Fe2O3 from One Day to Save All Life

For my first few entries in 2009 I would like to take a quick look back at music that I’ve been involved in in 2008. One of my favorite tracks from Keston and Westdal’s album One Day to Save All Life is Fe2O3 which we named after the chemical composition of iron oxide. This is the middle piece in a group of three gapless tracks on the album, so unfortunately it has an abrupt start and end. A much better way to hear it is in sequence with the previous and subsequent tracks in gapless format as it was mastered on the CD. In any case, I am fond of the abundant processing we used creating a textural atmosphere on this piece.

Fe2O3

Segment of New track at 84 bpm

Here’s a brief segment of a new track I’m working on. I don’t have much to say about it other than it’s at eighty four beats per minute and involves lots of processing. It is still untitled and far from complete, but I expect that it will be included on the album that I have committed to releasing this March on Unearthed Music. If you listen carefully you may recognize one of the layers as the sound from Octave Pedal Rhodes.

84 Octave (working title)

More Image to Sound Techniques: Mould by Nick Froud

Today’s fascinating sound is another example of the conversion of digital imagery into sound and was submitted by Manchester based artist Nick Froud. Nick writes:

“I have been following your blog for months and have found it really inspiring. The software featured in your most recent entry is quite similar to a program I (very quickly) put together for an exhibition idea I have. My girlfriend produces photography based and nature and process, I wanted to adopt these ideas into sound that could accompany each of her pictures in a gallery.

The program I made converts an image directly into sound by scanning along each pixel and outputting a sample to a wave file based on an average of the red, green and blue channels. It also outputs the red green and blue channels as CC data in a MIDI file. In this way, I intend to create music entirely generated from an image but with human direction as to choices of effects to be controlled by MIDI data, layering of sounds etc. The sound generated are much noisier than in other sound / image conversion applications, but I think it gives a better feel of the texture of an image.”

You can hear more of Nick’s creations on his myspace sites Crunchy Alligator and Circastate.

Mould

Sticky Key Reveals the Insides

You’ve probably heard enough about my Casiotone 403 by now, but I’m not finished with it yet. What’s my fixation with this outdated, inflexible, cheese filled, imitation wood grain dinosaur? I don’t quite know myself. I can tell you that it’s not the kitsch factor. I actually like the way this relic sounds. So much so that I bothered to open it up to repair a sticky key. What I found inside were well organized electronics in a wooden and metal chassis that opened up like a clam and invited me in. So here’s another example of of sound from the Casiotone. I added a bass line with the Maxi-Korg and delay on the comping. Two great tastes that go great together.

Casiotone Madness in D Minor

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