Norm

‘Norm’ is inspired by the pioneering optical sound animation of Scottish-Canadian animator Norman McLaren, whose visual music film ‘Synchromy’ (1971) perfectly synchronises image and sound by using optical techniques to compose the soundtrack directly onto the filmstrip. In ‘Norm’, the image also functions as an optical soundtrack, but the concept is revisited with digital tools. Abstract shapes in motion become sound, as various lens and monitor test charts are animated across seven chapters to create intense visual hallucinations and a wide range of hypnotic sounds. What you hear is what you see. Everything you see is also heard.

In this film, pre-existing test charts and test patterns were animated with Adobe After Effects in different ways to create abstract animated sequences. The sound is generated by "reading" the entire image as an optical soundtrack with AEO-Light 2, an open-source software that extracts audio from optical soundtracks of motion picture film. In the context of experimental animation, this tool can be reappropriated to read digital animation frames in the same way it would read an optical soundtrack. It is important to note that, as a film sound restoration tool, AEO-Light does not rely on any kind of arbitrary digital cross-modal mapping of image to sound but corresponds exactly to the way in which analogue optical sound is created. As such, the analogue optical sound principle is honoured but translated to the digital domain.