Manipulating Sound Through Imagery

There are quite a few applications available that produce audio from imagery. Whether it’s photography, or computer generated graphics the results can be fascinating. For further exploration an article that describes eight programs that convert imagery to sound called Say it With Pictures is available on emusician.com. An additional application that I’ve been looking at recently called Photosounder has the unique capability of allowing you to manipulate sound in its image state. This creates a whole host of effects from time stretching to flipping the sound upside down creating a bizarre, inverse, reflection of the original sound. For this example I used Photosounder to process the sound from More Memory Man Madness. A few of the adjustments I made were the rotation of the image, the gamma property, and pixels per second.

Memory Man Through Photosounder

Maxi-Korg Repeat Function

I literally dusted off my Maxi-Korg today which had been stored in a closet for well too long. To my surprise after a minimal amount of wiping and moving the controls it still sounded as clean as the last time I used it. This synth really sucks you in. After spending a couple of hours creating sounds I decided to experiment with the repeat function.

The repeat function has two sliders; one for speed and the other for the duration or width of the note repeating. It also has a mode switch. I set the mode to “A” to retrigger the note I was playing, then fussed with the speed and width to get this wet, growling, engine like noise. For the time being, I’m leaving this beast in my studio so expect to hear more from the Maxi-Korg in the future.

Maxi-Korg Repeat Function

Conversion of Graffiti into Sound

Recently I was invited by Michel Rouzic to try his software, Photosounder, designed for converting images into sound. Image to sound conversion is something I’ve been meaning to explore, so today I finally had some time to have a look. The software does much more than create strange sound from images. It’s a great time stretching tool, and it also reads in wave files as images allowing you to use the same sort of manipulation you can do on image based files.

This sound was created from the full resolution version of the graffiti photo shown. I settled on this image because of it’s simplicity, and the diagonal strokes of the tag produced a nice cascade of descending pitches. The way the flash lights up the center of the photo gave the sound a dynamic swell that I emphasized by adjusting the gamma parameter. Photosounder allows you to set the time and frequency range of the audio produced, so for this example I put the bottom at 52Hz and the top at 12kHz.

Graffiti Photo to Sound

Some Kind of Adhesive Excerpt from Live Mix

Here’s another segment from the live recording I wrote about in the last entry. This is an excerpt from the piece Some Kind of Adhesive from One Day to Save All Life (2008, Unearthed Music). If you are familiar with the piece you will probably notice that this excerpt bares little resemblance to the original recording.

This is an example of how far a piece can stray from it’s original structure. The tempo hasn’t changed and some of the same instrument recordings are used, but these elements have been shaped into something new by cutting, stretching, looping, processing, and other forms of manipulation in real-time during the performance. This makes every set different from the next and keeps things interesting for us and (hopefully) our listeners.

Some Kind of Adhesive Live Mix (Excerpt)

Segment of Improvisation from Set Recording

This is one of several little magic moments from a recent performance with Nils Westdal. You can hear the Memory Man feedback come in at about twenty five seconds. Since we were limited to using laptops for this performance I was able to include the Memory Man as an external device as described in More Memory Man Madness. One of the good things about laptop sets are that you’re able to focus on improvising arrangements of the material, and freely experiment with processing.

Segment of Improvisation from Photo Exhibit