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Batch Totem
{Drawn By August}

Single FR 2008 on skyndo label
Electronic (Technical, Experimental)

{drawn by august} is an electronic music piece that is drawn, mixed and processed in the world-famous graphics editing program Adobe Photoshop. Each single pixel represents a sample point in the audiofile. The color of the pixel represents the amplitude of the sound. The spacing between pixels as well as the physical image size defines the pitch. A single track is composed of a series of hand-drawn pixels in various colors, resulting in complex sound events. The final piece is composed of tracks directly mixed within Adobe Photoshop using the layer utility. The result is saved in .RAW format and then converted into sound. The audio and the visual pieces are as such identical and the image can be read as a score. The timeline is defined by the western reading process, from top left to bottom right. The intensity of the sound is defined by the brightness: the more a part of the image is dark, the more the sound of the piece is loud, and vice versa. This piece is an exercice in composing electronic music without any music software. A sound-editing software is simply used at the end of the process in order to convert the visual image (.RAW file) into an audio track (.WAV file). This experiment can be seen as an illustration of the structural & timbral possibilities for creating & processing sound in Adobe Photoshop: image effects (blurring, contrast, inversion, etc.) can be used as complex audio processors and act as combinations of unique sound effects (delays, flangers, filters, etc.). Furthermore, the scope of this project is also to discover and use any other potential interface to compose electronic music (such as Adobe Photoshop), which is radically different from any conventional music software's interface since it has a complex time domain and it is free from any musical terminology. Release is also available in a compressed Ogg Vorbis format.

Musicians

Batch Totem , *1979 DK album by

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