Spirals

Each piece in Spirals has a twin image. The recording is cut into thousands of overlapping slices, each slice is measured for how much of every frequency it holds, and the result is laid out as a spectrogram. That spectrogram is then read off as a single strand of color and wound into an Archimedean spiral, starting at the center and ending at the outer edge, the way a record is cut.

The images are made with the same tool for every piece, so the differences between them are differences in the sound.

I started making images to go with these pieces as a way to experiment with Inkscape about 20 years ago. The spiral tool held my attention. So I applied the name to the music and a very weak and simple connection was made.

I am not a visual artist, really, but I have a fascination with aleatoric processes. Generating images this way feels a bit like Cage and makes me feel like a mad scientist tweaking numbers and playing with functions to see what comes out. It’s very akin to my experiments with Csound and Pure Data. It all fits.

The images are a way visually to label the music (for me).

I’d say it’s “Not That Deep” but when I first see the image created by the data that represents the sound? It feels like something very real. Unpredictable. But completely predictable.