Sanara Creations is the professional dimension of sound designer, producer and artist Sarana / Janne Särkelä.
Tools: Logic, Cubase , Pro Tools, Photoshop, Illustrator, GIMP, Final Cut, Premiere, Max/MSP/Jitter, Plogue Bidule, Flash/AS, CSS, HTML, PHP, Javascript, jQuery, OSX/Win/Linux, Arduino, Processing, Captivate, Storyline.
Janne resides in Helsinki, Finland at the moment, and works at Digital Lessons Finland as the Senior Technical Developer.
International Teletext Art Festival website needed to be transformed into a responsive WordPress site. Besides being the main site for the festival it presents the works by the artists in a virtual gallery.
A unique custom WordPress theme was created from the ground up.
Inter_active is a gamified installation by Juha van Ingen, inspired by the ancient Moksha Patam (the ladder to salvation), commonly known as the snakes and ladders game.
The artists wanted there to be two paths, which in practice meant two sequences of dozens of images side by side on the screen. The images are animated gifs, and the player advances on the path by pressing keyboard buttons.
The images are accompanied by a sound track, realized by selected sound artists. The sounds loop independently from the images, and the player is able to stop or play a sound. The sound selection also advances sequentially, and maximum of two sounds can be heard at the same time.
The main challenge is to see all of the animations and reach the end. The player is also able to create a combination of images and sounds, and thus become a creator in the process.
The work was realized with HTML5, CSS and Javascript (jQuery).
The rings of Saturn look like a spectrogram, so it occurred to me try how it would sound like. In essence, this a sonification of space!
Sound was created by using an authentic image of rings of Saturn as a spectral source to a series of filters. A 1 pixel slice of the image of the rings was extracted
The ring spectrogram was divided into three color planes, and the color intensity values were transformed into resonant filter cutoff frequencies. In essence one filter unit (per color plane) has 256 sounds playing simultaneously. The individual filters are placed along the x-axis so, that the stereo image consists of 256 steps from left to right. The last two sounds were created with 1024 voices and 3×340 voices.
The spectrum was compressed to a couple of ranges. In some sounds a small variation in certain divider factor per color plane is introduced for a slight chorus like effect. The original lossless sound bits are available on Freesound.
KAVA, The national audiovisual archive of Finland has its own cinema, but they don’t provide standard .ics vCalendar of the movie showtimes for downloading or subscription. However, they have their own web store to buy tickets, and the page is neatly formatted.
I decided to practice website scraping a bit and as a bonus to try to create an ICS vCalendar file from the scraped data. The result is basically for my own use, but available for everybody (Download link of the generated calendar). The caveat is that if KAVA decides to change the layout the code wouldn’t work anymore, so be warned that the calendar may be broken then for a while.
The showtimes don’t change that much, so it’s safe to set the update period to once per week. Set the subscription to the address
https://www.sanaracreations.fi/apps/kavacal/kavacal.php
KAVA has changed their site’s layout and the code is not functional any longer. Take a peek at the website scraper code and hack on!
The interactive sound waves builder was presented at the Helsinki Hacklab stand at WÄRK:fest, a DIY/Hacker/Culture -festival. The system consists of a small table, webcam and Max/MSP/Jitter process. Visitors were able to manipulate the sound waves by (re)arranging colorful objects on the table.
The table was simultaneously scanned in two dimensions, and the extracted data was used to create the sound waves, pitches and amplitudes for the oscillators. Besides the musical piece the rearrangement of the colorful objects created a transforming visual piece.