Sound from Light, A Description: The history of photography and recorded sound have interestingly similar paths. There is a belief in each medium that there is a trace of reality captured in the mechanical recording of either light waves or sound waves. And in contemporary times, there is a parallel between the two mediums in the space of computers. The scale for pixel values in a black and white image goes from 0-255 and for MIDI notes is 0-127, exactly half the scale for pixels. Using Max/MSP software I translate a digital capture of a skiagram into a sequence of MIDI notes. Those sequential notes are then the foundation of the sound composition. I can assign different octaves different “instruments” in the software to create or evoke a sense of what the space was. In addition, in some compositions I layer in field recordings made of the space itself when I was making the photographic exposure so blending the translation with an indexical recording. I am very interested in adding back to the finished work the element of time that is removed when you make a photograph. In some pieces, the duration of the sound recording is the duration of the exposure time it took to make the image.
