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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 music relevant to the specific picture’s details. Some of these music sources are musically related, and some others 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”

MusIcon: “Blue II”

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

“Blue II” by Joan Miro is the second MusIcon I composed.  “Blue II ” is a 1961 abstract oil painting by the Spanish modern artist Joan Miró. The painting is the middle part of a triptych.  In this painting there are 3 main different music themes:Read More »MusIcon: “Blue II”

MusIcon: “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump”

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

“An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump” by Joseph Wright of Derby depicts a scientist performing an experiment in which a bird is deprived of air, before a varied group of onlookers. The bird will die if the demonstrator continues to deprive it of oxygen, and Wright leaves us in doubt as to whether or not the cockatoo will be reprieved.[1] In this painting there are 6 different music themes:Read More »MusIcon: “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump”