Why not news photographs on the Web can be used for art and music materials. Ongoing Web project "RGB Music News" has been making archives of algorithmic compositions that converts image date of news photographs to musics. The project shows what news images bring into this world visually and musically. This is one of experimentations with the relationships between perception and cognition, phenomenon, technology, music and visual.
The music is not an impression of a photograph of a musical variation. The Web program composes a music from an image data directly. The program imports photograph data from five Internet news sites. It reads RGB value of the image pixels from the top left to the bottom right horizontally. These digital photographs are further reduced to their color pixels as mosaic. Because so many amount of pixels will be hours of a music. Then the program adjusts the length of the music. One mosaic color cell is converted three notes of sounds from three RGB color values, and the length of note is determined by high or low value of the pixel. The highest RGB value is 255. The lowest is 0. RGB value 120 is the middle C of the musical scale. Added two RGB value will be a half step higher of the note. 0 is no sounds. Basic conversion is chromatic scale (twelve-tone) notes. The program arranges a music by musical scale filters, over 100 different instruments, tempo and other functions.
Musical Graphic Notation appeared in the middle of 20th century. Musical composers used graphical patterns, letters and sometimes paintings. The players of graphic notation played these musics by their own interpretations. The musics were reflected accidental player’s minds and/or their arbitrary decisions. We became to feel the music was only haphazard, and could never listen the same composition. Some artists and musicians like Wassily Kandinsky (painter) and Alexander Scriabin (composer/pianist) stated that they could hear sounds what they saw colors, and they could see colors what they heard sounds. It is called Synesthesia. I am very curious about it, but I am not sure whether it is true or not. Besides I am quite sure I am not a that kind of person. Personal computer has been improved rapidly for the last 20 years. Now it is possible that ordinary people like me can handle and process a large amount of data immediately. The sense of human being resembles with data analysis. An analysis of data may draw out potentials of new art forms.
Web application "The Current News Music" and "RGB Music News Player Web Version" require a plug-in which can be downloaded at http://revweb.runrev.com/.
for Exhibition: Large displays or a projector with stereo speakers. You can download an archive player "RGB Music News Player". Please use MacOS version for better sounds. The player shows all archives continuously, and can open a file "FUKUSHIMA2011" which is in the zip file.
The Current News Music (Web Application Image)
RGB Music News Player Web Version (Web Application Image)
