This analysis focuses on generating audio signals to existing imagery, where the main outcome is the synchronisation of sound and image with the audio material recorded on tape. It is the computer that became the main tool for creating this ‘media hybrid’, though some of the building blocks used are man-made art objects. The inspiration behind this visual music type of composition was a cycle of graphic works by Jacek Papla arranged in four pictures: 1. Runes, 2. Spheres of sensitivity, 3. Votive offerings, 4. Marks.
The subject selected for analysis in this article is the composition Paplanina. Four serigraphies for tape (2017) by the Polish composer Katarzyna Kwiecień-Długosz. In this work, a certain intermedia score is being created as an outcome of the structural musical-visual filiations 1. The composition is a music installation in which the audience follows both the musical layer (tape) and the visual layer.
No physical score exists for this piece; the recording of the audio and video events is a type of animated or visual score unfolding in time, in which the phenomenon of intermediality is present.
The analysis has shown that the perception of different audio phenomena is the main cohesive force behind this composition. In the course of time, the composer manipulates the audio events and the graphics, which in themselves are not animated, the only element of animation being the changing of particular graphics within the framework of the musical form continuum. As a result, a temporal visualisation is created whose elements evolve in time similarly to the elements of music in a musical work. The timbral impulse becomes the absolute synchronization point 2 of the two media. Here we deal with the so-called abstract animation based on human perception and emotions.
The graphics by Papla carry hidden symbolic meanings that were deciphered by the composer.
In the short piece Marks composed to three graphic works portraying different shapes of roofs with windows, Katarzyna Kwiecień-Długosz, already in the title, suggests the audience the presence of symbols that appear in this work as a message. The superordinate symbol is the number 3, which alludes to the three graphics used in the short piece, three shapes of windows (circle, triangle and square), three different roof types, the ABA’ ternary form, the dominant width of the interval of a third. The number three symbolises God, sacrum, harmony and heaven. The triangular window in one of the graphic works comes from the roof of the cathedral in Budapest, which is what the composer intuitively connected with Christian symbolism. For the finale of the piece, against the background of the triangular window with a red light, the composer quotes the voice of her husband’s grandmother (Anna Lorkowska) singing a verse from the Polish Christmas carol Z Narodzenia Pana (Skąd ta łuna bije, tak miła oku…). The use of the previously recorded human voice (grandmother) was the inspiration for the composer, as worded by the Polish composer Eugeniusz Rudnik, ‘God is hidden in the human voice’ 3.
The large-scale structure of the movements of Marks is built around the changes of both the musical material and the projection of the three graphics (Mark 1, Mark 2, Mark 3). The caesurae between particular phases are clear-cut; such division being presented by the time-dynamics representation of the work’s audio recording (sonogram) and by its time-frequency representation (spectrogram). see Figure 1. In the A’ phase, the composer used all the three graphic works, which she introduces synchronously with the change of the musical material:
Phase A (0’00” – 1’45”): Mark 1
Phase B (1’45” – 2’59”): Mark 2
Phase A’ (3’00” – 5’07”): Mark 3 (3’00” – 3’41”); Mark 1 (3’42” – 3’57”); Mark 2 (3’58” – 4’34”); Mark 3 (4’35” – 5’07”).

Figure 1. K. Kwiecień-Długosz, Paplanina. Four serigraphies for tape, Marks. A sonogram and a spectrogram (the division of the large-scale structure)

In this movement of the piece, the composer used sounds produced by traditional instruments, i.e. the church organ of a Bavarian monastery, percussion instruments (bongos, drums, Vietnam gong), as well as from the phonosphere and the sonosphere, i.e. the sound of swallows recorded in Dubrovnik (Croatia) and of a children’s music box. Importantly, while creating the tape part, the composer drew inspiration from a technique based on pre-recorded ‘clippings, shreds of sounds and timbral waste’ typical of Eugeniusz Rudnik (the first electro-acoustic music producer in Poland, who worked for the Experimental Studio of the Polish Radio). The bulk of the material used in this composition thus came from archival recordings. Those audio signals became raw material for creating the work, processed and generated with the audio software Cubase and Audacity.
The completed work is a hybrid artistic discourse that conveys a new message and a new aesthetic quality

Video 1. K. Kwiecień-Długosz, Paplanina. Four serigraphies for tape, Marks. (graphics: Jacek Papla), visualisations: Faculty of Arts of the University of Zielona Góra, 2017

The first movement of the composition Runes was arranged as Soliloquium for solo cello and tape, becoming an inspiration for creating a live performance. The intermedia project Soliloquium is the outcome of the collaborative work of the composer, choreographer, graphic designer, set designer and animator, presented during the GENERATIVE ART 2019 (National Etruscan Museum, at Villa Giulia in the centre of Rome) (see Video 2). In effect, a media hybrid was created that required creative endeavours in ‘choreographing movement to music, interactive visualisation and generative design capturing the movements of the human body’ 4.
In this interactive spectacle we deal with live animation, the so-called visual music, in which synchronisation of sound and lighting effects with body movement live is present. The dancer, through her fluid, expressive movements and gestures, interprets the tones of the cello, becoming at the same time a transmitter of movement for the real-time generated graphic form. Animations projected on spatial objects as interactive visualisations are generated by video projectors, while the background sounds played from the tape become the raw material for these animations. The building blocks for creating the tape part were the sounds generated by traditional Vietnamese instruments (lithophone and hegaro (bronze drum)) and zither as well as double bass flageolets and sounds of stones being thrown, water and a washing machine.
Modern technology made it possible ‘to create new visual music that affords “soft fascination”; works of “abstracted animation” that are suffused with human presence and emotion … Visuals depend on an animator’s sensibility; they are not mechanistically or algorithmically produced from the audio’ 5. It is the rhythm and the light that have thus become both the main form-building process of this work and a trigger of emotions.

Soliloquium
Beata Oryl, MA
Poland, Stanisław Moniuszko Academy of Music in Gdańsk
e-mail: webe.o at interia.pl
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-6344-6013

Robert Turło, PhD
Poland, Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk
e-mail: turlo at o2.pl

Adam Przybysz, MA
Poland, Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk

Video 2. Soliloquium, composition: Katarzyna Kwiecień-Długosz; choreography and interpretation of music: Beata Oryl; MoCap visualisations in the Unity environment: Adam Przybysz; animations, direction: Robert Turło. Performed on 21 December 2019, GENERATIVE ART 2019 (National Etruscan Museum, at Villa Giulia in the centre of Rome)

References
1. Karwaszewska, M. (2019). Intermedial Score – Structural Filiations in The Context of Music–Literature Relations as well as Musical and Visual Relations. In: Soddu, C., Colabella, E., (ed.) XXII Generative Art Conference – GA2019. Generative Art and Design Lab, Argenia Association, Roma, ISBN 978‐88‐96610‐39‐8, pp. 232–244.
2. A term borrowed from Julie Watkins: ‘“Absolute synchronisation point” is my own term; it refers to animation that starts absolutely on the onset of the first note of a musical phrase’. Watkins, J. (2018). Composing Visual Music: Visual Music Practice at the Intersection of Technology, Audio-visual Rhythms and Human Traces. Body, Space & Technology, 17(1), pp. 51–75, p. 57. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/bst.296.
3. 15 Corners of the World. (2014). A documentary; script and direction: Zuzanna Solakiewicz, Polish Film Institute, Endorfina Studio Marta Golba, Hupe Film, Adam Mickiewicz Institute, National Audiovisual Institute, Mazovia Film Fund, TVP Kultura, National Centre for Culture, Centrala SP. Z O.O., Association of Creative Initiatives ‘ę’, https://ninateka.pl/film/15-stron-swiata-zuzanna-solakiewicz.
4. Oryl, B., Turło, R. (2019). Soliloquium. In: Soddu, C., Colabella, E., (ed.) XXII Generative Art Conference – GA2019. Generative Art and Design Lab, Argenia Association, Roma, ISBN 978‐88‐96610‐39‐8, p. 507.
5. Watkins J., op. cit.