When @tinypaleokitchen announced her contest for a collaboration between different media and writing, @negativer and I set out to write a song for voice and piano, with him providing the lyrics and I the music.

We titled this song, "Lacrimosa," which is an old Latin word referring to weeping. It also is used as a part of a Requiem Mass, or Mass for the Dead.

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Here is the link to @negativer's post for the lyrics:

https://steemit.com/poem/@negativer/lacrimosa-original-poem-reflections-1-mixed-media-collaboration-contest

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The Process

Creation

We started out by first just letting @negativer do what he does best. I didn't really have a vision in mind of what the subject matter should be, and I really didn't want to hinder his process by dictating any limits from the start.

Once he wrote the poem, then I came up with some ideas on how I wanted the music to sound. I also tried writing the vocal line to match the syllables and inflections of the words. Sometimes things didn't really fit for the music, so @negativer and I made adjustments to the words where needed so that the inflections and rhythm of the notes would match.

I wrote down the music with a notation program called Finale. I find that writing it out helps me sort out my ideas and it makes editing much easier.

Audio Recording

The recording process was a bit harrowing! When you compose a piece of music, it doesn't necessarily mean you know how to play it, so after some time to practice I gave it a go with playing and singing. Well, that totally didn't work out! I felt that I wasn't able to play it well enough and focus on singing it well, so I decided to record them separately.

The piano part was recorded on my Petrof concert grand piano. This beast is 9 feet 2 inches of pure joy to play, but really getting a good sound on recording acoustic pianos is quite difficult. I have since asked Neg for a pair of really nice microphones for Christmas ;) . But since Christmas didn't come in time to record this, I used a simple Zoom H4n hand recorder. I then imported the audio into a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) program called Logic Pro.

For voice, I listened to the piano track through headphones and recorded myself singing on the Zoom.

Audio Post-Production

Then I imported the vocal track into Logic and made sure it lined up with the piano part. This can be a bit tricky since the piano and voice tracks are not identical in length in the recording process.

Once lined up, I then tried to get the balance between the two tracks so that one part didn't overtake the other. Lastly, I added some reverb to the whole thing and exported it as a wav file.

Video

From there, I imported the wav file into iMovie and started looking at various pictures on Pixabay and Pexels. Considering this piece was about the loss of a loved one, I searched for graveyards and found a ton of cool statues at gravestones. I really liked the drama of these sculptures and so that became the theme to bring it all together.

Once I had selected a fair number of pictures I liked, I dragged them into iMovie and then matched them as best I could with the lyrics. After adding the lyrics as subtitles, I exported this as an mp4 file, and uploaded to Youtube.

Of course, I got @negativer's opinion on the recordings and the video to make sure he liked them!

Thank you to @tinypaleokitchen and to the judges for considering our collaborative work for this contest!

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