Thru-you.com

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Composing music with youTube videos

Music composition meets the very interesting world of video montage composition.

Ophir Kutiel (aka Kutiman) is a musician, artist, producer, and now someone of enduring youTube fame. In 2009 he created a number of unique and fascinating music compositions by mixing video clips that he found on youTube.

It's unlikely that the various "participants" had any notion or intention of collaboration. They just posted a video to youTube. Ordinarily that would have been the end of it. Then Kutiman stepped in.

He providing unsolicited compositional vision and collaborative glue, remixing various video clips: looping, layering, melding, and eventually transforming numerous unrelated videos into an engaging song ... and simultaneously creating a remarkably beautiful audio/visual collage.

Kutiman used youTube videos as his sound-bite sample library. He brought a song into existence by layering the combined audio of many videos. If you're familiar with GarageBand, the process was surely like choosing "loops" from GarageBand's "loop browser" library. But instead of building songs out of built-in audio loops, Kutiman's basic building blocks are 'found art' footage of youTube videos. And in Garageband the samples and loops are of well prefabricated lengths, and perfectly tuned.

Although several videos play simultaneously, and usually just one video image is visable at a time, sometimes Kutiman includes more than one video image, and to good effect.

In most the various source clips we usually see an individual playing a solo instrument, someone kindly offering music lesson, a musical demonstration or tip, a small group playing, an aspiring songwriter singing solo, or someone messing around with sound generators, oscillators or synthesizers.

I have a few more words of introduction, but if you wish to go ahead and view the finished pieces, click here.

Kutiman, Thru-you.com, and Copyright issues

It's no surprise that Kutiman's projects have occasionally raised copyright concerns and ownership objections—essentially, to create his video mix art, he worked exclusively with swiped videos that someone else had recorded, using other peoples' compositions, performances, and videos.

Anyone involved could claim copyright violation and demand that youTube and/or Kutiman permanently remove Kutiman's videos from public viewing or until a legal or remunerative resolve is reached. Because a copyright infringement claim could occur at any time, the hotsing sites my need to remove content, thus some of the following links may lead to nowhere, or merely to a 'removed' notice. Sorry if you run into any such dead ends in the links provided here.

Nevertheless Kutiman's Thru-you productions stand presently, and that is a testament to the good natured reception and acceptance by those haplessly swept into his work. Hopefully they have benefited in some way from his work.

Sadly, some of Kutiman's work was removed from youTube at the request of one the artists involved. Fortunately, at the time of this writing, I believe the work is currently online again, presumably due to a change of heart and a retraction of the objection.

All this begs the question, whose art is it anyway? For better or worse, this a question that Google and youTube constantly challenge.

I personally have a lot of creative work that may prove remunerative largely because I own exclusive rights (to my expression of an idea.) Nevertheless I believe that copyright protection has became excessively repressive when Congress passed Sonny Bono's legislation The Copyright Extension Act.

It's interesting to see artists struggling with the copyright stranglehold. For instance, such a struggle led Nina Paley to take three years of work creating Sita Sings the Blues and package it as a free, copyright-free full length animation.

Nina Paley's Free-Culture Activism is of interest, as is Copyleft.

The thru-you.com video projects

The Thru-you project — Introduction (by Kutiman himself)

In his introductory video Kutiman mild manneredly explains his artistic intent with his thru-you project, he describes his creative process, and offers respect and appreciation to those whose videos he used.

Here’s what he has to say:

Modestly Kutiman takes little credit for the results, stating that sometimes video clips magically aligned themselves, without forethought, effort or planning. Indeed, there must have been some lucky splices and overdubs in Kutiman's creative process, but these beautiful compilations required thousands of artistic decisions and countless hours of slicing, editing and aligning. The results are quite enjoyable and they clearly reflect Kutiman's range of musical awareness, and they nicely showcase some talent and creativity that may have otherwise remaining largely undiscovered.

A guided tour of Kutiman's youTube art

If you're still with me, here are some of my favorite Kutiman video compositions. Be sure to check out some of the "raw footage"

Several finished projects appear on Kutiman’s own site, but please try my guided tour before going to www.thru-you.com.

<http://www.thru-you.com/#/videos/8/>

The Mother of all Funk Chords

In his first youTube mix — The Mother of all Funk Chords — Kutiman aligns clips of dialog and music, making it sound like a live rehearsal. Then, after the big "9 chord", the piece really takes off.

This fun little romp is probably the most simplistic of Kutiman's projects. It's quite straight forward ... even somewhat predictable. So it's a perfect introduction because it clearly illustrates the compositional principle behind his projects. (If you get bored, don't bail out completely. Be sure to watch the next project: Just a Lady.)

<http://www.thru-you.com/#/videos/1/>

Just a Lady

Even if you've already viewed Just a Lady I recommend that you take a moment to view the vocal as it originally appeared on youTubeas a solo vocal. Then listen to Kutiman's mix again of Just a Lady

Granted, Kutiman's interpretation of this young singer/songwriter's composition may not match her original vision, but it revealed for me that her voice and her composition have far more depth than I realized.

It's truly astonishing that Kutiman figured out a meter that holds her original vocal so well. I would have been hard pressed to discover a suitable metric foundation. Kutiman's choice of a slow 12/8 accompaniment is perfect ... and everything about his timing is spot on!

What's most amazing is that Kutiman's finished project underscores and hilights many very lovely vocal nuances and inflections in her original performance, details that I somehow overlooked and still have trouble perceiving when listening to to the original solo clip.

< http://www.thru-you.com/#/videos/7/>

Just a Lady — Original solo vocal

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAPkRqpZfjE>

I'm New

http://www.thru-you.com/#/videos/3/

(Viewable on youtube at: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsBfj6khrG4>)

Here are some of the source videos:

Rap (MP) Juice Lee Freestyle:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poaHk7J4wZI>

Singer 1:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fln3JIBikA

Wait for Me

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkv4yWBRODo> Talk box original video from TalkBoxerDX

<http://www.thru-you.com/#/videos/6/>

Viewing credits and links to original footage

As mentioned, the finished projects are more interesting if you view some of the original footage, so do watch some of the raw material that Kutiman culled together for us.

To see the original video clip, click on the credit link. You can roll credits by clicking the red ‘CREDITS’ button during playback. This option is available only when watching his projects on www.thru-you.com

thru-you.com intentionally looks like youTube, so you might check the address bar of your browser to make sure you're in the right location.

By watching a few of the original videos you'll quickly understand how much creativity went into these projects.

The video remix genre

New as the concept may seem, Kutiman has not created an new art form. As early as the 1970s others composed music via video remix and video collage, such as the Emergency Broadcast Network (EBN) from the 1990s:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_H4b7-eZNM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjHwxYqcFbI&feature=related

Nevertheless, Kutiman's projects are noteworthy due to their high level of artistry, and their overall sense of warmth.

The success of such undertakings hinges squarely on meticulous timing ... and Kutiman’s sense of timing is impeccable. Without precision timing, his innovative interpretations and concepts would prove clever at best ... perhaps only annoying.

I expect Kutiman will inspire interest in this reemerging art form ... and the time is ripe. Over the past few decades only the fortunate or elite had access to the necessary video editing tools; today however we find them advance tools on the average personal computer.

An appreciation of Kutiman's contribution

Although Kutiman handily covers a wide range of musical styles, there's nothing musically ground breaking about the finished compositions. Nevertheless they are engaging, fun, and full of heart ... and that's plenty for me!

Above all, Kutiman's creations reflect that many of us have artistic interests, and though our talents may be new, undiscovered, or undeveloped, our small accomplishments can be an integral part of a larger effort. In other words, appreciation, collaboration and recognition are sometimes closer than they appear, much closer than we realize ... and amazing things can happen when we allow ourselves be seen as artists and musicians ... even in a small homemade video clip.

Most inspiring is Kutiman's ability to peer deeply into another person's art, that through his power of perception he elegantly frames it so perhaps it becomes more accessible and well appreciated, even by those of us who might have otherwise failed to note the beauty therein.

We benefit from his ability to spot a diamond in the rough and reveal facets that may have gone unnoticed without his added craftsmanship.

I hope you enjoy Kutiman's projects as much as I have!

John Blasquez

Sita Sings the Blues

Sita Sing the Blues (by Nina Paley) is an incredible animation that combines the story of Sita and Rama, the musical performances of jazz singer Annette Hanshaw, the story of a failed love life, and plenty of good humor.

The animation and culatural topic might not be your cup of tea, but I was transfixed throughout from a purely illustrative and animational point of view. Paley does so much with so little motion, and her sense of color and design is extraordinary!

One confusing factor is that characters, like Sita and Rama, appear in four distinctly different animated forms, fortunately they transform simultaneously so you don't feel terribly lost.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzTg7YXuy34

The recordings and voice of Annette Hanshaw are really great ***

Nina Paley's Free Culture Activism is of interest as well, and the extent that she has had to work around copyright technicalities.

Watch an interesting interview on Reel 13 regarding her reason for giving away the work for free, and her positions on Free Culture:

http://www.thirteen.org/sites/reel13/blog/nina-sings-the-copyright-song/445/