Scott Pagano & Jochem Paap:
Hi-Fi Fusion
Creative Collaboration
Pagano and Paap zapped their ideas back and forth using iChat,email, and good old telephone lines. Paap had cut most of the surround-sound tracks for the DVD, but was still formulating the last few when Pagano got onboard. “I thought, we can take this to the next level and come up with new ways to work with pixels and sound,” says Pagano. That meant gleaning inspiration from Paap’s tracks, constructing 2D and 3D imagery using Adobe After Effects and Photoshop, Shake, Maya, and Max/MSP/Jitter. The artist drew all his pieces together in Final Cut Pro.
“Final Cut is indifferent to formats and resolutions,” says Pagano. “It can handle anything I can throw at it. That is incredibly important for what I do.”
Paap plotted the music for the project using Max/MSP, Native Instruments Traktor and Kontakt, and Logic Pro — the trusted tools for nearly every one of his musical projects. All the tracks for the DVD were composed in 5.1 surround, an exciting new medium for Paap. “It was inspiring to think about composing for a multiple-speaker setup,” he says. “It’s been done before, but not really in the kind of music I produce.” The producer plugged his sounds into Logic Pro, where he massaged them with filters and effects. Using Logic Pro’s native surround sound capabilities, he mixed his music for six audio channels. “I assemble and treat everything with Logic,” he says. “It’s the end stage for any piece of music I create.”
To find better synergy between music and motion, Pagano flew to Rotterdam to work with Paap in person. There, amid the inner workings of the industrial city, the artist found inspiration. He and Paap explored Rotterdam, equipped with an HD camcorder and still photography equipment. He shot the city’s grit and grime, its industrial structure.
The artists built on those rough foundations together. “Jochem’s music is almost abstract,” says Pagano. “It’s in the realm of sound design and creating narrative or story was not going to be appropriate. But the music got me very excited about audio-visual synchronization. I pulled the energy and the movement out of the music and mapped it to 2D and 3D graphics. Then we developed the concept of moving through a series of environments with each track.”
For example: Some of Pagano’s abstract artistic environments are filled with 3D metallic flora that grows over serene stills of the city, every motion precisely synced to Paap’s sonic salvo. “My understanding of music and sound really helps in a project like this,” says Pagano. “The connection allows me to work with musicians in a very subtle way.”
Subtle Improvisation
That fine interplay between music and motion graphics is easily channeled into an intriguing live reinterpretation of “Umfeld.” The two artists jam together, feeding off their common creative energy to create new material. “In a band, you gain an understanding of your bandmates,” says Pagano. “You become a team because you inherently develop a sensitivity to what they’re going to do.” Pagano and Paap share that nearly psychic connection, weaving their two mediums together like improvising musicians.
The live show requires an array of portable audio-video tech. Pagano employs a MacBook Pro, a Mac mini, an iPod, a DVD player, and a video mixer. He pulls clips — virtually everything he’s ever created — from the various storage devices and routes them through the mixer. He previews those clips using a custom browser-player application he created using Max/MSP. The browser allows him to sort his clips on the fly and nab whatever he needs to accompany Paap’s music.
Paap packs two Mac laptops, one running Native Instruments Traktor and the other running Ableton Live. He controls both with an Allen & Heath Xone 3D mixing desk. The mixer flawlessly interfaces with Paap’s Macs, allowing him to throw faders and tweak knobs in each application without touching a mouse. “It enables me to control every aspect of the software,” he says. “To me, it’s a much more human interface than a keyboard and mouse.” The DJ sends MIDI timing info to Pagano, who uses it to precisely sync his visuals with each audio track.
The performance can be customized for any space. “It’s totally scalable,” says Pagano. “We can do it with one screen, two screens, surround speakers or stereo speakers. The venue dictates how the performance will go and it’ll be different every time.”
Refining Imagery and Sound
“Different” is essentially at the core of Pagano and Paap’s work. Both artists continue to strive to create new art forms and media for expression. “I’m very excited about all the things that could be done with sound-image relationships,” says Pagano. “There are a lot of creative and technical avenues to go down.”
High-definition video is one such avenue for Pagano. He’s worked with HD extensively, but he plans to push his art even further into the realm of high-resolution video. “Coming from a photography and cinema background, I really love beautiful, refined images,” he says. “As video artists, we didn’t have access to that kind of quality until recently. We were stuck with a format (television) that was basically defined in the ‘30s. Now, with HD video and Final Cut Pro, we can produce much cleaner and refined work. And with the Mac, we have the computing horsepower to do it all.”
Paap plans to explore the emerging realm of multi-channel sound design. “Surround sound and the surround-sound design domain is a very Wild West area at the moment and working in a new medium like multi-channel surround forces you to find creative solutions to new problems,” he says. “That’s when amazing things happen. That’s when new and exciting music emerges.”
