Roosevelt Arts Project/Computer Music Center
A Night at the Movies



Combine an end-of-year dinner-party for the CMC crew with a Roosevelt Arts Project event, and you wind up with a really fun evening. Every year for the past several decades I've done some kind of RAP event, and this year we decided to have fun with a 'silent film' approach. It was inspired by son Daniel's and friend Julia Dreifus' combined sixteenth birthday party last year. We used a theme of "chocolate" for the party and had rented some videos ("Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory", etc.) for the event. The kids wanted to listen to danceable music, so we played the films with the music and MAGICALLY the music matched the videos! Kind of like the Pink Floyd/Wizard of Oz connection... the human brain is a strange and wonderful thing.

With this experience in mind, I asked the CMC gang to choose video segments about 10 minutes long with the directive to improvise a new soundtrack as the visuals were playing. It worked really well! I recorded the audio, but the pairing with the videos will have to exist only in memory.

Here are the audio recordings:

The final "Mr. Ed" group improvisation came into being because I happened to look up "Mr. Ed" on YouTube while searching for the Stroszek clip. For some reason, Daniel, Jill and I had been discussing "Mr. Ed" at dinner earlier in the week. When I saw the episode, it just had to be used!



Some pictures taken during set-up: