Sound Mantra
"Sound Mantra" (2023) is an audiovisual etude series exploring circular phrases, sound objects, minimalist notation, and time manipulation.
A youtube playlist of all the mantras are available for convenient consumption. Vimeo links can be found below in the Gallery section.
Overview
"Sound Mantra" is an audiovisual etude series made during Looptober in October 2023.
The process involved constructing a high-level musical vocabulary for an underlying shared sound object. Each new mantra adds a new symbol to the vocabulary, extending the performance capabilities of this sound object. Symbols are arranged in sequences and spaced out along a circle, where they perform a small looped phrase (hence the name "Mantra").
Mantras are visualized using a circular sequencer, with symbols arranged like numbers on a clock. A swining pendulumn hand is used to indicate playback position. 1-bit graphics were used as an aesthetic choice.
In addition to the sound object vocabulary symbols, there are also symbols used to manipulate the flow of time. A sequence can be smoothly speed up or slowed down the control rate of this sequence. Time warping visualized using two pendulum hands: the long hand shows the actual playhead movement, while the shorter playhead moves at the original constant speed as a reference. The sequence used to control the flow of time is visualized underneath the circle as a linear sequencer with a looping playhead.
Technical Details
Works were rendered entirely using mnolth, a monolithic audiovisual software ecosystem, specializing in rendering video. It combines several smaller libraries together and glues them together using the Lua scripting language.
Audio was synthesized using DSP code from sndkit, with the sequencing made possible using the Gesture-based algorithms seen in gestvm.
Visuals were made using an extended version of btprnt, a specialized library for 1-bit graphics.
Gallery
Displayed Below are all the mantras, ordered by the day they were created in October 2023. Clicking on the thumbnail or link will open the corresponding video (hosted on Vimeo).
