Japurá River
Japurá River (2013) is an original thirty second animation for Mike Patterson's Visual Music class in the USC Department of Animation and Digital Arts. The music is performed by Uakti and composed by Philip Glass.
This project started as an assignment to create a visual score; a still image that visually represented the structure and character of a piece of music. I chose Japurá River, a piece that had really interesting polyrhythms that I thought would be fun to illustrate. Later in the semester, we had to create a thirty second visual music animation, so I decided to keep going and make my visual score move.
I created the original image by manually programming Philip Glass' minimalist composition into a Processing script, and writing a program that would draw the composition according to a set of rules.
For the animation, I extended those rules so that the image would be progressively drawn based on the current frame's position in music time. I then rendered out every frame into an image sequence and combined it with the music for the final video.