Blue Noise
A music-visualisation performance at the QUT Music
Dept Mix1 concert at the QUT Gardens point theatre in July 2002. This
involved a slide guitar/E-Bow signal being fed into a real-time abstract
music visualisation system. The compositional basis was
the 9/11 WTC terrorist attack, sparked by the E-Bow sent to
me by an old friend (Adam Hoppe, on the
right in this
photo) who was 70+ stories up in one of the towers
and survived by a close margin. The piece comprises six loosely linked
scenes
of 40 seconds duration. The visual scenes have a corresponding sound
design
generated through a digital effects chain, starting with a simple pure
tone melody based on a shakuhachi scale and finishing with blue noise rushing
through a tunnel.
- Jewel - Freedom, Purity, brightness, shining, hope
- Symmetry/Frequency - Duality, balance, Yin Yang
- Demons - Unstability, fear, revenge, jealousy, greed
- Ghosts - Transition, loss
- Didgeridoo - An Australian survivor
- Passage - Journey, escape to freedom
The intentions were to:
- Experiment with visual-music composition techniques
- Perform Gesture-sound-visual mapping research
- Introduce an audience to experimental music/sound by
leading them from a comfortable melodic listening zone to an attentive
sonic noise listening zone in a logically consistant manner through
use of abstract sound/visual mappings
