Music for King Kong

The class split up into separate groups after watching part of the 'sacrifice' scene in the movie King Kong to compose our own film music. Some of the instruments we used to create our piece were the xylophone, glockenspiel, piano, a 'cabassa' shaker and an animal skin drum.
 Our original piece of music started off at a thin texture with the glockenspiel, then slowly built up, adding to the texture, dynamics and pitch with more instruments joining in, then slowly fading out again at the end. Although, when recording, the role of the drums wasn't decided enough, and so the beat was uneven and unsteady, therefore confusing the whole group. The fact  that the recording device picked up the sounds of other groups practicing their music in the background too loudly was also something that messed up our entire piece.
So, what we did to solve this problem was that we would re-record our piece later on - however, since the rest of the group were happy with what we already had, me and my partner Almira decided to record the different parts of the instruments on the software 'Mixcraft' and used the skills we learnt for this program last year to layer the different instrument tracks into one piece. We kept the same ostinato as last time (A, E, A, D) and added chords to it as well. We also had a drone in the background of the note A using a bass guitar as the instrument. We used the same technique as last time, where the piece starts with a thin texture, with just the xylophone playing the ostinato and then the bass guitar drones joined in along with the piano chords consecutively. Since we were only two people working on the project and we had very limited time to complete the piece, we decided to leave out the complicated parts of the drum and the shaker, and kept the instrumentation simple and quick.
When playing it back, I feel that one of our strong points was that the ostinato we played had a haunted kind of feel to it, and therefore fit well with the fact that there was a horror component to the film, although we could have improved if there were drums, as this would go well with the whole 'sacrifice' part of the scene, and it would have been more like a tribal kind of horror rather than what I feel is now a melancholy kind of horror. I think that if maybe the video had been slower, it would have suited the video better - although, the music does fit better than expected beforehand!  I also felt that the whole thing sounded very rushed, and had a very abrupt ending so we could have extended the piece a bit longer, although we ran out of time before we could improve while making the actual recording - in conclusion, the lesson I have to learn from this is: time management is CRUCIAL!

Introduction to Film Music

So far this term in Music, our class has focused on how film music and theme songs are composed. We started off by learning the various components of music along with a few key terms:

• Dynamics - how loud or soft a piece of music is, and to describe it getting gradually louder, we use the italian term 'crescendo', and to describe it getting gradually softer, we use either 'decrescendo' or 'minnuendo'. The softest a piece of music can be is 'pianissimo' and the loudest is 'fortissimo'
• Tempo - the tempo of a piece of music is its speed, how slow or fast it it is. To describe something that increases in tempo, we use the term 'accelerando'.
• Texture - the texture of a piece of music is basically how many sounds you hear at once - if there is only one sound or instrument playing, it is described as a 'thin' texture, while if the music is very concentrated and has many sounds going on at once, (for example: an orchestra), we say that it has a 'thick' texture.
• Instrumentation - this is actually a very simple term, it is basically what instrument(s) you hear playing in the song.
• Pitch - how high or low a note or set of notes is in the music you hear, you can use this to help describe a song's instrumentation. For example, if the music is very low pitched, then it probably means that the instruments used were bass instruments.

We also learnt some terminology that helped describe the actual tune of the music playing, like:

• Ostinato - a simple, repetitive usually four-note tun that plays in the background all the way throughout the piece. It plays a huge role in setting the tone of the song and also helps maintain the beat 
• Drone - a drone is a bass note that is also played repetitively in the background, with the notes long and dragged out. It helps make sure that the rest of the piece is played in the correct scale. Since most drones are very low-pitched, they add a dark and haunted effect to the song by underlying the music

After we learnt all of this, we used our new knowledge to help us analyse and produce film music. As a class, we watched a scene from the movie King Kong - our task was to create a short piece of backing music to play over the video on mute. We all took different instruments and successfully created appropriate music for the film by starting of with a thin texture at a low pitch and building it up, also raising the dynamics in a crescendo and accelerating the tempo as well. We then gradually faded everything out towards the end of the clip, and kept the whole thing moderately low pitched to add to the eerie effect of the scene at hand. After that, it was time to compose our own music...