Fern unfurling a Sonification
#synth #technique
Paul Giblin my friend, Exeter promoter, DJ, radio presenter on Phonic FM community radio station, former organiser of the long running Exeter Respect Festival (for which he carried the Olympic torch) amongst many other things (see FSOE web site https://www.fsoe.co.uk/about-and-history/ )
So when it came to lock down and Paul’s usual activities were curtailed what then? Well he turned to sketching (as he calls it) the plants in his garden, producing a beautiful and prolific collection of sketches.
He then went on to exhibit them, raising over £2000 for Cancer Research at the Glorious Art House Café, in memory of his mum, who sadly died of cancer.
Vision off video process
I decided to combine Paul’s Garden Sketches photos into a sequence with some artistic ‘Ken Burns’ effects, using Final Cut Pro to make them dynamic and therefore of more interest to the viewer. The outcome made me think of the TV series Vision On, introduced by Tony Hart back in the day. Lots of sketches or other articles were displayed at the end of the program. The producers always played the gallery theme music; ‘Left Bank two’ by the Noveltones whilst they zoomed in on the art.
I decided to use this track, but sound mangle it to make it more appropriate for Paul’s art work.
To do this I used AI splitter online to split the track into five wavs. I made a midi track from. each of these and assigned a different synth to each one. At the exhibition evening event I recorded the ambient background conversation. I duplicated and mixed excerpts from it to make it anonymous. I added this track to the others and mixed them down to a single stereo wav, this track dictated the overall length of the video slide show.
Enjoy
Fern Unfolding
One of Paul’s images particularly struck me when we were hanging them. It was the fern, I love this because we have magnificent fern in our own garden, and he captures it superbly.
When it came to my birthday Paul went to great lengths, to my great delight, to reproduce the fern as an exclusive T-shirt (photo).
Which I’ll proudly wear.
A few weeks after I was reading a friends MA dissertation which mentioned sonification.
Turning images into sound, a new but fascinating concept to me.
During lockdown I’ve learned to programme and play both analog and digital synthesisers, a hard road for a guitar player.
I realised I might be able to turn the fern image into sound. I did this online using and AI platform. The results were astonishing and I recorded them at several different octaves.
I then learned how to convert them to wavetable patches and transfer them to my Korg Modwave, a brilliant wavetable synth that my amazing wife bought me for my birthday (I suspect to keep me occupied, but not quiet!).
I put the wavetable patches into the synth and used them to record an Fminor pattern in several octaves
This is the result
https://polarvoidx.bandcamp.com/track/fern-unfurling
https://open.spotify.com/track/72kDGwzFZ1amO49I13cGrj?si=lpqdytRGSwyGycO4_zz64Q
So Paul Giblin drew this fab fern picture, which became a lovely T-shirt for my birthday. So I fed the image into ai that creates sounds from images, converted the output to a wavetable for my Korg Modwave, this is the result a short ambient piece, I hope you like it PVx
https://polarvoidx.bandcamp.com/track/fern-unfurling
Aka Joe K Baker
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