van't Klooster, A., 2012.

Sonifying animated graphical scores and visualising sound in the hearimprov performance

HEARIMPROV was a live audiovisual performance project for which nine musicians1 from different musical backgrounds were brought together to improvise acoustically to range of animated graphical scores. These video scores by 4 different artists were projected alongside a live generated spectrogram. The spectrogram software tracked the sound input from three microphones and translated this via Fourier transform into one blue, one green and one red spectrogram that overlapped simultaneously into one image. This literal visualisation of the sound originated from the desire to make the music available to people with a hearing impairment. The HEARIMPROV performance was a playful way of visualising live music through software and simultaneously sonifying graphic scores by a group of musicians. Certain 'playing rules' were invented by the musicians, to keep the improvised music varied and semi-structured. The project was inspired by the fluidity of digital media where one form of data can be transformed into another and used a collaborative, participatory method in the process of creation.