To facilitate my editing and also bring creative solution, I completed a few weeks ago a song map. This is rather simple:
I asked in December the musician to give me separate tracks for each elements he used in his song. I did this in case I was planning to synchronize some visual elements to some specific instruments (the singer voice for instance could interact by vibrating or scaling up and down some visuals through its intensity). The interesting part I noticed about it when i opened the tracks in Logic Pro is that they also have blanks, making noticeable for instance, where the guitar is playing and where it is not.
The idea of the map appears during production, when i was struggling about seeing where are the key moments of the song. I felt that track soundwave was uninspiring and left only a few noticeable spots. Therefore I opted for a system where every instruments could be displayed, facilitating the visualization of the track.
I didn’t want to do a simple screenshot of my timeline in Logic, as the quality would be too low for printing in big size, i looked on internet for an application that could export the soundwave visual into vector. After a few minutes, i found an obscure application named Praat, an application for phonetics… but with a great magical option nowhere to be seen: exporting the sounwave into an eps file!
From that I could work in Adobe Ilustrator, change the colors remove the unnecessary attributes given by Praat and combining all into one file! Voila!
This greatly helped me during my editing mostly, where i could visualize the lyrics in its context, also to decide when to change from shot to shot.
I also did a video version of the file. So i could visualize directly in Premiere pro or after effects how the music is changing. To create the animated bars, i created an expression in after affects to link the size of each bar to the intensity of each instrument.
Slowreverse Track analysis from Freelenser on Vimeo.
On the right side is one of my first draft of visual representation. I constantly needed to listen the music to place the main elements on the soundwave. I realize i could work much faster with each elements separated…