Hint: place your mouse over the picture and move it around.
Use mouse wheel or double click to zoom in/out. For best experience click full screen.
Click the bulb icon for a visual representation of the soundscape.
“Composition A” by Piet Mondrian is an abstract painting where color is used lavishly, showing bright contrast between yellow and black, red and blue, framed by dark lines and white space. My decision was to approach this painting rhythmically. I used only percussion and different rhythmic signatures for every color. So we have:
MusIcon™ is a picture where you can move around it and listen to different music moments. The sounds and music change depending on the place and time. MusIcon™ is an image with an interactive soundscape.
Background Information.
Music in its nature includes motion but most times it doesn’t interact with the listener. So I designed a virtual 2D audio canvas where I placed a number of music sources in the space. Every source is like a small orchestra that plays a music relevant with the specific picture’s detail. Some of these music sources are musically related and some other are not. The listener can move around (using the mouse in a computer or his/her finger for a touch device) and listen to different musical moments as he is the composer-mixer. The duration of the music of every source is different so there is no obvious restart point of the mix. Considering also the fact that the movement of every listener is also different, gives us unlimited musical moments. In other words, MusIcon™ is an image with an interactive soundscape.
Hint: place your mouse over the picture and move it around.
Use mouse wheel or double click to zoom in/out. For best experience click full screen.
Click the bulb icon for a visual representation of the soundscape.
While working on this MusIcon™, the “The Empire of Light (L’Empire des lumières)” by René Magritte, I faced a problem. I wanted to have the sound of the morning birds only in the blue area of the sky. Additionally, the music I compose for the light, heard only in around the light and up to the dark area of the trees. Using the “music sources” approach (in short, having music source around the image like small speakers. For more info read my previous post here.) this was impossible. So I decided to move forward and upgrade the MusIcon idea. I totally damped the “music sources” and instead now I use what I call “music heatmap” for every music source. A music heatmap is a visual representation of the music volume just like a heatmap is a representation of the temperature. In our case, is a grayscale image representing the volume of the music from black=0% volume to white=100% volume. Have a look in the images bellow (The Light, The Window, The Sky) where these are colored versions of the music heatmaps.
This approach has many benefits. For example, you can control the spread of the sound and the direction. You can have a sound that stops immediately in an area or spreads smoothly in another. You can also have the same sound in two ore more areas of the image.
“The Empire of Light (L’Empire des lumières)” by René Magritte, numerous versions of which exist (Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, The Guggenheim Museum), gets its title from a poem by Paul Nouge. It depicts a dark, nocturnal street scene is set against a pastel-blue, light-drenched sky spotted with fluffy cumulus clouds. With no fantastic element other than the single paradoxical combination of day and night, René Magritte upsets a fundamental organizing premise of life. [1]
In this painting there are 3 different music themes: Read more
Hint: place your mouse over the picture and move it around.
Use mouse wheel or double click to zoom in/out. For best experience click full screen.
Click the bulb icon for a visual representation of the soundscape.
“Blue II” by Joan Miro is the second MusIcon I composed. “Blue II ” is a 1961 abstract oil painting by the Spanish modern artist Joan Miró. The painting is the middle part of a triptych. In this painting there are 3 main different music themes: Read more
I created this app so you can enjoy the MusIcon in your phone. Explore the painting with your finger or tap the ticket icon and use the “Random Tour” while you are on the go with your earphones. You can download it from bellow:
I updated the MusIcon™ interface with some new features. Now you can use you mouse wheel or double click to zoom in/out the painting. This gives you one more level of freedom. Additional you can click the magic wand button for a random tour around the MusIcon™. Click here to try it!
Hint: place your mouse over the picture and move it around.
Use mouse wheel or double click to zoom in/out. For best experience click full screen.
Click the bulb icon for a visual representation of the soundscape.
“An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump” by Joseph Wright of Derby depicts a scientist performing an experiment in which a bird is deprived of air, before a varied group of onlookers. The bird will die if the demonstrator continues to deprive it of oxygen, and Wright leaves us in doubt as to whether or not the cockatoo will be reprieved.[1] In this painting there are 6 different music themes: Read more
Welcome
Welcome to my website!
Here you can find a collection of my compositions (click “Music” on the menu). Under the “Film Music” you can find information about the music I wrote for short films. There are also some video samples where I have compose new music for experimental purposes (click “Experiments” on the menu).
Feel free to leave your comment on any composition or post.
