weimerhead

Martin Armiger stopped by the EMU last Thursday to give us all insight in his wonderful life as a film composer. It was great to see him talking about what inspires him with what he does, even if I didn’t personally get excited by the film “The Sea Hawk” and whatever the other one was. His ability to speak to the audience was quite notable; the audience was indeed larger than normal for a Thursday afternoon at the EMU, with new faces showing up for Armiger presentation. I would of perhaps preferred if he had talked a little more about work that he has done, I only realised this when someone asked me what films Arminger has worked on- I could only respond with ‘uh, dunno!’ Nevertheless seeing Arminger get all animated during ‘the Sea Hawk’ scene with strings playing arpeggios representing wind and similarly with the torture scene from ‘Reservoir Dogs’ was good value. Of all the lines of work that music technology students can consider, he certainly did not turn me away from film music, which was something presenters had been getting good at last semester. I though during his speech he might have touched on multichannel sound, as this available to the film (& DVD) music world. In fact, when he commenced his speech with the ten dollar question- “What’s wrong with film music?”, I thought he might be going to say something like ‘most film music is produced for stereo while film composers can use 5.1’… or something. Oh well. Seems nobody really cares about multichannel except computer nerd music composers and sound installation artists. Maybe. I really do not know much about the stuff, but it just seems like noone gets as excited by more speakers like me.

Mr. Whittington gave us EMUers a few pointers in scoring, analysing and generally commentating our music, during the hour David Harris normally fills with Pink Floyd. I am glad someone talked a bit about these things, because they are a part of all music technology major assignments and something I felt pretty unsure and ending up not caring about last semester. His allegory of the cut paper to a score for music was very understandable, and I am starting to see that he is good at what he does and why he is the head of my faculty.

Bibiography
Armington, Martin. "What's wrong with film music?" Presentation made at the Adelaide University, Schulz Building, EMU (level 5), Emu Space on 28 / July / 2006.

Whittington, Stephen. "Commentating Music." Presentation made at the Adelaide University, Schulz Building, EMU (level 5), Emu Space on 28 / July / 2006.