New York Ground – AKA The 12 Blocks of Santacon
Firstly, here is a “concert version” of the piece, because you will simply not be able to hear the musical elements all together in the ambisonic mix, because everything will be coming from another place relative to the listener and therefor volumes will be fluctuating just like normal moving sound sources everywhere beyond your earbuds.
Posted by Jeremiah Bornfield on Friday, February 1, 2019
View/Listen to this piece on your phone with headphones. The embedded video will not work with all browsers – try this link if yours is one of them
I’ve been thinking about taking video and replacing action with music for a long time and have attempted it with this little piece thanks to a new suite of 360 audio plugins by facebook. Basically I took a short 360 video from the ground at the corner of 12 blocks on 8th Avenue, stitched them together to create a crude kind of space portal effect as they transition in a video that has had its natural audio stripped out and replaced with a musical score based on the action. I should have started with a simpler sonic landscape – considering all of the possibilities – I ended up watching movement and creating melodies based on mostly footsteps, cars and bikes from the perspective of the viewer as follows: Right to Left in Front/Back and Left to Right in Front/Back, towards action and away action.
The music is a 12 tone ground bass switching bass tones at each shot change and roughly going through 3,4 or 5 harmonic shifts based on the number of bars in each of the sections. There are as many as 5 simultaneous melodies derived from the video – volume and panning in all directions including height is dependent on positions of the action.
After experimenting a bit with the mixing process I automated each voice in a virtual area of 16 meters Square with a 100 meter ceiling. There are so many parameters to automate in this new format, It’s simply awesome. One very fun effect you will notice (in the bikes especially) is the doppler effect making those 30mph bike instruments shift pitch as they whiz by your face. Some instruments had 15 automation parameter stripes in the mixing window.
Good times and more to come…
New York Ground by on Scribd
Member of Manhattan Producers Alliance, BMI Composer, Delian Society, and contributing editor at Hit Songs Deconstructed. Past performances at venues such as Lincoln Center, National Theater Taipei, Tenri Cultural Institute, International Electro-Acoustic Festival, Galapagos Art Space, SVA Theater, etc. M.A. in Music Composition from CUNY Hunter College, 2009.