Synthpaint - Devlog 01 - Why?
Hi there! Gabriel here! I hope you are having a nice day today :)
This is the first post about a series that I’ll develop through the following months and has to do with my ongoing Bachelor's project at SRH University of Popular Arts in Berlin, where I study Audio Design: SYNTHPAINT a playful sequencer/art creation tool.
Since I’ve been working on this for a couple of months already, I’ll split the current state of my experiment into several different entries. After dumping all the work I’ve done until now in here, I hope I can keep the blog updated with new weekly entries about the state of development.
But first, a little bit of history:
A chanson about love, Belle, bonne, sage, by Baude Cordier (XV century)
Cilla McQueen's 'Picnic' for violins, oboe and bass guitar (2006) © Cilla McQueen
The relationship between sonic creation and graphical art has a long history. From the curiously shaped scores of the Ars Subtilior to the complex webs of information in contemporary graphic scores, the visual representation of acoustic material has been a field of innovation for several centuries. In her essay “Unflattering Sounds: Paradigms of Interactivity in tactile interfaces for sound production” (2020) Victoria Simon shares a quote from Greek composer Iannis Xenakis that infers a paradigm of thinking about the nature and meaning of sound as a tactile experience:
It is necessary to relearn how to touch sound with one’s fingers. That is the heart of music, its essence!
-Iannis Xenakis (1952, p. 40)
In the 20th century, systems like UPIC (devised by Xenakis, and developed at the Centre d'Etudes de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales in Paris) have made efforts to offer new ways of conceiving sound creation with an emphasis on its materiality, proposing the direct manipulation by the user of abstract sound material via a 2D drawing board-like interface. Likewise, modern sampling technology like the one offered by iZotope’s sample-based synthesizer “Iris” has given the user tools of sound manipulation that offer the opportunity to the user to interact with the sound material in a similar way that is not too distant to that of a graphic artist that carves shape and shadow into the 2D space.
A short documentary about Xenaki’s musical graphical interface UPIC.
Why develop a new tool then?
Although these systems are indeed revolutionary tools for the composer and sound designer, the graphical side of these systems has traditionally been functional to a specific desired acoustic effect, with the graphical side of the interface being of no creative interest. Moreover, the methods of graphical interaction make use of interfaces of visualization (like the cartesian plane or the sound spectra) that are not intuitive to a person that is not well versed in the current paradigms of sound synthesis, and not a lot of effort has been made in exploring the expressive possibilities of alternative systems that are devoided of this hierarchical difference between the graphical and the acoustic.
“Hi NASA!” (jk… iZotope’s Iris is simply amazing, but it can be intimidating)
Coming from this line of thought (of sound as an entity of physical material nature), and taking inspiration from more widespread methods of interaction (like the canvas offered by the ubiquitous MS Paint and other drawing surfaces), SYNTHPAINT is my attempt to formulate an alternative type of interface in which neither sound nor image is outweighed by the other. What would it mean to design a sound taking into account how it looks? What would it mean to make 2D art taking into account how it sounds? Synthpaint will try to exist in the intersection of these two creative spheres and leave the answer to these creative questions to be explored by the user.
Time, texture, space, volume… Sounds and strokes have lots in common.
One burning question remains though:
How?
Well, I’ll explain that in the next entry.
Until then, stay safe!
