Howdy folks!
You are seeing this message because you have not configured your theme options yet. You can add or remove this message, and a variety of other design options for your homepage, by visiting the admin section of your new site and clicking theme options in the left sidebar. You can control virtually every aspect of the homepage design on the theme options page.
Latest
Can music translate directly to visual art? #114 Jupiter did.
Last night I sat down at my keyboard in the studio, moved the ole mouse to wake up the screen and there sat the project for Jupiter from yesterday. Specifically, the midi score. MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) is how you refer to what you have recorded when you’re using sampled instruments (software instruments). You don’t record anything but data, such as C1, C#3, D2, and so on. You end up with a grid of sorts, showing where in time and on what note you’ve pressed a key. This picture below is the score for Jupiter. Only a cello and violin track.
Notice anything that looks familiar in there? (click on the image to enlarge it) Like I said, there are two parts – violin and cello. The violin notes are a light blue, and the cello notes are gray and for the most-part, below the violin notes. I noticed immediately a range of mountains with clearly defined back and front ranges. Don’t see it? The mountains are about like this:
Still not seeing it? Here’s a composite of the two…
Quite literally, the midi notes for this song form an image of a two tiered range of mountains!
If you know me well(its possible), there are two things you know about me. One is that I’m forever bound to music and especially writing(more appropriately, channeling) music. The other is that I’ve always been at home in the mountains. I grew up playing in the mountains of WVA, fishing, swimming, canoeing etc etc. In later years I got into camping, hiking, spent a few years rock climbing and even guiding rock climbing trips in western NC. The last time I had a week to kill (how’d that happen?) I headed straight to the Smoky Mountains for three days of solitude and music making. So both music and mountains seem to be an integral part of my being.
I never thought the two would come together in such a way as this. This particular piece was written as most of my songs are, not much thought, just hit record and go. I consider this to usually be some sort of channeling, with the stance of ”how else could I have made that!”. This gets me thinking about that even deeper. Is that fact that I have this natural connection to mountains that caused me to write a song that can be visually represented by mountains? Or did I channel energy that is so natural it manifested itself as music and imagery, that being mountains? How did this happen? Does all midi date in compositions have this phenomenon? I searched a little last night before crashing but found nothing like this. What you see above in those images is exactly what it looks like. A piece of music that represents itself visually as mountains.
Coincidence? Got me. I’m open to suggestions.
Andy Harper - Jupiter[:::]
EDIT: I looked at this post last night and realized the score is NOT Jupiter at all, its #115 Strands (unreleased). Below are the screen shots of the Strands score. Mountains like a mo-fo. After seeing that, I started looking back through some other scores. I didn’t find any mountains at first. That’s because at first I was looking at the scores with all tracks on. I started looking at them individually and realized its the strings. The strings in (so far) all of my recent compositions appear visually as mountains. Interesting.
Wow. Pretty damn cool. Have you done this with anything else you’ve written? Would be interested to see other results.
Nope! I haven’t. I’m going to have a look though. In my quick search last night I didn’t find anything comparable. Interesting stuff though!
Andy – you midi nerd!! Seriously though. Actually, what you’ve encountered are fractals that are naturally occuring everywhere …. in nature as mountain ranges, ocean waves, trees, clouds, stars, and galaxies. It’s in your music too – http://www.science-house.org/student/bw/chaos/music/sld001.htm
Fascinating stuff if you ask me….
Hell yeah Noble! That’s the answer I was looking for but didn’t have words for. So could one assert that I tapped into an existing energy from outside of myself when composing that tune? Trippy. I’ll read that science-house link tonight.
This is incredible. There’s a book, “Musicophilia” by Oliver Sacks that talks about this sort of thing. Well, now I’m doubting myself. I’ve read about people using music to form pictures, and I THINK it was his book but it could’ve been another. It was talking mainly about sound mapping/sonar type stuff, but ventured into music. It’s not unprecedented. Tell Laura to get you the book for Christmas!
Very cool broheim. From the looks of things looks like you’ve just scored the Grand Tetons. I totally agree with what you’re saying here. Music can directly correlate with visual sensory perception and vice versa. For instance, I worked with a spoken word artist Bryan Lewis Saunders on two occasions now. The first time that I did a remix for him I took pictures of him, and also scanned works of his self portraits and ran them through MetaSynth. What this did was take each pixel and designated it to its own oscillator. Now then, as you know oscillators can be tuned and then further mangled through the audio path. Each picture had its own “identity” based upon number of pixels and corresponding data. My goal was to make sure his remix was 100% him, and the goal was met with a quite other worldly sonic backdrop. Haunting.
Recently, I was listening to NPR and a composer was discussing his inspiration for a piece that he recently produced. The inspiration was from a flock of birds perched on telephone lines. The lines were the same exact amount of a music staff (five I think, correct me…) and each bird represented a note based upon their location. It’s an amazing piece of work and I’ve been searching for the story on npr.org trying to find it because now he has the rest of the picture… the entire frame, not just the cropped shot. How cool is that?
So I’m guessing at this point that my Midi Scores to some of my breakbeat jive would perhaps look like a metro skyline?
You’re guessing right I think. I just sat down to open up some old projects and see what they look like with all tracks turn on in the roll editor. I heard that NPR story too btw, about the birds. That’s just the kind of thing I’m talking about. If you find that story send it on.
That’s trippy too about the MetaSynth, I think you’ve told me of that before. Do you think if you ran an HDR photo through there it’d come out the other end at 192kHz?
Yo – I had to update the post, see above. Interesting.
Not sure if an HDR photo would render the same. I mean, I guess it would but I think you would get more out of the individual bracketed shots then the final composition.