Visual-izing Viol

V I S U A L I Z I N G V I O L

We can close our eyes but we can’t close our ears.
Despite the digital new form of creating music, the possibility to bring noise to a new level of musicality, sound will be always listened using a physical medium, through sound waves and vibration. Therefore, I’m trying to bring to the digital and complex world of sound and image - obtained by the new possibili- ties of computing - a traditional, physical and touchable way of expression. Design and Art will be always a double-edged sword but we, as young artists, can find new ways of expression by the way we develop our process and by the final medi- ums of representation.
It all started with my interest in electronic music and a sup- posed lack of methodology and rules in creating samples of music that compose electronic tracks. The idea came from a French producer Gesaffelstein, who I’ve been following for a long time. I’ve started hearing his music over and over again in a loop without any logical explanation but on which I was discovering new sensations and experiences that suggest sound to go beyond hearing field. Thus, creating a visual artist expres- sion that would enable a more complete experience, with my visual reinterpretation, may respond to this mystical universe of sound sensations.

The technics in use are an old Asian technic – paper marbling where I can transfer the sound waves into visible artifacts us- ing the water as medium and glitch art giving some inputs from the music into the digital code of the marbling images.

Prints and an audio-visual performance using projections to show my visual results with the music in loop are the final result.

Of course I’m not the first one trying to develop this kind of duality between sound and imagery. The difference between every project it’s the way, the process to access a final result. So, my interest it’s almost focus in the process of making rather than the final aesthetically and correct visual expression of it.

Viol - Gessafelstein

V I S U A L I Z I N G V I O L V I D E O

[process of visualizing Viol, from the french techno produzer Gesaffelstein]

[sound instalation using a amplifier, a bass speaker and a recipient with water and inks.]

F I N A L R E S U L T

1. P A R T

[knowing Gesaffelstein - text from an interview given by him, all the photos are from his facebook page]

2. P A R T

[introducing to the Visualizing Viol concept narrative]

Between various references, the most relevant text was 'The Art of Noise', from Luigi Russolo, a futurist manifest from 1913.

Check it here.

"In antiquity, life was nothing but silence.

Noise was really not born before the 19th century, with the advent of machinery.

Today noise reigns supreme over human sensibility. For several centuries, life went on

silently, or mutedly. The loudest noises were neither intense, nor prolonged nor varied. In fact, nature is normally silent, except for storms, hurricanes, avalanches, cascades and some exceptional telluric movements. This is why man was thoroughly amazed by the first sounds he obtained out of a hole in reeds or a stretched string.

Primitive people attributed to sound a divine origin. It became surrounded

with religious respect, and reserved for the priests, who thereby enriched their rites

with a new mystery. Thus was developed the conception of sound as something apart,

different from and independent of life. The result of this was music, a fantastic world

superimposed upon reality, an inviolable and sacred world. This hieratic atmosphere

was bound to slow down the progress of music, so the other arts forged ahead and bypassed it.

First of all, musical art looked for the soft and limpid purity of sound.

Then it amalgamated different sounds, intent upon caressing the ear with suave harmonies.

Nowadays musical art aims at the shrilliest, strangest and most dissonant amalgams of sound.

Thus we are approaching noise-sound. This revolution of music is paralleled by the increasing proliferation of machinery sharing in human labor. In the pounding atmosphere of great cities as well as in the formerly silent countryside, machines create today such a large number of varied noises that pure sound, with its littleness and its monotony, now fails to arouse any emotion.

We must break at all cost from this restrictive circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.

All of us have liked and enjoyed the harmonies of the great masters. For years, Beethoven and Wagner have deliciously shaken our hearts. Now we are fed up with them. This is why we get infinitely more pleasure imagining combinations of the sounds of trolleys, autos and other vehicles, and loud crowds, than listening once more, for instance, to the heroic or pastoral symphonies.

Some will object that noise is necessarily unpleasant to the ear. The objection is futile, and I don’t intend to refute it, to enumerate all the delicate noises that give pleasant sensations. To convince you of the surprising variety of noises, I will mention thunder, wind, cascades, rivers, streams, leaves, a horse trotting away, the starts and jumps of a carriage on the pavement, the white solemn breathing of a city at night, all the noises made by feline and domestic animals and all those man’s mouth can make without talking or singing.

Let’s walk together through a great modern capital, with the ear more attentive than the eye, and we will vary the pleasures of our sensibilities by distinguishing among the gurglings of water, air and gas inside metallic pipes, the rumblings and rattlings of engines breathing with obvious animal spirits, the rising and falling of pis- tons, the stridency of mechanical saws, the loud jumping of trolleys on their rails, the snapping of whips, the whipping of flags. We will have fun imagining our orchestration of department stores’ sliding doors, the hubbub of the crowds, the different roars of railroad stations, iron foundries, textile mills, printing houses, power plants and subways. And we must not forget the very new noises of Modern Warfare.

Noise accompanies every manifestation of our life. Noise is familiar to us. Noise has the power to bring us back to life.

On the other hand, sound, foreign to life, always a musical, outside thing, an occasional element, has come to strike our ears no more than an overly familiar face does our eye.

Noise, gushing confusely and irregularly out of life, is never totally revealed to us and it keeps in store innumerable surprises for our benefit. We feel certain that in selecting and coordinating all noises we will enrich men with a voluptuousness they did not suspect.

The rhythmic movements of a noise are infinite. We must enlarge and enrich more and more the domain of musical sounds. Our sensibility requires it. In fact it can be noticed that all contemporary composers of genius tend to stress the most complex dissonances.

Moving away from pure sound, they nearly reach noise-sound. This need and this tendency can be totally realized only through the joining and substituting of noises to and for musical sounds.

We must replace the limited variety of timbres of orchestral instruments by the infinite variety of timbres of noises obtained through special mechanisms.

The musician’s sensibility, once he is rid of facile, traditional rhythms, will find in the domain of noises the means of development and renewal, an easy task, since each noise offers us the union of the most diverse rhythms as well as its dominant one.

Each noise possesses among its irregular vibrations a predominant basic pitch. This will make it easy to obtain, while building instruments meant to produce this sound, a very wide variety of pitches, half-pitches and quarter-pitches. This variety of pitches will not deprive each noise of its characteristic timbre but, rather, increase its range.

The technical difficulties presented by the construction of these instruments are not grave. As soon as we will have found the mechanical principle which produces a certain noise, we will be able to graduate its pitch according to the laws of acoustics. For instance, if the instrument employs a rotating movement, we will speed it up or slow it down. When not dealing with a rotating instrument we will increase or decrease the size or the tension of the sound-making parts.

This new orchestra will produce the most complex and newest sonic emotions, not through a succession of imitative noises reproducing life, but rather through a fantas- tic association of these varied sounds. For this reason, every instrument must make possi- ble the changing of pitches through a built-in, larger or smaller resonator or other extension.

The variety of noises is infinite. We certainly possess nowadays over a thousand different machines, among whose thousand different noises we can distin- guish. With the endless multiplication of machinery, one day we will be able to distinguish among ten, twenty or thirty thousand different noises. We will not have to imitate these noises but rather to combine them accord- ing to our artistic fantasy.

We invite all the truly gifted and bold young musicians to analyze all nois- es so as to understand their different composing rhythms, their main and their sec- ondary pitches. Comparing these noise sounds to other sounds they will realize how the latter are more varied than the former. Thus the comprehension, the taste, and the passion for noises will be developed. Our expanded sensibility will gain futurist ears as it already has futurist eyes. In a few years, the engines of our industrial cities will be skillfully tuned so that every factory is turned into an intoxicating orchestra of noises.

I am not a musician, so that I have no acoustic preferences, nor works to defend. I am a futurist painter who projects on a profoundly loved art his will to renew everything. This is why, bolder than the bolder professional musician, totally unpreoccupied with my apparent incompetence, knowing that audacity gives all prerogatives and all possibilities, I have conceived the renovation of music through the Art of Noise."

3. P A R T - M A R B L E

[Paper Marbling was the technic used to translate my graphics (obtained in the sound instalation - check the video above) into a physical support so I can work on it taking advantage from the conceptual development.

Its an East Asia born technic and appeared in Europe in the 17th century]

4. P A R T - G L I T C H

[Glitch Art is the aesthetic of digital and analog errors, from the digital corruption of data and/or plysicaly manipulating electronic devices. This is were the music as data and the digital data itself, like the Ghostriders music video for Viol, are present.]