SILHOUETTE - Visual to Analog Audio Synthesizer with Dual Flight Style Joysticks & Monitor Display

Published on Jan 2, 2019 Pit Przygodda

Kind of a modern day ANS, or Oramics. Also see Virtual ANS for iOS.

"silhouette". A video-to-audio-synthesizer by Pit Przygodda (Prototype 2018).
Infos: www.silhouette-synthesizer.de

6-voice, seperate tuning and modulation, analog-filter, FX. SILHOUETTE trains itself to become a really extraordinary sound-scape-machine!

Technique
s i l h o u e t t e is a software-based synthesizer, that creates sound by using greyscale-data chosen from a picture file.

This is done in real-time.

At the moment, it is programmed under the Pure Data programming environment.

Data-sources:
- real-time-pictures/motion-pictures (camera)
- picture-files
- motion-pictures (films)

Oscillator:
The sound is produced by transforming an area of greyscale-data into sound-data.

Windows:
You have a screen, where you see the camera-picture/picture/film you have loaded in.
You have 2 data-windows within the loaded picture to chose a visual area where you like to extract sound-data.
The 2 windows can be changed in size and position individualy and be modulated by LFO, EG, KBD-follow, audio-waveform or manually in realtime.
Their audio-output is routed anolog to their x/y-position in the picture to coordinates in a quadrophonic sound-system in the performance-room.

Silhouette
So it is possible that the outline of a silhouette is analog to your audio-waveform.
Therefor it is necessary that the silhouette-shape is strictly black and white.
This was the main idea at the beginning of this project:
That you act visually directly IN the waveform.
This is done very sensually by acting on the light-table in front of the camera.
I think about giving that technique a name: "silhouette-synthesis".

Quadrophonia
Since summer 2018 I am building a hardware. It has 2 joystick-controlled-data-windows inside the main-screen which let you move 2 audio-waves analog to their coordinates in the main-wondow inside a quadrophonic space (screen corner-left/top > speaker-front/left; screen corner-right/bottom > speaker back/right etc.).