road sonifier · 24-08 19:45
Every number the preset set is here to bend by hand — tap a genre first, then change it. Pitch and rhythm still come from the road; this only shapes the voice.
Tap a name to mute it, drag to set how loud it is against the others.
Road sonifier. C'est la rue qui fait la musique — it is the street that makes the music. A line sweeps across the live picture, one pass over the whole road at a time, never on a clock: a handful of discrete notes fire during each sweep, on the road's own brightest spots, snapped to the preset's scale — a real tune, not a wash, because only the brightest few spots ever sound at once. How fast those notes actually come depends entirely on how fast the sweep is going: the preset's own pace, stretched by how much the picture itself is really changing — never GPS. Pedal into real texture and it speeds up on its own; stop, and it goes quiet, because nothing is passing under the line to make a note of. Ten genres set the scale, the voice, the filter and how many notes may sound at once; Noise is the one exception on every count — no scale, no note grid, every position sounding as a continuous drone, and the only preset that carries distortion. The drum hits are real too, but they are never on a beat — a hit fires the instant the picture itself changes sharply, in real time: a crack, a seam, a shift from tarmac to gravel actually passing under the camera, not a pattern read off a still photo. Kick, snare and hat each carry their own volume, so more than one can sound on the same edge. Ride takes a GPS fix for the kilometres and the route you can save when you are done — it never sets the tempo. Nothing leaves your phone.
the road, played