Categories
Sound

Sound of the Rings of Saturn – A sonification of Space

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.

Categories
Art

Sonification of a graphical piece – Sounds of Calligraphy

The three pieces of Sounds of Calligraphy playlist are the continuation from the Sarana performance at the opening of Viiva & Viiru calligraphy group exhibition in Helsinki, Finland. The pieces are based on a real time process that analyzes the images in three color channels, and some of the oscillator sound waves are derived from the image properties too. The process has 128 oscillators and filters per channel, and they are positioned to the stereo panorama to exactly follow the figures. The resulting music is thus a true voyage across the image.

The sonification process was realized with Max/MSP/Jitter. A very warm thanks to the Viiva & Viiru group for their openness to the abstract.

Categories
Art

Generative and interactive sound installation

AMBIENT² interprets the sound landscape of Harakka island in Helsinki into music into another language through a computer-abled generative process. We are born into a sound landscape to which we get used to through our lives and we take it as the familiar foundation, compared to which everything is strange and peculiar. It is about interpretation. When the same sound landscape is repeated as music something weird and unexpected is revealed. Video of the interactive sound installation.

Ambient^2 Generatiivinen ääni-installaatioMusic created by the AMBIENT² does not strive to fit its tones into any existing note system. It re-creates the frequencies of the source material by synthetic instruments as a spectral musical application. The final result is a musical work which never quite exactly repeats itself. The composer is the observed space which creates its own tonal system. The music thus created is not aleatory but determined by its own rules.

The basic form of the music is defined by ambient aesthetics, and in this case ambient sound creates the ambient music and the borders of music and the world are seamlessly intertwined.

The work was part of the La-Bas -biennale 2012 and it was presented at the sound art gallery Akusmata.

Categories
Film

Sound designer of an indie feature movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30XJhUVNIio

I worked as the sound designer for Anni, a Finnish indie feature movie production. I also did on site recording, foley effects and mixing. The movie was directed by Jussi Einola and produced by Joonas Einola.

Besides mixing the movie soundtrack I also mixed and mastered the music and created a few original pieces using material from the composer (Simo Salo).

Anni uses samples and source material by Freesound.org contributors, who are listed below.

Categories
Visual

Promotional video for a youth camp

Teaser cut from the material I shooted at TaigaMetsä camp in july 2010. The camp was organized by Kaleva Youth Association to celebrate their 50th anniversary. I worked for them for a year as a media producer.

The related videos take you to a video series called TaigaStudio, which I also shot and edited.