforce music with visuals as a package. Film studios have used and appropriated the work of animators like Fischinger, John Whitney Sr., and Jordan Belson for films such as Fantasia, Vertigo, and The Right Stuff respectively. Fischinger did not work on Fantasia directly. Instead, Disney animators were influenced by Fischinger to create abstract animation during the scene featuring Jean-Sebastian Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor”. Not only was Fischinger’s work not used, but he did not want to be credited in the film.

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