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Forms – Visual Music Scoring Machine

Twitch Channel.April 2020

This project is a real-time audiovisual synthesis exercise.

From a set of rules of graphic generation, based on randomness and probability, a custom software proposes a series of visual compositions created in realtime and never repeating. It is permanently streaming at Playmodes’ Twitch channel at https://www.twitch.tv/playmodes

How likely do we define a square, triangle, line, or cloud of points to appear? What is the density of geometric figures on the canvas? And its size? How many different colors can we use? All these parameters end up shaping the final characteristics of the audiovisual composition.

Graphic results refer to the geometric abstraction of the avant-garde: from the Bauhaus school (Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian) to the Russian suprematists and constructivists (Tatlin, Malevitch, Rodchenko).

These scores can be framed within the “tradition” of graphic musical notation that gained strength among twentieth-century composers (John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mestres Quadreny, Gyorgi Ligetti …), and which allow music to be released from tone, bars and the rigidity of classic staves.

Thanks to a real-time “sonification” engine, the resulting graphics are transformed into sound using spectral synthesis algorithms. A header runs through the image from left to right, interpreting that small vertical fragment of the image. The luminance captured by this header is transformed into bass (if at the bottom of the image) and treble (if at the top of the image).