I’m messing around with event driven musical scores for comics; you mouse over the panel and you hear a snippet of music appropriate for that panel. Just a sketch to see if I can get it to work in principal.
Hypercomic Sketch: Music Comic
August 5, 2008 · 1 Comment
Categories: Our stuff · Theory
Tagged: hypercomic, music
1 response so far ↓
tymmi // August 6, 2008 at 2:51 am |
I like what you’re going for here. You may know that I’ve given some thought to the theory side of fusing comics and music. Wrote a couple articles even (most notably: http://comixtalk.com/index.php?q=node/7350)
I think the combination has possibilities, but it’s been a pretty clumsy mashup so far. I think it boils down to comics reading being an active engagement and music listening a more passive one.
I like the forced interaction of the two elements you hint at in your sketch – not sure how well it’ll work out, but I’m really glad you’re trying this.
Now, my two cents:
The “event driven” part you mention is gonna be pretty important for any workable combination of comics and music. *but* there’re gonna be some serious limitations of one or the other for a seamless integration. If you synch the images to the music you get animation, or at least a “slide show” effect. If you tie the soundtrack to a specific reader cue – such as your rollover here – the reader either modifies their pacing (which, apparently, people REALLY HATE to do) or your soundtrack is clipped, from event to event (panel to panel, in this case).
I do think an event driven soundtrack can be implemented, keeping the reader-defined pacing AND less noticeable seams in the soundtrack only if a lot of what would be traditional song structure is disregarded. What I mean is: a “seamless” event driven soundtrack would have to be more along the lines of ambient sound cues than a traditionally scored piece of music. Rollover would work but, personally, I like the click through approach. Some hypercomic-y stuff is displayed one panel at a time, like Tarquin comics or some of my own IC stuff. The “click-for-next” cue could trigger the next part of the score as well as the next image.
Music could also be tied to scenes rather than single panels and a more traditional comics-layout structure would be maintained, too.
Rollovers work in a more interactive/exploratory way than the click-through (a standard reading action for any fan of existing webcomics) making them a less comfortable fit into the reading experience.
Of course making a reader less comfortable with the reading experience isn’t always a bad thing, in the end…