OnVideo: Remembering Tokyo

One of the Japan-related websites I read regularly is the blog of Joi Ito, a Japanese entrepreneur and venture capitalist.

Recently he posted a video to Vimeo that he made using the new Canon 5SD MkII camera - a new camera that can shoot high-definition video as well as still photography. Since it was released under a Creative Commons Attribution license, I took the liberty of creating a score for the sequence.

Since I moved back from Japan, I frequently get nostalgic - for the smell of incense that my neighbors burned, the constant white-noise of traffic and city sounds, the rhythm of the trains. So when I saw this short clip, I knew I had to create a piece for it before those memories of Japan fade.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.
Locally stored copy

My basic idea was to use the three main rhythms of the clip - trains, pedestrians, and traffic - to structure the piece. When you hear the noises that remind you of the train rhythm or the sound of traffic passing, you might notice that I did not actually use the sound from the footage. Instead, I created / used synthesizer parts which resemble those noises. I think this is particularly interesting in the first “train” segment. For the pedestrians, I found that anything too footstep-like was rather boring, so I broke away from the literal notion of “pedestrians” and instead focused on the people and the places they occupy in the movie. When it came to the street traffic, I settled for a doppler-effect like groan which dissolves into the outro.