Triptychos

Triptychos was commissioned by Sonic Arts Network, and ran at the Jerwood Space, London in May and June 2005.

The work was recently shown at the TECHNE digital performance platform in Istanbul.

Triptychos is mentioned in the book The Fundamentals of Sonic Art and Sound Design by Tony Gibbs.

Here's the programme note:

Triptychos is a digital media triptych, transforming the realtime images from a video camera into an abstract graphical music score, and interpreting the score to play an interactive, algorithmic soundtrack.

The panes of the triptych expose the analytical process from left to right: video capture (left), thresholding and downsampling (centre), and graphical score (right).

The sound engine is a sophisticated sample manipulation instrument. Instructions from the score recall different audio selections, tunings and key intervals, and individual instrument voices play samples forwards or backwards, often changing direction and speed within a single note.

Here's some coverage on the project from BBC Radio 3.

Here are some Recordings of Triptychos in action.

Triptychos is written in Max/MSP, Jitter and Java, with OpenGL graphics via JavaScript. The sample resources range from timestretched acoustic recordings and hardware synthesis to voice recordings in a variety of languages and accents: Japanese, Portuguese, Arabic and Basque.

Here are some Setup Snaps of the installation.

Triptychos has its own MySpace page with some additional audio.