Sonata for the Unaware

Sonata for the Unaware is an absolutely stunning piece by carbonatedjazz, who I now realise has been involved with a few sites I’ve coveted over the years, including the Classic Motown extravaganza a while back.

"The mundane routine of Philadelphia commuters is transformed into a living piece of music. Human bodies become musical markings on the pages of a cranking machine. Bodies were not tracked by hand. Video effects and body tracking were done completely through Director scripting."

Sonata for the Unaware [Flash]

Made me think of several presentations at last year’s Doors Of Perceptions conference – and that someone should add this musical dimension to David Rokeby’s beautiful work done on tracking people, objects, pigeons across Piazza San Marco in Venice.

Also made me think that if we reverse this process – a musical score derived from visual events, into visual events derived from musical ones – could we not make an alternative to the visualisation software built into iTunes or Windows Media Player? i.e. rather than variations on faux-psychedelia, what if the visual patterns were fragments of cityscapes & street scenes, visual triggers we recognise and love (patterns of buses arriving/departing, timelapse of people/cars queuing, rain in puddles in the gutter, neon lights reflected across same, park life, skyscraper lights fading up at night etc.) Closer to elements of Koyaanisqatsi I guess, though without the environmental agenda and with the random element. But the same notion of city rhythms at work. The visual counterpoint to Steve Reich’s City Life, Walter Ruttman’s Weekend etc. They’d be heavily compressed natch, but personally that’s a visual style I enjoy anyway, whether vectored or pixellated. One could achieve further variation via a series of randomised real-time filters on these images/loops. I guess the library of clips and effects would have to be huge (as we’re talking a finite series here, rather than the infinite generative series – though even with several thousand short clips (updated live via http – ha!), the random element in music would surely enabled huge number of combinations?) Anyone know of such a thing? Would it ever be at all practical? Maybe it already exists?!

Anyway, that wishful thinking aside, go check Sonata for the Unaware.
[via Diary of a Superfluous Man]