“FORMS (it’s a)Live” by Playmodes
Title:
- FORMS (it’s a)Live
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Exhibiting Artist Collective(s):
Symposium:
Venue(s):
Artist Statement:
Santi Vilanova, artist of the Playmodes collective, presents a new performance mutation of FORMS. This new iteration of the project -whose “Screen Ensemble” version is part of the Beep collection of Electronic Art and of the exhibition that can be seen at the Recinte Modernista de Sant Pau- explores the compositional possibilities of visual music through generative graphic algorithms and image sonification.
On this occasion, the artist has developed a live controllable audiovisual system, which generates infinite variations of sonicated spectrograms, and which operates halfway between the sound machine and the live musical instrument.
A series of generative graphic algorithms produce spectrally coherent images, based on a set of randomness and probabilistic parameters controlled in real time by the artist. These sonograms are sonificated to generate soundscapes that may or may not incorporate elements of “classical” harmony and rhythmic periodicity.
The real-time sonification process analyzes a column of the image -the header- and links the brightness of each pixel to the amplitude of a sine wave bank. This is the reverse process of sound spectrums representation: instead of visualizing existing sound recordings, a visual representation is created first and then transformed into sound by additive synthesis.
In short, the engine becomes a digital instrument for sound and visual creation that can refer both to the more conservative schemes of music inherited from Romanticism and to the atonality / microtonality of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as opening a new audiovisual creation field that unifies sound and image in a single common code.
