''Synchromy'' (French: ''Synchromie'') is a 1971

National Film Board of Canada The National Film Board of Canada (NFB; french: Office national du film du Canada (ONF)) is Canada's public film and digital media producer and distributor. An agency of the Government of Canada, the NFB produces and distributes documentary f ...

visual music film by Norman McLaren utilizing

graphical sound Graphical sound or drawn sound (Fr. ''son dessiné'', Ger. ''graphische Tonerzeugung'',; It. ''suono disegnato'') is a sound recording created from images drawn directly onto film or paper that were then played back using a sound system. There are ...

. To produce the film's musical

soundtrack A soundtrack is recorded music accompanying and synchronised to the images of a motion picture, drama, book, television program, radio program, or video game; a commercially released soundtrack album of music as featured in the soundtrack ...

, McLaren photographed rectangular cards with lines on them. He arranged these shapes in sequences on the analog

optical sound Optical sound is a means of storing sound recordings on transparent film. Originally developed for military purposes, the technology first saw widespread use in the 1920s as a sound-on-film format for motion pictures. Optical sound eventually ...

track to produce notes and chords. He then reproduced the sequence of shapes, colorized, in the image portion of the film, so that audiences see the shapes that they are also hearing, as sound. McLaren had experimented with this technique for creating notes through patterns of stripes on the soundtrack area of the film in the 1950s, working with

Evelyn Lambart Evelyn Lambart (23 July 1914 – 3 April 1999) was a Canadian animator and technical director with the National Film Board of Canada, known for her early collaborations with Norman McLaren as well as her later films, as sole director. In 19 ...

. Their technique was based on earlier work in graphical sound by German pioneer Rudolf Pfenninger and Russian Nikolai Voinov. The creation of ''Synchromy'' was documented by

Gavin Millar Gavin Millar (11 January 1938 – 20 April 2022) was a Scottish film director, critic and television presenter. Biography Millar was born in Clydebank, near Glasgow, the son of Tom Millar and his wife Rita (née Osborne). The family relocated ...

in 1970 in a film called ''The Eye Hears, The Ear Sees''. In McLaren's production notes, he stated that "Apart from planning and executing the music, the only creative aspect of the film was the “choreographing” of the striations in the columns and deciding on the sequence and combinations of colours." The film received eight awards, including a Special Jury Mention at the

Annecy International Animated Film Festival The Annecy International Animation Film Festival (french: Festival international du film d'animation d'Annecy, officially abbreviated in English as the Annecy Festival, or simply Annecy) was created in 1960 and takes place at the beginning of J ...

References

Terence Dobson, ''The Film Work of Norman McLaren'' (Eastleigh: John Libbey Publishing, 2006)

External links

Watch ''Synchromy'' at NFB.ca
1971 films Films directed by Norman McLaren Visual music Animated films without speech National Film Board of Canada animated short films Quebec films Graphical sound 1970s animated short films 1971 animated films Canadian animated short films Canadian musical films 1970s Canadian films {{short-animation-film-stub