Christine Chen-Looking Outwards-04

Above is Jimmy Lakatoes, Murcof, Alexandre Burton and Julien Roy’s piece Three Pieces with Titles created in 2017
Source: https://vimeo.com/239921625

While scrolling through all the numerous works of sound and computation, my attention was captured by the piece Three Pieces with Titles created by Jimmy Lakatoes, electronic musician Murcof, Alexandre Burton and Julien Roy. The piece is consisted of three pieces of musical audio that is created and controlled through manipulation of movement of physical forms under the camera. The creators used openFrameworks for processing the visual inputs and driving videos. The visuals were then synchronized to trigger phrases and even in Csound orchestra. All of visual details, such as colors, that were recorded influenced the audio output. The creators’ artistic sensibilities were manifested in the final form through rearranging the rhythm of the audio output and editing out some minor background sounds to make the final sound output more pleasing, organized, and clean.

The creator’s use of computation to turn visual forms into audio forms changed my views on audio. Before reading about this piece, I have always thought of visual forms and audio as two distinct entities that are not really relate to each other although both are extremely important. How one can be used to generate the other is just fascinating to me and makes me start to think whether the other ones of the human’s 5 senses can be used to generate each other through computation.