Generating Music Out of a Film
This project has been realized for Clarence Barlow, a contemporary composer
and computer music pioneer.
Clarence was asked by the Bonner
Kunsthalle to compose a new music track for a 2 minute film from 1930
by Oskar Fischinger "Study No.6". The film was originally created
(charcoal drawing on paper) for the existing piece "Los Verderones
Fandango" by Jacinto Guerrero. The film consists of abstract objects
moving and changing in shape. Clarence's idea was to measure the bounding
boxes of these objects and use the measured parameters for the control
of musical parameters, using his own algorithmic composition program
AUTOBUSK. Imaging specialist Dr. Martin Bichsel provided his blob
recognition software for measuring a single frame. We developed the
software to iterate over the whole movie and apply the blob recognition
to each frame. The measured data were sent to Clarence by email,
where he started the music generation process. In the meantime we
extended our PerEdit software by a special converter for the
measurement data format. With this converter, it is possible to
visually check the correctness of the blob recognition process and in
case of error adapt the parameters provided by the blob recognition
program. The work was presented at EX MACHINA 1996.
