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April 2012

MusIcon: “Composition A”

Hint: place your mouse over the picture and move it around. For best experience click full screen.

“Composition A” by Piet Mondrian is an abstract painting where color is used lavishly, showing bright contrast between yellow and black, red and blue, framed by dark lines and white space. My decision was to approach this painting rhythmically. I used only percussion and different rhythmic signatures for every color. So we have:

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What is a MusIcon?

In a Nutshell.

MusIcon™ is a picture where you can move around it and listen to different music moments. The sounds and music change depending on the place and time. MusIcon™ is an image with an interactive soundscape.

Background Information.

Music in its nature includes motion but most times it doesn’t interact with the listener.  So I designed a virtual 2D audio canvas where I placed a number of music sources in the space. Every source is like a small orchestra that plays a music relevant with the specific picture’s detail. Some of these music sources are musically related and some other are not. The listener can move around (using the mouse in a computer or his/her finger for a touch device) and listen to different musical moments as he is the composer-mixer. The duration of the music of every source is different so there is no obvious restart point of the mix. Considering also the fact that the movement of every listener is also different, gives us unlimited musical moments. In other words, MusIcon™ is an image with an interactive soundscape.

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MusIcon: “The Empire of Light”

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Hint: place your mouse over the picture and move it around. For best experience click full screen.

While working on this MusIcon™, the “The Empire of Light (L’Empire des lumières)” by René Magritte, I faced a problem. I wanted to have the sound of the morning birds only in the blue area of the sky. Additionally, the music I compose for the light, heard only in around the light and up to the dark area of the trees. Using the “music sources” approach (in short, having music source around the image like small speakers. For more info read my previous post here.) this was impossible.  So I decided to move forward and upgrade the MusIcon idea. I totally damped the “music sources” and instead now I use what I call “music heatmap” for every music source. A music heatmap is a visual representation of the music volume just like a heatmap is a representation of the temperature. In our case, is a grayscale  image representing the volume of the music from black=0% volume  to white=100% volume. Have a look in the images bellow (The Light, The Window, The Sky) where these are colored versions of the music heatmaps.

This approach has many benefits. For example, you can control the spread of the sound and the direction. You can have a sound that stops immediately in an area or spreads  smoothly in another. You can also have the same sound in two ore more areas of the image.

The Empire of Light (L’Empire des lumières)” by René Magritte, numerous versions of which exist (Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, The Guggenheim Museum), gets its title from a poem by Paul Nouge. It depicts a dark, nocturnal street scene is set against a pastel-blue, light-drenched sky spotted with fluffy cumulus clouds. With no fantastic element other than the single paradoxical combination of day and night, René Magritte upsets a fundamental organizing premise of life. [1]

In this painting there are 3 different music themes:Read More »MusIcon: “The Empire of Light”