Creative Audio - Work Summary
This will be quite a long post because I want to put all the outcomes I got so far for this project. All my workflow is here.
Michan, Will and I formed a group, did some brainstorming then decided we would take the same concept of creating sound from the city silhouette and each one of us would get an outcome going through different paths. Here I’ll explain mine.
With Photoshop and the grid, I got some initial values for the notes and then I created pure sound frequencies with these values:
https://soundcloud.com/felipe-sineta/sounds-of-auckland-i
As you can see, the notes follow the red dots on the roofs. One thing I’ve also noticed is that when the points were close on the Y axis, the sound barely changed. I knew I had to develop this idea further, but wasn’t really sure how.
I also wanted to have a more refined input to work on. After some time in Processing, I got to a program that reads an image and locates the Y coordinate of the roof through the X axis skipping a certain interval. Here’s the result I got:
My next step was to change how I created the sound. Using the aspect I realized earlier and instead of using the positions to create pure frequencies, I divided the height into eight different zones, representing musical notes (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, and do again). This made it easier for me to work with since I had less options - eight zones instead of individual frequencies. Next on I wrote down what notes the positions represented:
Disclaimer: I didn’t know that, but in English the name for the note is TI and in Portuguese it’s SI.
That sorted, I worked with the set of notes on the left. The set on the right has the scale inverted, but I stuck with the original. As I wrote them down in sequences of eight, I used the same sequences to produce the sound. The first two sequences of eight were used to get a bass. The third sequence became the strings. The fourth sequence, the synthetic-like sound. I used the rest to create a solo using strings with different settings.
I downloaded FL Studio and tried out on that. Michan also gave me some hints on how to use it. After some attempts, and applying the configuration I specified before, I got to this is the outcome:
https://soundcloud.com/felipe-sineta/auckland-mix
Working on the visualization of the sound, I did some more research and found this video from a Brazilian YouTube channel:
At 2:50 his device is being tested. It allows you to see shapes according to the sound waves of your voice as you speak inside a can. I managed to replicate it as can be seen on Michan’s blog:
http://michanfukushima.tumblr.com/post/125386762819/here-we-have-experimented-with-ideas-using-our
http://michanfukushima.tumblr.com/post/125387021155/testing-out-felipes-laser-frequency-displayer
At home I set up my system and recorded some attempts. Here are the videos:
Second attempt, first time trying the slow motion mode:
This is the slow motion working: https://youtu.be/74kZrshSv4Q
I don’t know why, but tumblr won’t let me upload any other embedded video. Maybe I hit the limit per post.
This is all I have so far. As for what to do now, I had some ideas:
- Once I have the process sorted out, recreate that with more pictures from different perspectives. As a tourist, I’ve visited some spots and I may already have some that would work;
- Use my own photos, just to get all original material;
- Create an album cover and sort the info on the tracks to give it a more professional feel;
- Mix efforts with Michan and implement some cymatics, try out and experiment with that;
- FL Studio has a kind of characteristic sound, which is the sequence of notes instead of a continuous sound. On the next tries I’ll try to break it somehow;
During this break I’ll think more about it and define how I’ll finalize the whole project. I think I’ve covered a lot of ground so far, learnt a lot on how to produce and edit sound and use creative thinking do make stuff.
