Organizing the Bookcase by Sean Ohlenkamp and Lisa Ohlenkamp

Reworked library recordings

Above is the reworked version of the library noise. I also used the 3D Max output to cobble together some visual accompaniment.

Radius Installation by Random International

CC HH UK // Test video shot (unedited) from rAndom International on Vimeo.

"The installation is a sound-reactive media installation that plays with the light emitted by spatially arranged light sources. Where a commonly flat arrangement of LEDs would be conceived as a display with a resolution too low to establish image, text or pattern, Amplitude is actually home to a large number of individually controlled light sources on a y-axis. The introduction of a third dimension to the traditional concept of a display turns the piece into a vivid part of the space and emphasises the fact that the piece is a light installation rather than a display; the algorithm controlling the emittance of light creates a living organism that can be detected in the shadows that the installation casts on itself."

Chris Cunningham show

I went to the Chris Cunningham show at the Opera House. Above is a previous A/V performance from him that appears to also contain most of the important elements I saw including the re-edited versions of 'Windowlicker', 'Sheena is a Parasite', 'Rubber Johnny' and 'Flex'.

I had an extra ticket which my sister ended up using and that proved interesting. She's not familiar with Cunningham's work but I thought that she wouldn't be too freaked out as she loves Spanish cinema - particularly inventive stuff by Guillermo del Toro and clever but terrifying horrors like Rec. However she felt this footage was a bit "weird". I must admit that I thought that it was a bit unsettling at times. Especially the more sexually explicit parts. And they were quite often "parts".

After leaving we both agreed that the precision editing - perfectly in time with the audio - was amazing. The super-fast cuts ensured that even the most frenetic soundtrack appeared to be generated by the image that was displayed on screen. Although some of these segments went on too long. Initially interesting, they were endlessly looped so that even someone like me (who loves their repetitive beats and hypnotic visuals) started losing interest before a particular section was finished.

My sister also said that the shocking, more pornographic material didn't feel edgy after being repeated so much. Which was probably true but really strange to hear her make that observation. Especially given that the next show she will be seeing is Dancing On Ice this Saturday.

Links to Chris Cunningham DVDs:

The Work Of Director Chris Cunningham [DVD]
Rubber Johnny - Chris Cunningham [DVD]

3D Studio Max animation

Above is some geometry being plain mental in 3d Max. The textures on the objects are from the image on the earlier post. I'm currently looking at ways to use the morphing tool to give another aspect to the sort of ominous shapes that I'm placing in the British Library as visualizations of noise.

Sonar by Renaud Hallée

Sonar from Renaud Hallée on Vimeo.

Library rhythm

Hardly likely to be crashing into the Top 40 anytime soon, the above was a test to see how the noise from the British Library could be arranged. All the audio is sourced from those London recordings with snippets organised to create a rhythm. I've also cobbled together a quick and very rough visualization video using imagery generated by the audio itself - seeing as it was getting uploaded to Youtube.

Adam Brandon animation for The Album Leaf

Album Leaf Animation Test 2 from Adam Brandon on Vimeo.

I posted an earlier Adam Brandon visualization but I've since been looking at his Vimeo channel. From what I've seen it appears that he is particularly interested in visually representing sound. (For one project he attempted to create a visual notation for where silence exists.) It's certainly of interest give what I'm working on but it's even more intriguing given that he's studying in Manchester.

He also has two blogs on the go. The first is primarily touching on sound-related video at http://adams-sketchbook.blogspot.com/ while the other collects together the full range of his graphic design/communication/art direction passions at http://hello-mynameisadam.blogspot.com/.

Obsolete technology: noise as music

Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

Two closely related projects above. The first being Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody' assembled from dot matrix printers and other electronic crap from yesteryear. For me, it's incredibly melancholic. As are Radiohead, of course, who have been processed in much the same way for the second project.

I'm referencing these for a couple of reasons. The first is that it relates to an earlier suggestion that the library noise could be reconfigured into a less haphazard form. It could become rhythmic and arranged (if not quite music). But the aesthetics of the projects are also interesting to me. I've spoken with Dave in the past about obsolete technology as we both felt that the history of hardware hasn't been documented properly due to the haste to constantly upgrade. Okay, people might snigger or indulge in some retro fetishism for an old Atari or Sinclair, but then there has been a mountain of other electronic machinery integral to a lot of industries that - despite probably having the combined memory of one current mobile phone - actually tells us a lot about how things used to be produced. And maybe by acknowledging that development we would be less inclined to take for granted the ease of current digital production.

2'03"

I tried to upload a MP3 of track one to have it play here via a flash player. However it's not working correctly and has been uploaded as a Youtube video instead.

Sonorama

Sonorama from Vogler Voice on Vimeo.

Sonorama from kamila mikos on Vimeo.

Sonorama from Vogler Voice on Vimeo.

Sonorama is a project that catalogues relationships between sound and shape.
More at http://www.sonorama.org/

Pappeltalks

PAPPELTALKS from vizage on Vimeo.

One of the good things about this Masters is having a group of creative people undertaking the same course of study that spot things that you might otherwise miss. As with the last post, Amy found the above.

Last week Kai also brought in Johnny Trunk's book on 'Library Music' which has some inspirational examples of vintage graphic design.

Basic Sound Effector from Adam Brandon

Basic Sound Effector from Adam Brandon on Vimeo.

The software used to create this was something called Cinema 4D.

Toulon books

Another short, quick experiment which looks at the potential to use the colours from library book spines as markers for noise. There would be a requirement for the assignment of a colour to particular tones [perhaps with more or less vibrant hues representing the pitch of the sound] and then editing it to the audio track: maybe producing something that is choppier and far less gradual than the above trial. The inspiration for this visualization was disco lights.

Chris Cunningham

I'm currently working on something else where I may get to interview director Chris Cunningham. Who is one of my idols and a truly modern visionary. Ahead of that, I'm revisiting the Directors Label DVD that collected together some of his work back in 2003 and its booklet contains some words from him about trying to provide visuals for music.

On his video debut making Autechre's 'Second Bad Vilbel':

"...I was obsessed with the idea of making things move in time with music. I was trying to build this chunk of non-specific industrial machinery that would come apart in time to the music. So I built this model in my back garden and got all these pieces of machinery and stuff and ended up filming them. Then I tried to make a video out of the footage. I remember the band being really disappointed and me realising that the bottom line is... how do you turn a visually abstract idea into a piece of film. Even now I think that most of the stuff that I think up whilst listening to music is impossible to achieve..."

While Cunningham sees this project as something of a failure, it was the first in a series of works that married sound and vision - albeit while developing a relationship that is uniquely Chris Cunningham. How some of these ideas were triggered by a particular record is really interesting [in the case of Aphex Twin's 'Windowlicker', as one example, he felt that the track itself verged on the pornographic while he also wanted to create something that subverted the imagery that we are used to seeing in rap videos].

Anyway, this presents a good enough reason to embed some of his work here for future reference. The last, his own 'Rubber Johnny' film project, is a pretty disturbing masterpiece.


Autechre - 'Second Bad Vilbel'


Bjork - 'All is Full of Love'


Aphex Twin - 'Windowlicker'


Aphex Twin - 'Come To Daddy'


Portishead - 'Only You'


The Horrors - 'Sheena is a Parasite'


Chris Cunningham - 'Rubber Johnny' [music by Aphex Twin]

By the way, this isn't the first time I've posted something Aphex Twin-related. Previously I added his spectrogram. Interestingly, he also claims to suffer from synaesthesia which is very much related to the report part of this study.

Noisia - 'Machine Gun' video

Holland's Noisia - an act known for their ability to shift from drum & bass to electro - have employed Henk Loorbach to provide a video for the grinding title track from their new 'Machine Gun EP'. The band state that it's “an abstract story of mankind and its self-destructiveness, loosely based on the tale of Frankenstein’s monster”.

It possibly has very little to do with my current project although I do like the use of the collaged footage within the video. [Even though it gets a bit gory towards the end.] Anyway, just as a general influence, I thought that it was worth documenting.

Meantime, I also booked my ticket to go to London to carry out my British Library work.

Tenori-On

tenori-on from M I C H E L on Vimeo.

The last video reminded me to post something on the Tenori-On. Probably most visible via Little Boots' performances, this sequencer is an instrument that also provides a visualization of the music as it plays. I've seen it used a few times (including as part of Little Boots' stage show) and it's hypnotic.

Clavilux 2000: Generative Music Visualization Composition

Clavilux 2000 - Interactive instrument for generative music visualization from Jonas Heuer on Vimeo.

Another link that I need to thank Amy for finding:

Clavilux 2000 [jonasheuer.de] is a subtle music visualization installation that represents the playing of sounds by way of a simultaneous animation that can be interpreted.

For every note played on the keyboard, a stripe appears of which the dimensions, position and color correspond to the way the particular key was stroke. The length and vertical position of stripe is mapped unto the velocity, while the stripe's width reflects the length of each note. By mapping the color wheel on the circle of 5ths, the colors give the viewer (and listener) an impression of the harmonic relations. Notes belonging to one specific tonality correspond to colors from one specific area of the color wheel. Therefore each key has its own color scheme and "wrong" notes stand out in contrasting colors. The more different tonalities a music piece has, the more colorful the resulting visualization will be.

As all the stripes do not disappear, the resulting representation is able to convey insights about the composition as well as the specific performance: Which notes were played the most? Which were the loudest notes? Which range of the keys was played mostly? How harmonically constant was the music?

Larry Cuba's 'Calculated Movements'

I posted Calculated Movements by the seminal Larry Cuba on the Communication Design blog a while ago. I remembered it again today as Cuba's name was mentioned in one of the books I have [within a chapter about music represented through video].

Audiovisualize

I picked up a few DVDs that I thought would highlight some of the ways that other people have interpreted sound visually. One was Addictive TV's Audiovisualize. The write-up on the project sounded promising enough:

"Although working in an area with a rich but relatively little-known history, today's audiovisual artists perhaps owe as much to the VJs and music producers who've emerged from 90's electronic music culture, as some of the most influential 20th Century experimental film makers like Norman McClaren, Len Lye, Jordan Belson and notably Oskar Fischinger, who began laying the foundations of this fusion genre, based on a synthesis of motion, colour and sound, over half a century ago.

Now, using contemporary techniques such as sampling, remixing and digital manipulation alongside traditional film, video and music production methods, modern audiovisualizers are able to push creative boundaries ever further. Music and image play an equal, complimentary and indeed synergistic role in this arena with modern software allowing a much closer and more specific integration than was ever possible previously.

Whether it's finding new ways of visualizing music, or expressing images sonically, the goal is the same now as it ever was; to produce something that can be watched in much the same way as we listen to music. Again and again."

Unfortunately the 2004 release already seems very tired. The opening project - a video put togther for a track called 'Snake Worship Island' by Eclectic Method - is particularly uninspiring. An edited selection of old kung fu movies accompanies a soundtrack that might have appeared at least a little cutting edge had it been released before Depth Charge's early 1990's output and there appears to be some prevailing, naive approach of 'if it moves, filter it'.

More successful is a second video under the title 'Corp. Inc' which utilises archives of science-based imagery and some text overlays that share some similarities with Rob Chiu's 'The Time Has Come' video. But there is no getting away from the fact that the relationships involved in "visualizing music" throughout the DVD are tenuous at best. It barely touches on the synergy that the project aspires to create.

Maybe I'm being overtly critical, but I just don't believe that matching up the tempo of a piece of music to random imagery, however pretty, really adds anything of massive value. Personally, I'd expect more of a considered undertaking where even the most abstract of imagery has an agreed relationship with particular sounds. Like the Kate Moross videos (posted earlier) where the kick drum is represented via one element and a narrative becomes defined by the audio. Audiovisualize instead lacks the attention span and conviction to present something close to a schematic system for addressing sound in a visual form. I'm guessing that in many cases the music was felt to be too repetitive for the artists to create something that rigidly represented specific sections/sound elements and still hold the interest of the viewer. But, sadly, the end result - laregly a series of ever-shifting fractal-like eye candies - just proves to be meaningless.