Sonifying the sights of White Mountain

In light of taking both an analog reel-to-reel tape recorder and a portable cassette recorder on the trip, both pieces of equipment failed to function properly after fresh batteries and new tape had been inserted. The equipment that I had along with me that fortunately had not malfunctioned turned out to be my Canon S50 Digital Camera and my circa 1950’s sky blue tripod. I realized that the camera was also capable of capturing audio, but with its small non-directional microphone I was bound to lose any rich sound detail to the wind noise rushing across the camera housing. I took a good hard look at the materials before me and decided to make the project based on a photographic source.


Revised Conceptual Orientation
The revised conceptual orientation of the project was based around the extrapolation of images into sound textures. Images were recorded with pattern, rhyme and flow in mind. Since the images had to be fed into an engine that would transform their visual context into an aural context, I felt that it would be best to capture scenes that contained objects arranged in such a way. In music we often hear patterns played out over time in the form of melodic progressions or arpeggiations; series of notes that belong to a chord or a scale become the simple musical patterns we hear on a daily basis. As these patterns are strung together to form songs, they fall into certain musical ‘rhyme schemes’ which align the series of patterns into an orthodox hierarchy. We commonly understand these rhyme schemes as musical scales; Scales not only dictate which sets of notes should be preferentially chosen, but also the kinds of chordal structures that can be used to convey a sense of motion, distance, mood, and tension.

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Zane C.P. Andre

Zane is a Third year Computing in the Arts with Music Emphasis and Cognitive Science major with a passion for New Media technologies, and the outdoors. Currently working towards building a sound studio and releasing electronic compositions for use at live Drum N Bass / IDM sound events.