Senior Projects 2014 have run the gamut from customizing a motorcycle to dance choreography to shadowing teachers and public health officials. I wanted to share the award winning project with you: Silent Film Scoring by Renee Chen'14.
Renee wrote original music to accompany Charlie Chaplin's movie "The Kid." She shared that these silent films were aired in theaters with live orchestras, so there was indeed sound. She was intrigued with the idea of composing her own versions of the stories through music. Before you enjoy the clips, please read Renee's abstract of her project below.
Silent Film Scoring By Renee Chen '14
I had watched the same fifteen seconds of clip fifty-eight times. I played some random notes that came across my mind, wrote down several measures, played them, and then hit the delete button. There were many moments like this over the past seven weeks of my senior project. But there were also times when I had flashes of inspiration. I could hear a theme in my mind, and had to quickly play it out on the keyboard to record it, so that I could expand upon it later.
Composing is abstract. If the process could be explained in any language, it would be science instead of music. Notwithstanding, the tool that I used was high technology – Finale 2012. This computer software allows one to write down notes. It offers tools that can add details such as expressions and articulations to the score. It can playback the music and adjust the volume of each instrument in a mixer. Most importantly, it has a function that synchronizes the music with a selected video.
After researching silent films and composers for contemporary film scores, I decided to compose three clips from Charlie Chaplin’s "The Kid." As I started composing, I found that film scoring is much more challenging than composing original songs, because it is restricted by the film in many aspects. Before writing any notes down, I selected the instruments according to the characters and emotions in the film. For example, I chose xylophone to match the child’s footsteps. To make the music more orchestral, I had to select an ensemble of instruments. I found composing different parts for ten instruments and making them sound harmonious is harder than composing ten separate pop songs. I used many techniques I learned in the process, such as leitmotif and different modulations for key changes. After I finished composing, I had a hard time trying to match the music produced by Finale with the music in my mind. Finale is very powerful software, but all it does is to make the sound of certain frequencies, there is no emotion to it. I worked hard to make the score as detailed as possible to make it closer to perfection. I hope you will enjoy my music!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries?list=PLZwwkQh2GbyPJiDCj4TdXgQaTJQLjMMDn&w=560&h=315]
