Vladlena Gromova, Artem Paramonov: Cryptographer

Title:

Cryptographer

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Medium:

interactive sound object

Artist Statement:

Cryptographer supplements to small things and images a sound dimension. The instrument combines the form of 19th-century instruments, the sound of the piano, the traditional European musical theory, code and “basic” process of human visual analyzer working. The camera captures a picture or a thing, which is placed on the instrument cover, and the instrument offers a sound interpretation of the image according to the algorithm.
The algorithm of Cryptographer is based on two hypotheses. The first one is proposed by the American artist Katherine Lubar, who applies the established in the 19th-century principles of consonance and dissonance to color
«intervals». According to her, analogous tone relations are formed between twelve semitones of a music scale and twelve parts of the Johannes Itten’s color circle. For instance, red and yellow colors constitute a major 3rd so far as a distance between colors includes four semitones. To determine a sound frequency we added an operation that allows finding certain notes according to the association of high frequency sounds to the light tones and low frequency sounds to the dark tone. The quantity of pixels in a color interval correlates to the duration of one sound.
The second hypothesis proposes the existence of a sequence in a process of image perception by a human visual analyzer. Professor and Russian inventor Nicolay Blinov attempted to build a universal rank. A presumed sequence of elements in an image perception was defined as a result of his first experiments: 1. Horizontal straight; 2. Vertical straight; 3. Volume; 4. Symmetry;
5. Periodicity; 6. Inclined straight line; 7. Angle, triangle, square; 8. Circle; 9. Outline, etc. This sequence was included in the algorithm but simplified to the set of “basic” principles which are not related to complex intellectual activities, and determined in Cryptographer’s algorithm the order of reading the image elements in the main musical part. Video: Cryptographer