SKYNDO release text:
{drawn by august} is an electronic music piece that is drawn, mixed and processed
in the world-famous graphics editing program Adobe Photoshop. Each single
pixel represents a sample point in the audiofile.
The color of the pixel represents the amplitude of the sound.The
spacing between pixels as well as the physical image size defines the pitch.
A single track is composed of a series of hand-drawn pixels in various colors,
resulting in complex sound events. The final piece is composed of tracks directly
mixed within Adobe Photoshop using the layer utility. The result is saved
in .RAW format and then converted into sound.
The audio and the visual pieces are as such identical and the image can be
read as a score.
The timeline is defined asthe western reading
process, from top left to bottom right. The intensity of the sound is defined
by the brightness: the more a part of the image is dark, the more the sound
of the piece is loud, and vice versa. This piece is an exercice in composing
electronic music without any music software. A
sound-editing software is simply used at the end of the process in order to
convert the visual image (.RAW file) into an audio track (.WAV file). This experiment
can be seen as an illustration of the structural & timbral possibilities for
creating & processing sound in Adobe Photoshop: image effects (blurring, contrast,
inversion, etc.) can be used as complex audio processors and act as combinations
of unique sound effects (delays, flangers, filters, etc.).
Furthermore, the scope of this project is also to discover and use any other
potential interface to compose electronic music (such as Adobe Photoshop), which
is radically different from any conventional music software's interface since
it has a complex time domain and it is free from any musical terminology.
* note: technical descriptions are
somewhat incorrect and will be elaborated in a technical manual to RAW audio
editing (to come...)
