MUSICOSMICA – A Journey into the Universe of MusicAn animated fairy tale “for children of all ages”Opus 12 2024, 2K, colour, 26'10" VR Version 8K, 5 parts: Part 1 – Chaos – Stardust 7'22" (long version 9'36") CREDITSIdea, story, objects, script, animation, stop motion camera, editing, voices and direction: Iby-Jolande Varga >Music composed and orchestrated by Stephen Ferguson > ANIMATION TECHNIQUESStop motion, object and puppet animation, painted animation, 360° photography, digital montageSHORT TEXT (unter 200 l.)MUSICOSMICA – A Journey into the Universe of Music. An animated fairy tale “for children of all ages” and a love story taking place in the enigmatic realm of music theory.SHORT TEXT (300 l.)Little Edna Loy loves to drift through the big wide world on her flying oasis with the sphere house on top. One day she gets a sounding cosmic gift and as soon as she tries it, it turns into a little piano planet and takes her away into the musical universe. There she will find her star friend ...STORY PERSONAL STATEMENT DIDAKTIC MOTIVATION STORYThe little girl Edna Loy drifts through the big world in her little world and is given a pianino in a cloud of balloons. With her first plink, it turns into a little pianino planet and she is whisked away with it into the Musical Universe.Now begins an adventurous journey through five worlds of music, in each world Edna Loy is presented with a symbolic gift by the musical beings who dwell there. In the first journey CHAOS, a bizarre world of objects, like a spatial score, emerges from her tinkling, representing the elementary state of music-making. Here Edna Loy is presented with the symbol STARDUST. In the second journey, ORDER, she enters a world of symmetries, mathematical ratios and regularities; a galaxy of musical celestial bodies - of intervals, circles of fifths and networks of tones, which she playfully explores without knowing their meaning. Here Edna Loy gets the symbol of a human FIGURE, which now brings the stardust from the first journey into a solid human form. In the third journey, RHYTHM, she encounters the dangerous tempo objects, the great intertwined rhythms of the world in creation and perishing, and the dancing bars of the 3s and 4s. Here Edna Loy is given a HEART symbol and the stardust figure begins to live and becomes her Musical Star Friend. The fourth journey, SOUNDS, takes Edna Loy into the forest of sounds; together with her star friend, she awakens the sounds of nature and civilization to a deafening concert. Here she gets an EAR and her star friend begins to hear. In the fifth journey, to the temple of the MELODY, to which she ascends the steps of the scale together with her star friend, Edna Loy gets a MOUTH symbol and she can communicate with him from now on… PERSONAL STATEMENT”BACKGROUNDMUSICOSMICA is the new title for one of my oldest music game and animation film projects. At the turn of the millennium, when I and my colleagues became enthusiastic about the new interactive possibilities for music, a small music game experiment was created with the title 'A Little Cosmology of Music'. What was already clear at that time were the titles for the 5 journeys of this 'journey into the musical universe', CHAOS, ORDER, RHYTHM, NOISE and MELODY. Although these titles seem very music-theoretical, the story is a very personal one and has to do with my background as a musician. It is inspired by experiences with the mysterious world of music, which is abstract and yet so concretely connected to all aspects of life. The story begins with a little girl being given a piano as a gift and being transported into the musical universe with her very first attempts at tinkling. Accordingly, she first has to survive a journey into chaos and other musical adventures in order to win a musical star friend … REALIZATION In the last few years, I have created all the ‘celestial bodies’ for this world, a total of about 200 objects, ranging from freely invented to 3-dimensional visualisations of musical phenomena. There are common ideas for the design of a circle of fifths, for example, as well as objects I developed myself, e.g. for sine curves, intervals, tempo, time signatures or the melody, but also artistic implementations of more complex musical-theoretical findings that are otherwise only found in mathematical-geometric 3D visualisations of music theory. The puppets were built in recent years with professional stop-motion armatures, with ball joints and a special design of the bodies. Photos of the process can be found in the online production diary on my website. MUSIC As a first step towards the realisation of the animated film, an animatic (a film sketch) was created from the storyboard as the basis for a musical composition by Stephen Ferguson: producing a music-related film with pre-composed music seemed obvious, even more specific for sequences in which the characters play music and interact with the musical 'celestial bodies'. Here the composer's improvisations provided the template for the stop-motion animation. After the completion of the film, Stephen Ferguson comprehensively developed, supplemented and orchestrated the composition, spanning it with a thematic arc. Some sections of the animation were animated to the finished music in a final step. DIDAKTIC MOTIVATIONEven as a child I found it strange that there were fun and colourful books and teaching materials for almost all subjects, even for abstract ones like mathematics, but not for the field of music. At the same time as MUSICOSMICA was being developed, extensive research on this topic was also taking place in connection with other, explicitly didactic projects. These researches too were largely disappointing. Although MUSICOSMICA is not conceived as a didactic project, the idea resonated during its development that the colourful 'celestial bodies' of music theory and other allusive themes might arouse a young audience's curiosity about what might lie behind these worlds."Iby-Jolande Varga 2023
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