Categories
Art

Life cycle – a sound installation exploring human rhythms

The work gives aural and visual forms to the cycles related to being a human. The pain during the menstruation (dysmenorrhea or painful periods) is intimately highlighted with the help of sound. The interaction between the Earth, Moon and the Sun is experienced by a sonification of their orbital data and their effects on gravity – which pervades the experience of being a habitant of the Earth.

The work was presented as a part of a group exhibition with the theme Cycles, in the framework of AAVE festival of audiovisual arts, in Helsinki.

The work consists of four led strips and four channel audio system. The Sun and the Moon rotate around the visitor. Also, a possibility to participate in the installation is provided by means of a heart rate sensor.

In the installation the orbits of the Sun and the Moon around the Earth have been translated into sound. The cycle of sounds lasts about 50 minutes, which corresponds to about two years. The period was chosen, because the Sun and the Moon happen to be quite close to the same position in the beginning and in the end of the cycle.

Sounds of pain are played at random intervals between 1 – 2 minutes. The Led lights pulses and fades with the same interval.

The audible frequency of the Sun in the installation is a higher octave of its about 11 year long activity cycle. The frequency of the Moon comes from the so called Saros cycle, during which the Moon goes through various cycles related to its orbit. Saros cycle lasts about 18 years in real time. The sound of the Sun in the installation is low and continous, whereas the sound of the moon is higher and pulsating. The length of one pulse is a thousandth of a month. The relationship of the amplitudes of the sounds of the Moon and the Sun corresponds to their tidal force amplitude.

It is possible to participate in the installation. In the middle of the room there’s a pole, on which a green light can be seen. The light shows the place of a pulse sensor. Just beside the sensor there’s a red Led light, which shows the sensed pulses.

The sensor finds the pulse from a finger or a palm, when the body part rests on the sensor. The pressure on the sensor shouldn’t be too hard or too light for it to work consistently. The red led will start to pulse according to your heart rate, when the contact is right.

When six sequential pulses have been detected, a real heart beat sound is played.

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.