2 av generative techniques by Shawn Feeney

Posted: April 27th, 2012 ˑ Filed under: Artists, Software ˑ Comments Closed

On his Vimeo channel Shawn Feeney presents two approaches how to generate images out of tones and shades out of images. He did these works some time ago, using various programs

Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise – Realization (2002):
Treatise is a graphic musical score written by Cornelius Cardew in the 1960ies comprising 193 pages of lines, symbols, and various geometric or abstract shapes that eschew conventional musical notation. Implicit in the title is a reference to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, which was of particular inspiration to Cardew in composing the work. The score neither contains nor is accompanied by any explicit instruction to the performers in how to perform the work.
Shawn Feeney played the Treatise composition by using the software MetaSynth to generate the sounds from scans of the pages and then animating the score in After Effects. Sine waves are generated from the black areas of the score as it scrolls from right to left, with the y-axis corresponding to pitch. An imaginary vertical line in the center of the screen is the „sounding membrane“.

MIDI Visualization Techniques Using Correspondance (2002):
This work quite goes the other way round. Here the music comes first in form of of midi notes. Using the realtime MIDI note input (specifically pitch, velocity, and duration) an app made with Director and Flash generates corresponding animated visuals. Correspondance has a number of interpretation paradigms, mapping the MIDI input to various visual characteristics (x/y position, size, color, etc). As you can see, the av-sync is very straight forward.
Correspondance also has a networked option where two performers can link to each other. Each performer sees the animation generated by the other player’s musical performance. An audiovisual feedback loop can be created if each performer treats the visuals an an animated graphic score.