"Rhythm & melody" is a simple separation of music into two basic components. It’s mostly sufficient when describing music written to be played (sheet music), but a century of audio recording technology has added to (if not changed) the dimensions of expression. If the two axis of sheet music are pitch and time, melody describes the set of events in the pitch axis (music notes), and rhythm describes the timing to "step" through this sequence of pitched events.
Something taken for granted in music performance that the advent of recording has since separated and abstracted is movement. When I say movement, I don’t mean rhythm (which refers to timing), I’m referring to the physical act of striking a drum, strumming strings, bringing the weight of your arms to strike a chord on a piano– the human effort and the collision of objects that sets into motion the vibrations that produce sound waves. Synthesizers, which allow audio signals to be generated electronically, have abstracted this motion even further.
Modern music carries an abundance of synthetic sounds: abstract synthesized chord stabs, kick drums composed of envelope-driven sine waves, claps and snares generated through filtered noise. However music can rarely be separated from our human experience in the physical world. When we hear a synthetic clapsnare, we understand it (we imagine it) as representative of the collion of two physical bodies, even though the sound itself was generated from circuits & software.
What this means is that a synthetic sound has the ability to conjure the image or impression of physical motion in the mind of the listener. It seems appropriate to call this phenomenon animation, especially in regard to more "synthetic" forms of production, as an animator’s work is to reverse-engineer and fabricate an illusion of motion. Recorded music, synthesized or real, also has this power. Sometimes it may conjure the image of a band, and at other times something much more abstract.
Much electronic dance music exists to convey a sense of motion, typically an easy to follow up-down motion. If a compelling impression of movement can be conjured into the imagination of the audience, then the audience will be compelled to move (dance, that is)… at least that’s the idea. Hip hop, with its often pronounced clapsnares, often aims to give the impression of a large audience all clapping and swaying to the supermassive beat.
There are songs that aim to convey more complex and abstract motion, typified by (but certainly not limited to) modern Autechre. Often this music does not allude to basic human experience but to the world of computers and machines, or to something even more abstract and alien. Nonetheless it conjures the impression of movement– an entity that’s at least driven and animated, if not human. Music like Autechre’s and Snd’s represent the utter extreme of expression through the power of music to conjure "animation". Achieving animation before the advent of audio recording was difficult because any performed music could not exist in a vacuum– there was necessarily a musician singing or performing an instrument, thus the audience would have to be particularly proactive to imagine something beyond the direct sound source (the musician).
Animation is only one aspect of recorded music’s greater ability to conjure spaces, textures, and assemble all those elements into scenes, but animation I feel is one of the more interesting new dimensions of expression in modern music.
Obligatory. Here, an animator attempts to meticulously re-create the visuals that Autechre’s music (and LSD) conjures in his imagination.
A similar one from the demoscene, 2003.
Meanwhile I added a draft track to my website, and lots of other things have been going on with me in terms of music, mostly related to my live show collab project w/ Dave. We’ve built a rather awesome live rig– at some point we’ll dissect it on our blog/site (yet to be launched).