I met someone I hadn’t seen in a long time last week who asked me about how I was doing with some of my sound art work. I recalled a project I started a little while ago where I was playing some feedback into Logic Pro X and using the Flex Pitch and Melodyne style auto-tune tools to digitally retrieve some musical notation from the noise. The example that I added to this blog was a version of the feedback-rich European Son by The Velvet Underground, as this experiment (somewhat fittingly) had just followed the death of Lou Reed in 2013.
I thought about revisiting this project as I’d never really fully explored what results this process could bring and in what way could the algorithm be manipulated. Also, it's a process that I’ve been able to do before, and it should be a relatively easy win to make some new work.
To start with, I recorded some banal commuting in an attempt to break the idea down into perhaps its purest form. I had considered using some more recognisable recordings, such as from popular culture/film/history but decided to keep it simple. There might be something more meaningful in the future, but I wanted to start again with something fairly basic and see if it can work.
The outcome has been somewhat different this time, with the software manipulation proceeding to one further stage whereby the interpreted notation is printed off as a score. I felt this might be an exciting lead to something physical, or perhaps as a piano recital, or maybe even a printed book of sheet music documenting my totally dull commutes over a period of weeks.
The Digital Scores project by Berlin-based Andreas Müller-Pohle springs to mind. Müller-Pohle digitally interpreted the oldest known photograph and then, in binary, printed off the results. This was back in 1995. There might be something about the choice of photograph here that might inform my future choice of subject matter regarding my audio sources.
I can’t help but feel that a lot of ‘Digital Art’ seems to involve the mere act of translating one thing to another: something of an analogue/digital conversion. I’ve written a word down in my sketchbook that I thought might describe this type of practice–Conversionism. I’m not trying to assume a new ‘ism’, just a trait that I have noticed for some time about art like this. Perhaps this speaks more about my hesitancy about this kind of work than the broader art world, but there probably should be something more about Digital Art than solely using technology to convert one thing into another thing.
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