Spectral Inversion / Negative Music with OM?

[schwarz]

Please let me draw your attention to this artistic research question about what a spectral negative of a sound could be. Do you think this could be possible to explore in OM-SuperVP?

[For non-francophones, Google translate should get the idea across.]

Musique négative

Bonjour à vous. Je poste ici pour la première fois. J’espère trouver par ici une réponse logiciel à une problématique artistique. « Exercices de musique en creux pour sourds: étant donné un nombre convenu conventionnel de notes de musique n’entendre que le groupe de celles qui ne sont pas jouées » Marcel Duchamp. Est-il possible de faire une empreinte d’un son ? Un moule à son ? Qu’est ce qu’il n’y a pas dans un son ? Une musique en négatif. L’idée principale de ce projet est de faire des …

[haddad]

Dear Diemo,

Om-SuperVP is an interface library using the supervp program. So as long as we use the required arguments for supervp, this will work for you. BUT…

1. for the time being we are awaiting for a notorization of supervp in order to be compliant with Apple security requirements for Catalina. So as long as we use omsupervp on Linux, windows or mac (prior to Catalina), this will work.

2. OpenMusic for the time being has no graphic spectral interface to view the results. We have a basic SDIF viewer only.

Best
K

[antonioflorenca]

Hi Diemo and Karim,

Emmanuel’s definition of the spectral negative, as I had said in an earlier post on this, amounts to nothing more than a particular case of image sonification, i.e. it’s just the audio output of a sonified (photographic) negative of a spectrogram. It can easily be achieved using apps like Photosounder, which has been around for quite a while.

An interesting definition of the mirror/negative of a sound can perhaps be attained by appealing to Audio Descriptors (e.g., IRCAM’s own ircamdescriptors), i.e. for a given Audio Descriptor phase space (Timbre Space) one could define by symmetry the mirror/negative of a sound (for the given Timbre Space), and then proceed to synthesize it. I have no idea, however, if any of these proposed mathematical symmetries have any pyschoacoustic or cognitive significance on their own, or if they’re just an alternative way of parsing and probing the world of sound/timbre.

Concerning Duchamp’s own musical game, it’s very easy to implement it in OpenMusic: one just needs to choose as universe a temperament (and mode/scale), and pick the complementary sublist for any given note or list of notes. Basic example: taking as universe the chromatic C major scale (i.e., (0 2 4 5 7 9 11) in Z12), a C major chord (0 4 7) would then give a D minor 6th chord (2 5 9 11.)

All the best,
António