I'm pretty into sound design. It's amazing how, with society embracing digital audio interfaces and mediums, we can transform sound in any way imaginable. Morphing any waveform into something entirely different by changing its shape opens up endless possibilities. We can craft diverse soundscapes and atmospheric effects, or even just get a consistent guitar sound that never goes out of tune. Along with this, we've seen the recent rise of deepfake AI voices, where anyone equipped with the right tools can train software to mimic someone else's voice.

I've developed a good familiarity with using DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) in my spare time. It all started with a year of experimenting with FL Studio, and I've now spent almost two years getting to grips with the more advanced DAW, Ableton Live. Collaborating with another audio technician or designer really excites me, as it would open up opportunities for larger and more polished audio and animation projects, making them seem more within reach. For the current project, though, our musician will be the one deciding on the audio.

When this brief about collaboration in audio for animation came up, I already had ideas about the genre or tempo that would suit my animation style. I'm leaning towards high-tempo sounds, like Drum and Bass or Dubstep, for that edgy vibe. Most of my animations lean towards sci-fi, and I think these modern music genres really call for abstract or sci-fi visuals to match.

Synergising the timing between audio and video senses can assist at forming a cohesive animated piece of music. An example would be visual shapes colliding upon impact when sounds such as loud fast impacts occur, like maybe a crash symbol of a kick of a drum or just a spike in volume.
I find animation is often about recreating and injecting life into stillness. life consists of many senses and to recreate a realistic and complete representation of aspects of reality its often benefitial to include as much information to our senses as possible, animation with muted audio is often dry and can loose context, especially in film production.

If I had to categorize and state a few favorites:

Liquid/Neuro/Jump-up/Jungle Drum and Bass.
Melodic Dubstep.
House.
Garage.

Star Wars:

I feel the sound designers for Star Wars have not only been responsible for a huge part of its success but its also a major contributor to the immersiveness of the movies. Drawing sounds for future landscapes and atmospheres is a challenging area as we have to imagine what certain sounds may sound like in the future, all the way from spaceships flying at full throttle, to the sounds of lightsabers activating.
I think Ben Burrt deserves praise for his imaginative sound design throughout the Star Wars trilogies.

www.youtube.com. (n.d.). Hi This Is Flume [Mixtape Visualiser]. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TML_MTQdg4&t=697s [Accessed 13 Apr. 2024].

To mention some other notable inspirations for creative music visuals i would say have insipred my project are these unique videos:

I have found out from making this project that good planning is required to execute detailed and hyperrealistic animation within Maya. I was slightly put down at the rendering potential witin maya, for parts of this project i heavily considered transfering to Unreal Engine to use their render as it runs so much more efficiently. unfortunately bounded by the Arnold inbuilt denoiser imager; Noice, which was almost 20 times slower at rendering than Nvidia's default denoiser, but was the only one that comes with Maya that works across multiple rendered images within a sequence, which is crucial for creating coherent blending between frames and reducing pixel flickering.
This process of having to go back and forth rendering images to calculate how many frames i would need to spend time rendering.
Let's say 1 image frame takes 1 minute to render with realistic lighting, and you want a 60fps animation; that's 1 hour of rendering for only 1 second of your animation. so for a 2-minute video it would take 120 hours, which is a ridiculous amount of time. so I had to rethink how my visuals were displayed and created multiple times, as all of it was lighting-based, so required lots of light ray bounces, and plenty of reflections.

Part of primary research involves exploration.  And I feel one who wants to do reasearch in this area, may go to music events- containing displays and visualisations to help get a better grip or understanding on what aspects other creators and listeners prefer or suit better alongside audio various tracks.
My primary research here involves first hand experience with music festivals and clubbing events from Ministry of Sound to Electricity Festival. These places need coherant and complimentary visuals to go alongside the audio at these places to keep the vibe going using visuals as a catalyst with the music and make them 'feel' it more. I also enjoyed doing my research as it creates a great oppotunity to find likeminded individuals.

I feel I would have to give credit to the Ministry of Sound for the unique and also iconic logo, recognised by many. Which although i did not use it as a reference when creating my disco ball and diamond rings. I feel I could be subconsciously replicating aspects of these visuals I have seen previously at events, and gradually moving towards these types of visuals that fit the dancy housey music.
Many of people I have showed and asked for feedback were quick to state it reminded them of the Ministry of Sound logo with the iconic rings around the disco ball. but to my surprise they aren't even full rings as I remembered they were two crests with words on either side of the disco ball shown here. In my opinion, the Ministry of Sound have done a great job of creating an iconic and recognisable logo helpful for identifying their brand and the only real similarity here to mine is that there's a disco ball.

I've delved through many different tutorials online to get a better grip on how you control and manipulate particles from simulations.
The following tutorials serve as great steps to understanding the technical aspects and the different mediums that MASH Nodes can be used for.
Understanding motion trails and reflections and emission is where i would say most of the care needs to take place when making flashy music visuals.
I feel this is due to the repetative nature of reverb, echo and delay effects that are frequently used on modern music, these effects when visualised often stem away from simple blocky shapes and fall into more nuanced detailed aspects of animation which you have to me more delicate with as each attribute may be connected to not one, but multiple shapes so would require much more precition and trial and error when dialling in the numbers through the attribute editor to control the array of flickering lights or vibrating particle systems.

Here is a great tutorial from T J Cousler on YouTube, who explains how to arrange your simulated points. And another video tutorial from Pogo Motion who goes more in-depth with the actual sound linking. 

www.youtube.com. (n.d.). Sound Visualization Workflow in After Effects and Maya. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFGNShzvY_U&t=1100s.

www.youtube.com. (n.d.). MASH Audio Node - Maya Tutorial. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-NvAO7b5K0&t=773s [Accessed 13 Apr. 2024].