Audiovisual
aequi.libra – Mattia Parisse
“aequi.libra” is an open score composition, born from the idea of ecosystem as a place characterized by its own formal balance, but open to exchanges and relations with the external environment. “echo” (from the Greek environment), understood as “place to live” and system understood as “set of separate and interdependent parts and units” whose activities are connected for the attainment of a certain purpose.
The ecosystem generates and generates on its own rules, creating the conditions conducive to the development of new elements, which will determine the state of equilibrium of the system itself.
The composition is based on the numerical generation by the Perrin Series of formal starting rules, which will determine the sound macrostructure of the performance. The control algorithm will behave as an “environment”, managing the indications of the Perrin Series within it. The latter will be the system that will characterize with its own formal order the environment and therefore the composition. The performer will manage (through Physical Computing processes) two DIY tools and related sound processing algorithms on them. He will move freely in interaction related to the ‘environment and context, remaining within the constraints/rules given by the’ control algorithm going to determine the internal shape of the composition, acting.
Camera Studies, Vol. 1 – Anthony T. Marasco
“Camera Studies, Vol. 1” is a piece for networked circuit-bent visual equipment and live electronics. The piece begins with repeating loops of static noise recorded live from the speakers of the television repeating in asynchronous patterns. A digital handicam is positioned so that it is aimed at both the blank television screen and the live performer, displaying a live video feed of its view onto its built-in LCD screen. Synthesizer melodies are performed over four looped tracks and real-time digital signal processing in the form of granular pitch shifting and pitched delay also occurs on four looped audio tracks.
Can You Hear Me? – Pietro Dossena
“Can You Hear Me?” is an exploration of sound, considered in its relationship with the body, time and space. The native language of the actress, together with her body-related sounds, were used as structural elements for the audiovisual interaction. The main aim of this video is to raise questions about perception in a poetic way.
Chromatophony – Juppo Yokokawa, Haruki Muta
“Chromatophony” is an audiovisual project that transforms a squid’s skin into an audio visualizer by feeding it an electric tone signal. Squid can rapidly change their body color for intimidating, courting, and communication. This ability is made possible by small organelles called chromatophores. Chromatophores are usually controlled by electrical signals from the nerves, but can also be artificially stimulated by external signals. Then, we measured the frequency response of chromatophores to the signals, and created music (i.e., collection of electrical signals) to match their frequency response. As a result, we got a visual image that the flicker of chromatophores and sounds are perfectly synchronized. Humans and squids are believed to have parted company about 600 million years ago during their evolutionary history, and their brains and neural structures are completely different from ours. It may not be a communication, but our project is a cross-species interaction between humans and squid. By using biological tissue as an image medium, this project expands the possibilities of visual expression that have been confined to pixels. Not only that it also allows us to discuss ethical and environmental issues from an aesthetic perspective.
Constant Shower – Robert Fraher, Tamara Brantmeier
Description On Wednesday, March 6th, 2019, Jair Bolsonaro, a self-described homophobe (BBC, 2019), asked the world via Twitter, “What is a golden shower?” Jair’s motives for doing so have been opined by many. What has remained a mystery is whether or not he received an answer to his question. This piece seeks to provide Jair with that answer. It is our sincere hope that, thanks to the unique demonstrative abilities of interactive digital media, this composition allows Jair (and everyone else) to clearly envision what a golden shower could be like for him. In fact, we created this experience to allow citizens of the world to collaborate and maintain a constant shower for Jair. By that, we mean this piece can run in its MAIN or AUX modes in multiple locations simultaneously. The experience provided by each instance is connected to all other instances. The composition uses the Web Audio API to create a five-channel interactive soundtrack to a multi-user augmented reality experience built with A-Frame. The soundtrack is synchronized across all devices through a WebSocket running on a Node.js server. Visit https://constantshower.azurewebsites.net to experience the composition. BBC. (2019, April 26). Bolsonaro: Brazil must not become ‘gay tourism paradise’.
Duo Sonata, Audiovisual work of art, Analog audio/video improvisation, 03:06 min., Full HD, HiFi stereo, NTSC, 2019-20. Analog, real-time audiovisual techniques born in the 1960-80s can still excite the experimental artist. Their aesthetics are characteristically different from digital solutions. Two-three decades when these tools were used proved to be short to exhaust their stock, so it is not by chance that these technical possibilities and methods reappear. The fusion of analog electronics and digital techniques would then open the door to even more possibilities, settlings. My work includes two short audiovisual improvisations made with the same Raster Manipulation Unit – Wobbulator. The difference between the two is, – among other things –, in the mixing of an extra motion picture to the audio-video improvisation. One extra video is a pre-recorded animation, while the other is a real-time closed-circuit video of the lamps of the sound equipment/source (Doepfer). The improvised sounds generate moving images. All the defining audio and visual elements take place in real-time, so the author is able to play as an instrument on these – nearly half-century-old – analog audiovisual devices. There are no editing or splitting points in the material and this raises new editorial issues for the present and the near future. Randomness also plays an important role in the work, especially in relation to the (two) audio-videos placed side by side. The entire material has remained in its raw character. Pure visual acoustics; where we see what we hear, or vice versa. The base of the opus was done at Signal Culture (Owego, New York).
Forms – Santiago Vilanova
“Forms” is a visual-music score generative system. Driven by a set of rules for graphic generation, and aided by randomness and probability, a custom software coded in javascript proposes a series of visual music compositions generated in realtime and never repeating. Forms is permanently streaming at Playmodes’ Twitch channel at https://www.twitch.tv/playmodes These resulting scores can be framed within the “tradition” of graphic musical notation that gained strength among twentieth-century composers (John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mestres Quadreny, Gyorgi Ligetti …), and which allow music to be released from tone, bars and the rigidity of classic staves. Thanks to a real-time “sonification” engine, the resulting graphics are transformed into sound using spectral synthesis algorithms. A header runs through the image from left to right, interpreting that small vertical fragment of the image. The luminance captured by this header is transformed into bass (if at the bottom of the image) and treble (if at the top of the image).
Il senso del luogo – Paolo Pastorino
The place is different from the space: the first is made of relationships and interactions while the second is a container. We can weave a relationship with space – triggering an action / response mechanism – and transform it into a place full of stimuli generated by physical and abstract actions such as thought. The intangible response that a place generates in the person is like a channel through which it crosses the individual. The place, therefore, can be inhabited and can inhabit humans. This work has been made during the lockdown with images of deserted cities like Rome, Paris and London.
Immagine – Simone Sims Longo
“Immagine” is a sound based video that explores the multiplicity of a memory as confused flashback. Sounds, time, space, the way as our mind groups, decode and order stimuli and store in remote memory. The images emerge from a past but are not organized in a chronological order, re-contextualized in a new world they lose their primordial meaning. The work is directly linked to the audio as “visual music concept”, the pictures used are recorded in Rotterdam by Cosenude Media Projects. The work was designed during a session of Music Through The Walls [MTTW Rotterdam], the sound takes some elements from.
One Five Nine – Alon Ilsar
The AirSticks are an audio-visual gestural instrument designed to allow the composition, performance and improvisation of live electronic music and graphics using movements captured by handheld motion controllers, utilising bespoke software to generate musical and visual content from the gestural controller’s real-time position and rotation information.Through this interface, the performer is offered multidimensional control over audio-visual parameters, whilst providing a clearly transparent relationship between gesture and audio-visual product. The graphics are projected onto a transparent screen—or scrim—to allow both the performer and audience to relate to them. In this video, we present an piece from a larger work, Trigger Happy ‘Visualised’, entitled “One Five Nine”.
Performed by Alon Ilsar on the AirSticks
Interactive visuals by Matt Hughes
Music by Greg Seiler and Alon Ilsar (aka Comatone & Foley)
Filmed by Alex Ryan
Opus III – Antonio D’Amato
This piece is a soundtrack composed expressly for a short abstract movie by Walter Ruttmann, titled Lichtspiel Opus III (1925). Previously I had composed a couple of pieces inspired by modern abstract paintings, where I tried maximizing the transmission of emotions through a synesthetic transposition of abstract paintings into music. Art synesthesia is an interaction of different sensory modalities, assumed that in certain conditions a single sense could activate the others. The first idea came up while I was visiting an exhibition on Italian futurism at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Unfortunately the work by Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra, who were two filmmakers associated with the futurist movement, has been lost. We just have an article (Abstract cinema – Chromatic music, 1912), where they describe their attempt to realize a direct translation of music into colours and shapes, applying coloured paint directly to film frames. The connection with Prometheus, the Poem of Fire (1908-1910) by Aleksandra Scriabin – where the composer also wrote a visual score with coloured shapes and lights, to be performed on the stage by a keyboard controller similar to an organ – is intriguing. The abstract movies by Hans Richter and Walter Ruttmann, dating around the 1920s seem to be an expected evolution of the above mentioned research. We could really call their artwork visual music, because of their emphasis on qualities as rhythm, tempo, movement, counterpoint and harmony, in the kinetic of colours and forms. Ruttmann was a violinist and cellist, but he wasn’t casual. Ruttmann, formerly a painter in his early abstract films followed the futurists’ idea of coordinating music with colours and moving shapes. In his effort he used some animation techniques that would be adopted later in the animation industry. In this experimentation the author investigates the possibility of a new grammar of forms and colours, through a dual reduction of forms into basic shapes and colours into basic tints, and the study of the mutual relations in their kinetic movements. However he didn’t adopt an invariable correspondence of colour or geometric shape and pitch, opting for a subjective and more expressive relations of elements. Though Opus III was created as a silent animated film without soundtrack, few years later Hanns Eisler wrote the music for this film, for a performance at the Baden-Baden music festival in 1927. Here I propose my piece composed as a soundtrack following strictly – frame by frame – the original silent movie. I adopted a free association of forms and sounds, working mostly on progressive timbre mutations, where the same shape appears many at time. The dislocation of the shapes is mostly reflected in a pitch change, but the behaviour is occasionally reversed or more complex. The goal is to achieve the merging of communicative strengths from different art forms.
Painting Electronic Soundscapes – Arcangelo Di Donato
“Painting Electronic Soundscapes” is a pictorial music controller that allows you to follow the pictorial action with sound involvement. On the sheet there are 4 contact microphones and 6 humidity sensors detected by the brush. The brush also has an accelerometer that records movements. Nine watercolor “godets” are also connected to humidity sensors. The sensor values are read by an Arduino Mega. The software used is Max msp. Recorded sounds undergo feedback processes, granulations and spectrum analysis. Ultimately, each color is associated with a digital signal processing preset, the microphones record every smallest brush sound, the accelerometer on the brush records the movements that, together with the humidity values, change the filters applied to the sound. “Painting Electronic Soundscapes” website: https://sites.google.com/view/personalforest/home-page Arcangelo Di Donato After graduating in architecture (Naples, 1992) I worked as an architect and designer. I have published some picture books for children. Master’s degree in electronic music at the conservatory of Padua (2019). I teach Art and Image.
Silent Inhabitants – Rodrigo Carvalho
“Silent Inhabitants” is an audiovisual exploration focused on classified trees specimens from the city of Porto. These trees, silent inhabitants , who have been living in our cities for dozens of years (some for hundreds) have witnessed key historical events and transformations in the city’s urban fabric.. The trees were digitally captured by photogrammetry techniques, then transformed in point clouds and used as catalyst for audiovisual exploration. . By order of appearance: Metrosideros excelsa #1 (Av Montevideu, Porto); Magnolia (Trindade, Porto); Quercus Suber (Museu Romântico da Quinta da Macieirinha, Porto); Metrosideros excelsa #2 (Av Montevideu, Porto); Open fields by the Ovelhariver (Aboadela, Amarante). . Audio-reactive visuals generated in realtime with VUO. . Concept, photogrammetry, visuals: Rodrigo Carvalho Sound: Francisca Rocha Gonçalves
Speech 2 – Francesc Martí
“Speech 2” is an experimental audiovisual piece created from a series of old clips from the US broadcast public affairs interview program The Open Mind. This piece is reflection on the action of communicating, highlighting its limitations, and can be labelled as “text-sound-art” in an audiovisual sampling framework. Technically, in this piece the author has been experimenting how granular sound synthesis techniques and pseudorandom number generator algorithms can be used for audio-visual creative works. The original movies are cut, mixed, manipulated and reassembled, generating new images and sonorities. No other sound samples or images have been used to create the final result.
Surface Tension – Eve Egoyan, David Rokeby
“Surface Tension” is a collaborative interdisciplinary work for disklavier piano and interactive video created by pianist Eve Egoyan and artist David Rokeby. It was commissioned by the Open Ears Festival through the Canada Council. The data Eve generated through her performance is transformed in real-time into live visual images projected behind the piano. These visuals respond to a variety of performance parameters including dynamics, pitch, the harmonic relation between pitches, the use of the sustain pedal, and the duration of individual notes. This extends the piano into a visual instrument as well as a musical one. Much of the visual material is based on simulations of natural processes such as the swarming behaviours of insects, the trajectories of planets or the rippling of water when a pebble hits the surface. Eve’s performance triggers and modulates aspects of these simulations; the visual representations respond to Eve, but also have a sort of life of their own, becoming in a sense a partner in the performance. The performance is a loosely structured audio-visual improvisation in 5 movements. The improvisation is shaped partly by Eve’s response to the system’s visual response to her playing.
terre – Hugo Scurto
“terre” is an online VR installation offering a critical reflection on machine learning and audiovisual media. This video submission comprises a short installation walkthrough (12 minutes). The full installation (30 minutes) is experienceable at the following link: https://wolfgang.wang/terre In terre, visitors are virtually put inside a cube, whose six faces successively display experimental music videos. No three-dimensional graphics, movement-sound mappings, nor machine learning techniques are implemented to realise the installation’s interactivity. Instead, flat screens, personal archives, and altered soundscapes are combined and displayed within the VR environment, letting visitors experience interactivity from the sole affordances provided by these experimental media. Rather than off-ground technological innovations, terre intends to situate machine learning applications to human-computer interaction within such material dimensions of sound and image. Complementary to this piece, terre was also submitted to this year’s Sound, Image and Interaction Design Symposium Paper track.
The Box – Roberto Zanata
“The Box” is a creative coding art-work made with Processing (video) and Supercollider (audio). Processing and Supercollider basically have, therefore, all the features which help to make works of art in the era of new technologies: high-level languages, interactive, object-oriented, efficient in the generation of video and audio real-time, an enormous amount of synthesis units and, not least, a very active community.
The truth is, there is so much happening beyond our own perceptions, particularly when it comes to sound and other “invisible” forces. However, using the incredible scientific tools that we have available to us, we can start to see a fraction of what is actually happening on an energetic level, to create changes in the matter within us and around us.
When the Sound Comes Second: Rhythms I – III – Sarah Groff Hennigh-Palermo
From early visual music works by Lye, Fischinger, and McLaren to modern music videos and club-based ldisplays, the assumption with abstract film has been that the music comes first and the visuals build from that basis.. But what if the sound came second? In parallel with audio/visual performances with the live code collective Codie (paper submitted separately), I have undertaken an exploration of what happens when visuals precede music, especially across artists. What kind of rhythmanalytical conclusions can be drawn from different songs composed to films that are already characterized by internal rhythms? _When the Sound Comes Second: Rhythms I – III_ comprises three abstract films scored by two sets of artists: Codie musicians Kate Sicchio and Melody Loveless, and electronic musician and composer Calum Gunn. _Rhythm II: Serrated_ has been scored by both; _Rhythm I: Pixel Pool_ by Codie alone and _Rhythm III: The Last Summer_ by Gunn. The videos are generated through accretion — beginning with animations livecoded via a home-made SVG system; rescanning the results through an analog video camera into the Fairlight CVI, a synth from the 1980s; and then further processing through a digital analog framebuffers and digital video editing software.
Xeno – Enrico Dorigatti
“Xeno” is a multimedial, audiovisual work based on a b/w video elaboration by Luca Truffarelli. It is built on the strong, dense and continuous interlacement between audio and video, that is enhanced through the whole duration and leads one to wonder which of the two components -sound or images- is cause or consequence of the other. “Xeno”, a greek word indicating something extraneous, describes perfectly this work. IIts main characteristic, in fact, is the fast and continuous mutation of the images, which, while remaining firm on some common points for the whole duration, change rapidly and seamlessly, in unpredictable shapes and colours that, not finding any reply in a known and agreed meaning, force mind to a compulsive decoding work, which results however vain because of the sudden changes. On the other side, sound, imposing itself as a faithful transducer of the cryptic message explicitated by images, even though it recalls to schemes and sounds vaguely more recognisable and interpretable, is anyway, now more and now less, strongly entwined to its visual counterpart, clearly manifesting its own intention not to act like a mediator and translator in the process of assimilation and comprehension of the meaning.
Audio
Agoraphobie de l’infini – Riccardo Tesorini
Suddenly, in a quiet moment: dust, lacerations and sudden changes on other dimensions, transmitted by the voice that becomes a figure. Until it fades out, exploding into a thousand frayed fragments. A dramaturgy of the end, abrupt and strident, which between its edges finds subtle and curved landscapes in the total loss of the spirit. “Agoraphobie de l’infini” is a tribute to Antonin Artaud. Voice I: Riccardo Toccacielo Voice II: Matilde Fratteggiani Bianchi
All in Bass – Enrico Francioni
In “All in bass” the material of concrete origin came from an in-depth study on the physicality of the medium (a double bass), in a laboratory open to the discovery of sound / noisy events. The approach to manipulation was, by super-imposition, purely scientific, even if it led to an unprecedented and unexpected result. The material was generated in various areas of the instrument and four were the elements from which the production of the sound samples started: [WHERE] to answer the question: where to go to generate the sound ?; [MEANS] by what means ?; [WHEREBY] how … using that medium and in what part of the tool? [MOVEMENTS] the gesture, which movements generate the sound? The piece has four sections: the first characterized by events with held sounds; the second from extra events and “random gestures”; the third from events with gestures of fixed duration; and finally the fourth from a-periodic events. So the sub-sections have been articulated with various textures and complex gestures or micro-gestures resulting from sound processing operations such as sound stretching, pitch change, granulation, or structural interventions such as the use of spatialisation ambisonics, or the use of reverberation models.
Electrical Conmotion XT – Elliot Hernández
At the present time we are involved in a world where the electricity is essential for the functioning of most of the things. Even in the way how our brain works which is based on chemical discharges that give rise to electric currents that allow the communication between brain cells. Hence, I can say that all of us are part of electricity and electricity it is part of us. That’s why this electroacoustic piece wants to take the public to an abstract space where the experience of the daily and transformed sounds converge, creating a narrative where we are all part of an electrical shock.
Image sonification in memoriam Ertuğrul Oğuz Fırat – Serkan Sevilgen
Image sonification in memoriam Ertuğrul Oğuz Fırat Fixed media, 2020 This piece was composed in memory of the Turkish composer, painter, and poet Ertuğrul Oğuz Fırat (1923-2014). One of the composer’s paintings, Politika, is used as a raw material for the image sonification. The RGB (red, green, blue) channel values of each pixel in Politika was read with Python programming language. In Csound audio programming language, image data is mapped to several parameters to reveal the patterns in the painting. Serkan Sevilgen is an Istanbul-based computer programmer and composer. He studied Music Technology at Audio Design program, YTU. He is a member of the Istanbul Coding Ensemble (ICE) which is the home laptop group of ITU/MIAM. He is currently the Director of Engineering at Temblor, Inc, master’s student for Sonic Arts at Center for Advanced Studies in Music (MIAM), Istanbul Technical University, and master’s student at Music and Performing Arts, Yildiz Technical University. He is experienced in many programming languages including Csound, MaxMSP, and Supercollider, Arduino. His interests are computer music, algorithmic composition, sonification, improvisation, network music, and spatial audio. Email: ssevilgen@gmail.com Phone: +90 533 361 46 23 Address: Istanbul / Turkey Website: https://serkansevilgen.com/
Risonanze – Marcela Pavia
The piece was composed for the WFS diffusion system using WFS Collider software and the spatialisation used the space to render the compositional structure. Conversely the structure of the composition was conceived taking in account the possibilities offered by the software. WFS COllider allows to control dynamic points and dynamic planes trajectories in real time or differed time, to a not determined level of complexity. Also the spatial movement may be used as a real processing sound technique through nested procedures and recursive techniques. In Risonanze the resonances of the generative sound object (the waterdrop) had delayed trajectories becoming progressively independant and by means of nested and recursive techniques of spatialisation became textures with trajectories in dynamic planes. From the original version a quadraphonic and stereo version were obtained. The concrete sound object (water drop) is the origin of 4 layers some of which includes resonances. The explored categories were: dependence/independence (object/resonance couple); superposition/succession (between sound object and its resonance ), degrees and velocity of change (of the different layers). The spatial rendering of the compositional structure and great èpart of the processing of the sound as well were achieved with WFS Collider so as to demostrate the blurred boundaries between space, time and timbre. Biography Master in Composition at the University Nacional of Rosario (Argentina) and Master in Electronic Music at the Conservatorio “G.Verdi”, Milan. Master in Sound Technologies and Music Composition at the Conservatory and University of Parma. Masterclasses with Dante Grela and Francisco Kropfl in Argentina, with Franco Donatoni (Italy). Artist in residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (USA) Artist in residence at the Gästeatelier Krone di Aarau. (Svizzera) Composer in residence for the 2016 Italian Composers Forum of the Centro di Musica Contemporanea, Milan Member of the Jury of the 2018 WPTA Composition Competition (Buenos Aires) Jury of the Festival Nuovi Orizzonti Sonori 2016. Awards: 2020 First Prize Academy of Music, Wien, 2017 Teatro Musical Theatre for Kids, Centro di Musica Contemporanea, MIlan; 2016 WPTA Composition Competition, SONOM 2012 (Electronic Music), 2012 Erasmus Competition Universitè VIII (Elecronic Music- Paris), “Trinac 2011” (Fondazione“Encuentros Internacionales de Musica Contemporanea” of Alicia Terzian); “Miriam Gideon” Prize 2010 (Research for New Music Competition by the International Alliance for Women in Music); “Claxica 2009”; the 2007 Composition Contest of the Percussive Arts Society (Italy) ecc.
Strait of Hormuz – Hadi Farahmand
Today it’s nearly a dream or in some levels impossible to live in a world with no borders, racism, violence, ignoring the rights of minorities, and power-seeking rulers. Political and military leaders, with their insatiable thirst for power, have ignored human feelings and spirits. The incidents that happened in Jun and July 2019 in the Strait of Hormuz are a clear example of the neglect of human rights by powers or governments to achieve political interests and authority ironically, with the slogan of ‘freedom‘! This project was born from the simultaneous influence of what happened in The Strait of Hormuz and acquaintance with a poem by Abu Sa’id Abu al-Khair (967-1049), a famous Persian Sufi and poet: “Although we are not aware of our actions, We’re not looking at this garden in vain; On the side-line of the book, like a doubt point, We’re not idle, though we’re not at functions.” The song is represented by an artwork painted by Margherita Damiano. As she says: “The painting is trying to reveal the feelings that the music has conveyed. The burst of impressions became a chromatic explosion and with each note, my head loaded with a manifestation of colours.”