Art Challenge Project #7: Coral Reef (Aerial)

Hello again for another installment of the Art Challenge Projects. Thank you for checking out and supporting Sara's and my work as we continue to work on these projects.

When I first thought of "coral reef" as an idea for a project, my first thoughts went to Pixar's Finding Nemo. "That would be a cool sound to capture for after writing a cold, underwater track," I thought. However, as I mentioned last week, Sara sometimes goes in a direction that is completely unexpected, occasionally even for her!

One of the challenges of writing music to a still picture is that music takes place over time while that picture never changes. This aerial view of a coral reef is a wide view of a landscape with no particular objects for me to derive character. So, I needed to create a narrative out of something that is not being shown in frame. Therefore, I decided that what we see in the picture is the view from an airplane; a small craft out for a calm ride just off a mainland coast in the Pacific.

I start the track with an open piano melody that is the main theme for the song. There are a few sections of varying levels sound intensity but my goal was to keep the calm nature of the plane ride at the center of the track. To propel the momentum, there is a consistent arpeggiating line underneath the melody to keep the sweeping motion of the melody and counter melodies moving forward. The full sound of the strings and horns were a natural fit to sonically create a warm, open sky.

For this piece, I was inspired by the music of Joe Hisaishi, a Japanese film composer with Studio Ghibli, to create a sound to represent a peaceful plane ride, from which stems the piano lead with some orchestral support. Luckily for me, or maybe not so lucky haha, those scores are not easy to imitate, hence the challenge part of the series name.