Hello everybody
Herewith I want to write down the current state of the sound development which is the outcome of the last working period in may/june where we sat all together (Ole, Annesofie, Silas and me) in Copenhagen:
After diverse tests with accelerated sound recording my doubts about the results of either too simple or too hectic sound structures got acknowledged. Imagining the final exhibition which meant projecting myself into the 360 degree time lapsed panorama, I decided to work with unprocessed sound-field recordings on the one hand and with a generative music on the other hand which formalisms are based on the grammar of Inuit music.
With fading into the real soundscape while the video panorama slows down to realtime, the listener shall have the chance to immerse into the audio visual environment as deep as possible. He is now able to get absorbed by the landscape and can meet the performers actions, a passing polar bear or whatever caused the system to slow down.
When the panorama accelerates again the listener leaves the perception of time he is used to and enters artistic space. A music develops or goes ahead, it is almost not music yet and should almost not comment the visual scenery but it is connected to the movie’s parameters which are considered as of eminently importance for our artistic vision. More challenges are that the music has to be about 12 hours long and should be neither disturbing nor boring, exhausting or anything else what lets us escape from the exhibition.
Is it possible to compose a ‘music’ based on these conditions – was the question I asked myself and started to implement some ideas.
Here you can listen to one of these which uses a simple algorithm (not based on Inuit music) which controls a software synthesizer (sculpture) that uses physical modeling for the sound synthesis. This Synth was a quick decision to prevent the danger of a folkloristic/stereotypistic music and in forethought that also elements of the sound could be controlled by the movie. Just for fun I added a drumset. As one of the first tests I found this result persuasive in cases of
- being not too much in the foreground and
- being very much developable ….
The next steps will be to:
- find out: what exactly is ‘Inuit music’?
Starting a period of research I found the abstract ‘Cluster Analysis for Computer-Assisted Statistical Analysis of Melodies’ by Luigi Logrippo and Bernard Stepien from 1986. Herein was described a statistical analysis method based on the example of ‘Inuit Music’. Fantastic!!!. But I missed more detailed informations about the analysis’ formalism and specially the data sets of the analyzed Inuit music songs so I contacted both and was deeply moved by their response mainly the amount of time they spent to find the about 30 years old papers, making them available and writing back looong emails. It seems that I am owning now at least a statistical description of Inuit music… I shouldn’t forget to mention Ramon Pelinski. He was part of this research project and mainly responsible for the musicological work.
- defining the right grammar and formulate a resynthesis algorithm
This is the current challenge I am working at…
- define the sound material: instruments, resynthesis, recordings of vocals in greenland (refering to choir music), etc.
- find the right video parameters which are able to produce an interesting, convincing and still surprising musical dramaturgy.
all best and see you soon – daniel
