Last year, I had a chance to attend one of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s exhibition. Out of all the projects that he accomplished throughout his career, I fell in love with his latest release called “Async.” This album is very subtle in audio processing, but, at the same time, very minimalistic in tonality.
Inspired by the astonishing work of art, I realized that input signals with less variations of all sound component truly show the power of the system that it goes through. In other words, if a boring instrumental music processed in a system became a very sophisticated signal, then it implies the greater quality and complexity of the signal processing system.
For this assignment, I wanted to prove that little details in a system can develop interesting differentiations to an original signal. For the sake of choosing a song that sounds simple, I decided to input the music video of “To Build a Home” by The Cinematic Orchestra.
In Max, I processed the audio and video signals separately. For the audio component, I incorporated a tapped delay line system. Compared to an ordinary tapped delay system, I considered sounds from two channels individually to bring about a gradual variation in a song. Moreover, one of the channel sounds focused only on the first half of the sample part when the other dealt with the second half. This processing resulted into an intriguing echo that translated from one side of a stereo to another. For the video component, I utilized the patches from our lecture. The video system is a combination of infinite feedback and slit scan. The resulting output led to look like, to my best description, a mosaic flip book.
I was very satisfied that a dull input became a dreamy video / audio. Also, I was glad to check my hypothesis that little details matter in a system for there to be an interesting result. However, I wonder that the video may have resulted in a better way if I added another video on top the original.
This assignment helped me think more about suitable parameters in a system to bring about better results. Since certain values completely distort a signal, I had to test different values to find the right fit for a system. Along with that, I would like to learn more later in the course about how many channels in sound signals can create a more spatial hearing experience.