Visus Sonitus I

This videoart piece, shortlisted at the Lumen Prize 2015, is carefully choreographed and perfectly synchronized with the musical work “Cantus Arcticus” (first movement), created in 1972 by Einojuhani Rautavaara , leading international composer in Contemporary Music. It’s not a random visualization of sounds, but a faithful reflect of what I literally can feel and see in my mind when I listen to this Finish composer’s work, due to my perceptual condition called synaesthesia. In a tradition started from Kandinsky to Disney’s Fantasia, and with recorded sounds of birds acting as another instrument in the composition, this music paints literally my mind with colours: flying yellow sounds of birds in combination with dancing colourful instruments that fly with the music in a three-dimensional space.
Thanks to my experience as effects technical director in movies like Jupiter Ascending, Man of Steel, Thor, among others, also my studies in Computer Science and my graduation in Fine Arts and thanks to the the musical sheets provided by the publisher in Finland, I tweaked MIDI libraries in C++ to extract musical data and bring it to 3D Software Houdini, where I re-timed it to match the real symphonic interpretation and sourced particle simulations from the data. This work includes the development of different tools to blend and position cameras, to create clouds, to shade the instruments or to paint branches procedurally, and is done in stereoscopic. That’s why it needs a proper 3D projector or VR mobile device to be seen as it’s meant to be. Link to the 3D version https://vimeo.com/129990229
Video Animation
7 min
2014