Soni Chrome

Soni-Chrome was the first serious attempt to create a piece of visual music using 'traditional' composition techniques found in electroacoustic compositions and for the music to strongly bond with the video imagery. Prior to this all the works had relied heavily on algorithmic techniques for fusing the sound track with the video. The Soni-Chrome video began life as a series of photographs with interesting colour content and hues that contrasted well with each other. They also produced interesting effects when faded between. To keep the video interesting many more manipulations were performed on the pictures to add movement, contrast, fluidity and evolutionary transformations to create a short piece of dynamic, constantly changing video. The technique of using different colour cross fades between the images created a certain random dynamic quality to the scenes which could not have been predefined in a useful way. The way the pixels and hues interact produces a wide variety of colour hues and textures that would be difficult to achieve by video ‘synthesis’.

Because of the fluid nature of the resulting work it was very appropriate to use a sound track created by found sound manipulation to accompany the video as this allows very complex textural soundscapes to be created. The quality, dynamic nature and spectral diversity of natural sounds ensures they fit very well with the nature of the visuals. Their strength is mainly in their 'timbre' if it is possible to use a single word for the description of the multitude of textures possible. The palette of sounds that can be created via found sound transformation is much greater than when using conventional instruments and to a certain extent sound synthesis. Sound synthesis relies heavily on good programming and allowing the sound algorithm to develop interestingly over time. The method of creating compositions from natural sounds requires the transformation of recordings and gives the composer the structural freedom as to where the sounds can be placed suitably into the musical work. With sound synthesis it could be said that the challenge is greater in the sound definition stage rather than the compositional structuring work. With the original photos being mainly of natural scenes, natural sounds also seemed to be their perfect complement.

Due to the complexity of the video it was difficult to find sounds that fitted and worked compositionally over time. The temptation was to throw everything at the soundtrack to emphasise the density of the visual work. Of course this can lead to an overload of the senses when the visual and auditory channel are swamped by stimuli it may be difficult for the observer to parse the information in a useful way. The answer then was to thin out the sounds and try to focus on the main element of the visual with the use of one or two sounds. Incidental sounds are also used for major transitions or more obvious visual events.