#39

I simply cannot agree more with that. Well said.

3 Likes
#40

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.

5 Likes
#41

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. :slight_smile:

1 Like
#42

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

#43

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

4 Likes
#44

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:

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.)

4 Likes
#45

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

4 Likes
#46

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.

3 Likes
#47

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.

5 Likes
#48

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

dl

4 Likes
#49

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.

3 Likes
#50

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.

4 Likes
#51

It’s been a while since I did one.

6 Likes
#52

I think I have counted a year to around this month the last time I took part in a Disquiet weekly event but my aim is to change that and hope it leads to a reinvigoration in my own personal work, which I have also been giving less focus to.

I chose This Rain (1958) and as a source material/ instrument I used field recordings I took of rain hitting the plastic roofing over my in-law’s porch. This Rain acted as a general guide for how I arranged my recordings and applied processing - Using the two main rectangles as a guide for two core motifs/tracks moving/panning back and forth across the stereo field and the larger third rectangle as the space in which the smaller ones would sit, this larger rectangle is comprised of a third and forth centered tracks consisting of heavier/ bass tones that ground the other two tracks. Martin’s focus on bliss, joy and happiness in her work inspired the tonality of the piece as I returned/ leaned into the curve of the sort of work I was creating a few years ago. Thank you for Disquiet and thank you for letting me take part.

OHELEM · [Disquiet0456] - This Rain
5 Likes
#53

I was really struck by Agnes Martin - both her works, and her life story. There’s an austerity to her work that defies categorisation and meaning. It’s less about the painting itself, and more about your internal experiences while viewing.

For this work, I chose Untitled #1 2003. I loved the striking contrasts between the black triangles [mountains? I choose to interpret them in such a way] against the static, lined sky [power line?]. I went for something appropriately minimal - a generated tone that went from 0-440hz [aka A, the shape of the mountains] and down again. To represent the parallel lines I went for a steady pulsating sound, and for the backdrop I took one of my field recordings of a falling pebble, slowed x1200 times.

5 Likes
#54

Hello everyone, I’m new here, so go easy on me :slight_smile:

I’ve listened to some of the submissions today and they are really good.

Here is mine:

Inspired by Agnes Martin’s painting “Grattitude” - https://www.wikiart.org/en/agnes-martin/grattitude-2001.

I created this piece with live coding synth Sonic Pi in a one-take session, using an experimental tuning system based on 19-Edo. Basically, I gazed into the painting while coding the sounds, and this was the outcome - My interpretation, as if it were a digital score. I see warmth and focus in the minimalist lines.

Lee.

8 Likes
#55

First time contributing to Disquiet, hello!

I picked ‘Happy Holidays’, a painting made up of seven white-coloured lines and seven peach-coloured lines: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/martin-happy-holiday-ar00179

My initial idea was to represent the lines by recording myself walking down seven parallel streets near where I live in Brighton: the structure of the painting reminded me of the appearance of these streets on a map. I planned to record on my phone and on a tape recorder and then process the results, but my recorder chewed up the tape I was using and the phone recording was wracked by tons of wind noise, so that was no good.

Instead I made a very simple realisation, interpreting the white lines as empty space and the peach lines as sounding space. I sat in my car (nearest quiet space to hand) and used an ebow on my zither, playing for 30 seconds and pausing for 30 seconds, and moving the ebow down the strings as I followed the ‘score’. The ebow-zither sounds similar to sine tones, but with a physical roughness and unpredictable variety compared to a ‘perfect’ digital sine. Likewise being able to hear passing cars and other background noise in the pauses. This feels appropriate for Martin’s hand-made minimalism, sparse but with a human touch. I suppose the equivalent approach for an artist like Donald Judd would be computer-generated sine tones and digital silence.

I also wanted to complicate the texture somewhat, to match the subtle gradations of the painting. So I recorded my realisation with 3 recorders simultaneously (my Zoom, my phone, and a cheapo mp3 player), and faded between these 3 recordings, so that the texture is always subtly shifting.

I don’t use soundcloud, but have uploaded this to my Bandcamp, here: https://hardworkingfamilies.bandcamp.com/album/hardworking-disquiet

5 Likes
#56

I chose a c. 1960 Untitled work, which I see as a line-drawn pyramid filled in with semi-parallel lines up to the pyramidion. This got me thinking about scales in quarter-tones, and so I ended up building a bunch of up/down scales using sine waves with basic effects added. I see the result as line scans of the painting from different angles, in frequency space, culminating in something weird but relatable, harmonically.

5 Likes
#57

Hey All, I penciled in some parallel lines in midi added drums and vocalized a poem from Peter Gizzi caused it had a line about parallel lives. The vocal has 3 pitches running parallel too. Hope all are well.

Peace, Hugh

3 Likes
#58

I did not quite follow the directions - instead, I was inspired by Martin’s paintings to try to create the auditory version of a series of horizontal lines. What would that sound like? Obviously the same sound, but I don’t react to her paintings like I would to something static. Instead, I find my gaze is very active as I look for patterns on a small and large scale.

To recreate this, I thought I would take some field recordings (and other, unlabeled large files lying around my hard-drive) and EQ them aggressively so that only the most active frequencies in the original would be the only audible frequencies in the processed version.

I also wanted a little rhythmic variation, so I put them into Ableton’s Simpler in Slice mode and made some interesting patterns.

After about 1:21, all of the tracks are run through a delay with 99% feedback and 100% wet - so basically all you hear is the delay, which could go on for(almost)ever. I added a little sonic interesting by shifting the delay times in the left and right channels (does this sound basically like Steve Reich’s phasing? Sure.) This generated some sweeping overtones that were entirely accidental but very much welcome.

At the end, I added a sample of a violinist from a jam session and added some subtle variations in the melodic pattern. It feels like the beginning of a new section instead the end of the song, which feels appropriate.

5 Likes