Visual Music Archive

close Work Detail

 

Cycles 720 

(2013) 

by Craig Allan is an hybrid visual/audio sequencer built using VVVV and Ableton Live with a custom M4L patch.

The earliest musical notation was chiseled on stone tablets in cuneiform, but it wasn’t until the Classical era of music that we developed the standard arrangement of notes on bars we know so well today. Now, it’s handy having a universal language for music, but in the era of computers, is that language something we need to see? Or could we compose and play music through manipulating some other set of visual symbols?

That’s largely the ideology behind Cycles 720, by Craig Allan of Numbercult. It’s a proof-of-concept A/V sequencer, meant for large venues, that allows someone to compose music simply by drawing shapes.

"In part I hope it inspires people to think of alternative compositional avenues to break free from the constraints of a given program, but mainly I hope that it brings a closer union between A/V systems, and a more immersive experience," Allan tells Co.Design. "I think the ability to construct music and real time graphics in tandem as part of live performance is developing apace."

As of right now, the music is built from the interplay of lines and circles. But playback isn’t a linear, left-to-right page-scanning process. Instead, the geometric abstraction becomes its own automaton, cranking and blinking with elasticity and mechanical logic. In spite of that, Craig Allan doesn’t want composers to read these shapes too literally, as they might notes on a page--and so it seems he’s programmed his own system with a bit of give. He’s specifically after a 'translation' between screen and sound, which to me implies that something could be lost (or gained) in translation from eye to ear.

"I don’t think there should be a strict one-to-one relationship between the geometrical elements of a piece and the sound itself," he writes. "I think you need to develop an aesthetic language that gets the balance between the sound and what’s happening on screen."

 

Source: Mint

 

 

Cycles 720, vvvv, real time, generative, Interactive

Reading

Notation. Calculation and Form in the Arts (2008) is a comprehensive catalogue (in German) edited by Dieter Appelt, Hubertus von Amelunxen and Peter Weibel which accompanied an exhibition of the same name at the Academy of the Arts, Berlin and the ZKM | Karlsruhe. (ZKM)

Notations 21 (2009) by Theresa Sauer features illustrated musical scores from more than 100 international composers, all of whom are making amazing breakthroughs in the art of notation. Notations 21 is a celebration of innovations in musical notation, employing an appreciative aesthetic for both the aural and visual beauty of these creations. The musical scores in this edition were created by composers whose creativity could not be confined by the staff and clef of traditional western notation, but whose musical language can communicate with the contemporary audience in a uniquely powerful way. (Notations 21 Project)

Grid Index (2009) by Carsten Nicolai is the first comprehensive visual lexicon of patterns and grid systems. Based upon years of research, artist and musician Carsten Nicolai has discovered and unlocked the visual code for visual systems into a systematic equation of grids and patterns. The accompanying CD contains all of the grids and patterns featured in the publication from the simplest grids made up entirely of squares to the most complex irregular ones with infinitely unpredictable patterns of growth, as editable vector graphic data files. (Gestalten)

Links

 

SEE ALSO

8 Switches (2011) by Tim Wright presents six black-and-white microcinematic vignettes of retina-searing, hard-edged, epilepsy-inducing sound and vision; digital hallucinations drained of colour, synchronized to a soundtrack that is relentless and unsentimental. Each new section presents a variation on the same sleek, kinetic minimalism. As each section progresses, the razor-sharp line between a host of binary oppositions—black/white, figure/ground, silence/sound, here/there, on/off — dissolves through sheer velocity. (Entr’acte)

Revolving Realities (2010) by Interpalazzo (Martin Hesselmeier, Andreas Muxel and Carsten Goertz) together with composer Marcus Schmickler is an autoreactive installation, one that plays with our sense of reality by continually causing us to perceive and experience a place and an object in new ways. Its surfaces projected with different images, textures and animations, the object becomes a mirror of changing realities. (Meiré und Meiré)

complex composition (2010) by Itaru Yasuda is a generative audiovisual concert piece updated every presentation. All sound and graphics are generated in real time by SuperCollider. (SuperCollider Symposium 2010)

Christopher Salter (*1967) is a media artist, performance director and composer/ sound designer based in Montreal, Canada and Berlin, Germany. His artistic and research interests revolve around the development and production of real time, computationally-augmented responsive performance environments fusing space, sound, image, architectural material and sensor-based technologies. Chris Salter collaborated with Peter Sellars and William Forsythe and co-founded the collective Sponge, whose works stretched between artistic production, theoretical reflection and scientific research. Chris Salter’s performances, installations, research and publications have been presented at numerous festivals and conferences around the world. (TASML)

Paul Prudence is an artist and real-time visual performer working with generative and computational systems. He is particularly interested in the ways in which sound, space and form can be synthaesthetically amalgamated. 

Paul Prudence has performed and lectured at numerous international shows, festivals and conferences. Researcher and writer at Dataisnature. (Transphormetic)