Here's a visual score for the ANS Synthesiser. Its by composer / audio engineer Stanislav Kreichi who discusses the synth and its development online. This visually appealing score reminds me of a sketch from an ecology text book. It seems to depict mountains, wind, rain and perhaps alpine vegetation. Perhaps this idea inspired Metasynth in which a very similar score of peaks, troughs and pulses can be composed visually for synthesis. I've just inverted this image and loaded it into Metasynth to hear it. Well, it sounds like it looks. In the 60s I bet that was really something! I'm not sure of the original scaling in the temporal dimension but I've played around with the mappings to have it play out over 30 seconds. Its great that a score from the 1960s can still be played on software made a few years ago.Wednesday, September 24, 2008
visual musical score - ANS synthesiser
Here's a visual score for the ANS Synthesiser. Its by composer / audio engineer Stanislav Kreichi who discusses the synth and its development online. This visually appealing score reminds me of a sketch from an ecology text book. It seems to depict mountains, wind, rain and perhaps alpine vegetation. Perhaps this idea inspired Metasynth in which a very similar score of peaks, troughs and pulses can be composed visually for synthesis. I've just inverted this image and loaded it into Metasynth to hear it. Well, it sounds like it looks. In the 60s I bet that was really something! I'm not sure of the original scaling in the temporal dimension but I've played around with the mappings to have it play out over 30 seconds. Its great that a score from the 1960s can still be played on software made a few years ago.
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There are a number of other precedents, including the "Hills and Dales" machine of the Australian/American composer Percy Grainger (around 1952). Grainger worked on a photo-electric version of this machine (the Electric Eye Tone Tool), but didn't live to finish it. (http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/articles/FreeMusic.html) The Electric Eye Tone Tool was recreated by Warren Burt and collaborators in 2003. (Proceedings of the Australasian Computer Music Conference 2004)
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