Disquiet Junto Project 0456: Line Up

[soundinett]

Smell that lavender. Lovely piece.

[Pineyb]

I used this Agnes Martin image as a graphic score. There is a horizontal and a vertical sequence. They overlap at the obvious overlaps in the image. Time is related to distance. Sound is related to color. Sounds and sequences patched up on the modular.
The original is twice as long… I time compressed it by half. I’m not sure that I like the time compression artifacts, but it was a bit long at seven minutes.

[Glitcher]

I have to say that I appreciate the time and effort you put into your submissions. Watching and hearing you play both instruments is very enjoyable. It’s like a visual two track recorder.

[wasabicube]

Taking the dimensions of Agnes Martin’s Untitled, 1960 (www.moma.org/collection/works/34006) and coding them into Ableton automation envelopes and MIDI via a custom-written Go application to extract line data from an SVG overlay of her work.
The track relies solely on square waves generated by Xils 3 SE and the Arturia ARP2600 VSTs. The Xils generates a constant square-wave pulse that is ring modded via a 1960Hz square wave from the ARP. The Xils’ cutoff and resonance (or response) is modulated by the left-hand and right-hand variations in the start- and end-points of the horizontal lines. The Arp also provides an LFO-rate backing based on the positions of the vertical lines in the work.

[El.Cjadaldiaul]

aloha! first time posting, thanks for setting up the Disquiet Junto project.

El Cjadaldiaul · Untitled/Mountain/Summer [disquiet0456]

when I read “graphical score”, I couldn’t help but think of Virtual ANS. it’s a spectral synthesizer, which takes a picture and turns it into a spectrogram. basically, a pixel-to-frequency converter. the program is by Alexander Zolotov, author of SunVox. if you’re interested, should be very easy to find on Google.

anyway, I started playing around with a few pictures (paintings by Agnes Martin) and settings in Virtual ANS, and in the end decided to stitch a few of them together

for the final composition I used 3 paintings (yes, I probably cheated a bit on the assignment):

• Untitled, 1960
• Mountain, 1960
• Summer, 1964

unfortunately I can’t link to the actual paintings, but they’re among the first results on Google image search. here you can see the spectrum of the composition. the shape of the paintings is clearly recognizable:

I wanted to add some piano improvisation on top of it, but I felt that too much “music” wasn’t the right thing for it. so I just added to the texture using an ostinato 3-note riff soaked in echoes, and a few almost inaudible chords. I played my keyboard through the RE-1 Tape Machine app on an iPad.

[bassling]

Very different. I wouldn’t have picked it as the same artwork.

[bassling]

Cheers, I like that analogy.

The Juntos are a good opportunity to play.

[Glitcher]

@RPLKTR

I’m super grateful to have stumbled upon Lines and the Disquiet Junto. It is one of the best parts of 2020 for me.

I simply cannot agree more with that. Well said.

[Tuonela]

I didn’t know her work at all. I spent some time looking through a number of images and this one grabbed me. I like that while it is as apparently linear and structured, like most of her work at that time, it has small irregularities and blips, unlike much of her work and much like most of my soundscapes.

I created a short “arched” sine tone which dropped a few tones and made a 15 second sonic piece, then replicated it, building a slightly irregular “structure” with uneven changes of pitch and tempo. This structure was duplicated and the mix treated with reverb. These were layered over a foundation tone made from the original tone structure and stretched and treated in the Abstract Chamber.

It’s a little ragged around the edges, but then, so is the image.

[disquiet]

@RPLKTR

I feel bad for joking about this, seeing how seriously you reacted.

Oh, no, not at all. I didn’t worry or anything. I think we understood each other. Sorry I further muddied the waters. I was just making sure my intention was clear. Oy, text-only communication can get complicated.

[disquiet]

The playlist should be up to date as of 8:30am, California time, but if your track is missing, lemme know.

[DeDe]

guys this week is a seriously great cuvée, some A+ stuff,
really enjoying, bravo!

[Paul_Reiners]

I wrote a program in Processing that lets you explore sonically Agnes Martin’s painting “Summer 1964”.
I also made a short video of me running the app, but I consider that a poor substitute for actually running the app and interacting with the painting. Here are the links:

• source code
• video demo
• app for Mac

Here is the most relevant code:

  float blueAtPixel = blue(pixels[mouseX + mouseY * width]);
  float blueInRegion = blueConvolutiion(mouseX, mouseY, blueMatrix, blueMatrixSize, img);
  // Map blue in the pixel region of the mouse logarithmically to 150 - 1150 to create a base frequency range
  float frequency = pow(1000, blueAtPixel / 255.0) + 150;
  // Use blue at the pixel of the mouse mapped from -0.5 to 0.5 as a detune argument
  float detune = map(blueInRegion, 0, 255, -0.5, 0.5);

Basically, the synth pitch is in ratio to the amount of blue present where the mouse is pointing. To be precise, the base pitch is mapped from the blue value of the single pixel, while the detuning is mapped from the average of that pixel and a small neighborhood of it.

One thing that is counter-intuitive is that white has an RGB value of [255, 255, 255]. So those white dots yield a high pitch, while they look like they have no blue (after all, they’re white), so it seems like the pitch should be low.

I spent a lot of time trying to make some sort of sound composition out of this, but the painting is simply too detailed and I couldn’t find a good way to map the two spatial dimensions of the painting (in its full detail) to the one temporal dimension of sound. (I’ve ran into this problem before.)

[vgmrmojo]

Disquiet0456
Boundary Elevated
• Key: Bb major/Bb minor ? BPM: 120 Time signature: 4/4 DAW: Reaper
• Instruments:
• Plug-ins: Autopaint, Waves Berzerk and Rverb, Vacuum Pro vsti, Ample bass P lite II, Bazille CM
• Chose Untitled 2001 to use for my musical score
• Imported the image into Iannix https://www.iannix.org/en/
• Used Loopbe1 to interface Iannix with Reaper thru midi to trigger the synth patches in Reaper
• Ran the image thru Autopaint for some background and imported the.wav into Reaper added some distortation and reverb to the .wav file

[Paul_Reiners]

The reason I did this transformation is because I wanted to make this image into a literal music score. That’s right, no wishy washy “inspirations”, no “interpretation by free association”. We want a music score that’s deterministic, reproducible, almost… scientific.

That’s what I aimed for too. I basically found it impossible if I were to use the painting in all its detail. Or even in a reduced 640x640 version. I used a grid painting. If I were to do it again, I might use one of the “parallel bands” paintings and move through time down the painting with the sound, using some sort of average of the pixel values in each horizontal slice.

[krehg]

https://soundcloud.com/ohm-research/nett-disquiet-0456

I used Agnes Martin’s “Summer” as my score for this piece. I saw it as the wavetable grid of an E350, and randomly scanned it with various clock and voltage generators.

[drlids]

I managed to participate this week as well. That makes two in a row!

dl

[RPLKTR]

One way your choice of painting could produce music as a score would be to use the following rules (just one possible example):

• each cell is a measure of time
• the size of the white dot is volume
• the relative horizontal position of the dot within its cell is its “dequantization” (center is perfect, left is sooner, right is later)
• the relative vertical position of the dot within its cell is the pitch (possibly quantized to a scale)
• the overall energy (lightness) of the cell is some expression value (filter cutoff?)

The biggest coding challenge would be to crop separate cells for analysis, especially given their imperfect geometrical nature, and further distortion in the photo taken of the painting. Something a little OpenCV might possibly help with.

[Paul_Reiners]

Using the separate cells as units definitely makes sense. Using pixels as I did is arbitrary. I did, early on, consider using the cells as discrete units.

I simply didn’t have the time. Work at my real job (boring web development) has been too stressful lately, and I needed to spend some time not programming this weekend. At any rate, I learned a little more about Processing.

[laerm]

It’s been a while since I did one.