Sounding Orbs (2014), Real-time digital audio and video media

I just rendered a fixed-media version of my latest installment (No. 6) in the Cellular Automata series, called Sounding Orbs (2014).



This is an homage to Oskar Fischinger's Kreise (1933-34) and John and James Whitney's Five Film Exercises (1943-44).  In terms of sound production, Sounding Orbs is most similar to Five Film Exercises.  For that piece, the Whitney brothers devised a special synthesizer attachment to their light producing mechanism, allowing them to create the sound and visual elements simultaneously.  This device is detailed in Die Reihe, volume 7.  Similarly, Sounding Orbs generates sound and video together.

Project description:

Sounding Orbs involves the real-time navigation of a generative, synaesthetic instrument, allowing the performer to explore sound, light and space synergistically.

This virtual instrument is composed of sound and light generating modules, arranged in space according to a multi-dimensional model of musical pitch perception.  In this model, pitches that are harmonically related to one another are separated by short distances, while large distances separate harmonically unrelated pitches.  Each sound module is represented visually with a corresponding light-producing sphere.  This spatial arrangement of sound and light modules is then activated using cellular automata, which are used in other contexts to mathematically model the expansion of populations of living cells across space.  Performers create musical behavior and drama by manipulating the cellular activity, while navigating the virtual space, highlighting the sound and light activity at various locations.

The conceptual foundations of this work draw upon interdisciplinary research in formalized music (Iannis Xenakis, Chris Ariza), mathematics (John von Neumann, John Conway, Stephen Wolfram), music cognition (Roger Shepard, Diana Deutsch, Fred Lerdahl and Gerald Balzano), and the aesthetics of the visual-music tradition (particularly works by Oskar Fischinger and John and James Whitney).

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Technical fine-print for the curious: Sounding Orbs uses variety of two-dimensional, hexagonal cellular automata to excite oscillators and to light-up corresponding spheres in Open GL, via MAX and Jitter.  These are arranged spatially according to a double-helical representation of the perception of equal-tempered pitch space, sometimes known as Roger Shepard's "melodic map."  Thus, a two-dimensional hexagonal grid of oscillator-spheres is wrapped around a column in three-dimensional space.  Colors mark the activation times of cells; all cells activated at a particular time produce the same color, which fades over time as long as they are "alive."  This use of color shows a brief history of cellular activity, while providing interesting visual contrasts.