Computer music animations

Abstract

Electroacoustic music, since its inception, has been situated in a cross-disciplinary no-man's-land, with areas of interest spread in many directions; from ideas of musical structures ordered through traditional pitch-classes to research on physical modelling and analysis of sound and compositional structures through the use of neural networks. Much of the material found in computer music has been developed through processes of appropriation, both from sound recordings of physical events and from the application of various principles found in the natural sciences.

Audiovisual Harmony: The realtime audiovisualisation of a single data source in Construction in Zhuangzi

“…As Whitney stated, ‘this would be a partnership that is valid only if the combinations produce interest greater than the separate contribution of either the aural or the visual member’ (Whitney 1980: 92), which is often not the case in this more commercial end of audiovisual practice. In the more experimental field, a few practitioners producing pioneering work involving deriving the video from the audio, or the audio from the video, or both did emerge from the 1980s onwards (see, for example, Abbado 1988; Ritter 1993; Rudi 1998).…”

A Fuzzy-Logic Mapper for Audiovisual Media

“…Audiovisual presentations were categorized in three different submodes: simple documentary, which is just a video recording of the live performance; TVtype, in which live performance is alternated with images from various perspectives, close-ups, and images of details; and non-documentary, which does not aim to be a faithful description of the performance. Non-documentary is the type of presentation that best describes the approach presented here, and it also generally corresponds to Rudi's (1998) idea of "concert videos" in which the moving images do not necessarily resemble the performance or the score of the music being presented. Finaas reviewed eight studies in the literature finding that, in the case of non-documentary modes of presentation, the results showed that no mode of presentation was clearly favored and that non-documentary visual material had some tendency to create impressions of activity and complexity, while its effect on preference was unpredictable.…”

Computer Music Video: A Composer's Perspective

“…The timbres were derived from additive and granulation synthesis algorithms, along with two sound recordings: one of my son (two years old at the time), and one of a large tam-tam, approximately five feet in diameter. The ratios between the partials of the synthesized timbre that is presented in the first halfsecond of the piece are used throughout the work as structuring numbers, and the concrete pitches of the partials serve as a guiding harmonic grid (see Rudi 1998).…”