This weeks Disquiet Junto asks us to abuse software to make music. I was going to pass on this one quite honestly - there has been lots of interesting work in this field - using data files as audio etc etc. but then, and I’m not quite sure why, a project in an electronics magazine from when I was a child came to mind. In the project they created (an incredibly lofi) video by using electro-mechanical scanning of a light resistor. Seeing video as an analog signal then prompted this.

I’ve got a Max/Jitter patch collecting video. The video is split into 4 pieces - each piece is treated as a wavetable and the volume of it is modulated by taking the video segment using the average of each column from left to right scanned at quite a low frequency. A few parameters here and there let me turn it into music rather than noise and there is a reverb and a bit of delay in there for good measure. And then I recorded an improvisation on the whole setup.

I’m still not quite sure it counts - surely using Max/MSP to make music is its entire reason for existing! But perhaps it’s ok since ALL the audio signal is generated by a video camera……

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