more to come ....

sound design
philipp asked me if i wanted to do the sound design. flash_flag/pink_noise is one piece in a family of works from philipp and i know the others briefly and we had some discussions about them a couple of times. so i had an idea about the concept and of course the sound should also fit to this concept.
in this work the flags do not stand for the differences between nations. Rather than that they express the similarities of all people - that nations are highly artificial constructs of patterns - in this case patterns of black and white pixels. by rendering them duotone those national symbols get symbolised symbols, icons or symbolic patterns of black and white pixels. from the sequence of those duotone patterns there emerges a rhythmic phrase that emphasises the unity of the entity we call earth. the iconised flags become a corpus of signifiers describing this entity.

the sounddesign sonifies these iconised flags - it does not relate to any policital or socio-cultural considerations concerning the nations the flags stand for. in the sequence of the flags one duotone pattern becomes one sonic impulse. therefore the sequence of flags result in an impulse phrase. properties of the iconised flags are used to sculpt the sound. the parameters that were modulated are: frequency (bandwidth), decay characteristic, attenuation and panning.

it seemed most interesting to sonify each pattern with lowpass-filtered noise - as noise is randomness and thus the dialectic complement to pattern. the percentage of white pixels controls the cut-off frequency of the lowpass-filter (frequency bandwidth of the resulting signal). Therefore the bigger the fraction of white pixels the more signal passes the filter.
we chose to use pink noise as the spectrum is closer to the harmonic impression of the iconised flags than this would be the case for the colder and more aggressive spectrum of white noise.
the flags have different aspect ratios that result in a specific actual coverage for the chosen medium. the coverage for film is used to control the attenuation of the resulting impulse. the smaller the covered area the more the signal is attenuated.
Therefore the overall level of each impulse depends on both - the duotone pattern and the proportion of the flag.
the localisation of the sound - especially when using surround sound - is a very interesting parameter. the location of the flag could be considered to be the coordinates of the countries capital. the longitude becomes the position in panorama. subsequently, if using surround sound the recipient is placed in the center of the earth, supporting the idea of unity. The same way the flags became duotone the localisation becomes two dimensional - down-folded and iconised. north-south differences are eliminated.
the latitude was used to determine the decay characteristic of the impulse - between concave and convex. this brings back the north-south location but as a subtle variation - more related to the natural circumstances than to politic or economic conditions.

a custom jitter-external in max/msp-jitter was used to extract the percentage of white and black pixels as well as the amount of covered pixels of the iconised flags. Each flag was masked in order to be able to distinguish between background and pattern.
the impulse's decay characteristic and lowpass-filtering were applied in max/msp-jitter. for the stereo version also panning was processed in this environment. then the impulse train was recorded and transfered to logic pro where surround panning for the surround version was added and the impulses were aligned to the frames of the image sequence.

view flash_flag/pink_noise — exhibitions

[projected]
Solo24Ore24Stunden, museion - museo d'arte moderna e contemporanea, bolzano, italia, 14-15 december 2007
flash_flag/pink_noise will be shown during the opening event of this new building

flash_flag/pink_noise is part of the following art collections

museion - museo d'arte moderna e contemporanea
39100 bolzano, via sernesi 1
italia
t +39 0471 977 116, f + 39 0471 312 460
info ::at:: museion.it

view flash_flag/pink_noise — preview

:whisper: the image on top is a link that opens the sequence (pal, 25fps, stereo) in a new window :/whisper:

downloads

description of the sound design [german]

another text concerning this project [english]

contact information:
for more information about flash_flag/pink_noise and for related inquiries, please contact philipp messner (philippmessner ::at:: gmx.net).

please note that the text here is written according to the design guidelines of the flash_flag project!

disclaimer: please also note that this is an art project and the name is in no way related to Adobe® or the former Macromedia® or the Adobe® Flash^TM software package, they are not responsible for this content and there is no connection between this project and the named companies! All rights of the product names and brand names of Adobe® products and brands remain to their registered owners! thanks