AIKA: Self Destructing Visual Scores

Video about continuous creation and destruction through artistic process.

This piece was recorded for album 'AIKA' in Village studios, Copenhagen in 2019. The piece is timed to four minutes and played from a visual score.

Original visual score played in the studio.

We played the music twice and aligned all the tracks (vocal, bass, drums + 2 synths) in post to form about 8 tracks in total.

The drummer Olavi Louhivuori created some sounds by crumpling the visual score paper on the drums, creating the perfect motif for the animation.

Still from the generative visual setup

The animation is a series of generative reproductions of visual scores for the music using various algorithms, all based on transients extracted from the recorded stems and used as input data.

Essentially the process from composition to the video follows the sequence:

visual score -> music -> visual scores

Loosely in the spirit of mandalas, the digital representations of the music are destroyed by paper folding algorithms implemented in Houdini using the Vellum solver to simulate paper and some invisible colliders.

Some representations are quite linear and primitive, connecting channel points in a sequence while the more complex ones are based on force-directed graphs to generate a more organic look.

Another still

The track is released as a single from AMP records. Have a listen in Spotify!

AIKA single cover: Procedurally regenerated visual score. Can you see the similarity to the original score?