Advertising | Sound | Code

Advertising | Sound | Code

by Luca Ruhri

Advertising | Sound | Code, a project suitable for both in class and distance learning, explores the scoring of advertising clips. With the app Sonic-Pi, new soundtracks are added to old advertising clips. It offers students the opportunity to learn the basics of coding while at the same time creating electronic music. Students can create a new atmosphere for an advertising clip or even change its meaning altogether; modernize the commercial, or simply try to recreate the mood of the original. They will also take a critical look at advertising and advertising aesthetics.

By combining sounds and images from different contexts, you can create completely new meanings, stories and messages. In music, there are so-called mashups – two elements from different songs are isolated and then combined.
Every day, we encounter this phenomenon of combining two completely different levels of meaning in memes. In this case, it is the juxtaposition of images, film stills etc. with short text passages that once again creates new stories and messages. A lot has been written, researched, and discussed on the subject of memes in recent years (for example, I can recommend “Me(me), myself and I” by Gila Kolb and Helena Schmidt, see http://myow.org/meme-myself-and-i).

Advertising | Sound | Code poses the question of whether the concept of the mashup, respectively the insights gained from the world of memes, can also be applied to the combination of old advertising clips and their sounds/of video and sound. What kind of new contexts or relations may emerge from this?

  • Selection of an advertising clip which is at least 10 years old
  • Analyzing this advertising clip (goal, background, time, problematization)
  • Introduction to Sonic-Pi
  • Create a new sound design
  • Merge video and sound
  • Presentation in front of the group
The user interface shows different sound editing functions. In another program frame, a still image of a commercial video can be seen. Five young people are standing in front of old gaming machines from the 80s.
Advertising | Sound | Code

Werbung | Sound | Code © 2022 by Miriam Raggam-Alji is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Luca Ruhri, studies at the Department Art and Education, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

Author’s Encouragement
Programming and/or coding are rarely covered in art class. Sonic-Pi provides a good lead-in to the subject. Similarly, working with sound is often underrepresented in art class, but it can be an important introduction in regard to future film, video, or performance projects.