(Warning: This project contains explicit material)

I was really interested in the idea of reversing the spectrogram to sonify existing images as a a way to talk about or refer to topics that would otherwise be taboo. For this project, I used the spectrogram max patch that was part of the PhD dissertation of Tadej Droljc. There was a lot going on here under the hood, and a significant portion of my time was spent in understanding the inner workings of the patch. I then adapted it to take images as amplitude and phase input, perform manipulations on the matrices and sonify them using frequency domain processing. The images I used were some of the iconic nudes by Robert Mapplethorpe, one of my favorite photographers.

(Note: I tried implementing the contrast boost in max itself, first using jit.brcosa, and then using jit.expr and a formula, however both ways didn’t work properly because I was dealing with matrices with single planes rather than 4, because the amplitude and phase information were stored in 2 planes of a matrix. In the end, I just ended up using iPhoto)

I then recorded one loop of the audio for each image and stitched them together in Adobe Premiere to create the video documentation.

While the timbre of the piece is quite static, since the whole thing uses only sawtooth waves, I found that the contours of the sounds very visibly mimic the contours and contrasts in the bodies and poses of Mapplethorpe’s models.