Acoustic Shadows - Patrick Bergeron

Video Artwork

Imagine a landscape ... Moved by the wind, the leaves and the grass are balancing back and forth.
Into this field, a vertical object emits a sound. The wind, erratically, disperses this sound into streaks of particles.

This project moves sound and image using, mathematically extracted, wind movements of landscape video sequences. It shows the alteration of a spectrogram with these motion vectors and applies a sound resynthesis. The result is a sound and an image linked in these metamorphoses.

Video: essay, 2:38 minutes

DIFFUSION

Installation

* LÁ Art Museum, Iceland, September - December 2024, Organic Circuits (group exhibit)

Screenings

* Animatou animation festival, Geneva, Switzerland, October 2024

* Other Cinema, San Francisco, USA, September 2024

* Annecy animation festival, France, June 2024

* Halifax Independent Filmakers Festival, Halifax, Canada, June 2024

* Les sommets du cinéma d'animation, Montreal, May 2024

* Les Rendez-vous Quebec Cinema, Monteral, February 2024

* Jihlava documentary film festival, Czech Republic, October 2023

* Festival du nouveau cinéma (FNC), Montreal, October 2023

Windy landscape	Motion of objects calculation (Oflow/motion vectors)
Spectrogram	Spectrogram deformation using motion vectors
Resynthesized sound Sonograms, or spectrograms, are a visual representation of sound in the frequency and time domain. The low frequencies are found at the bottom of the image and the highs at the top. The sound amplitude is defined by the intensity of the horizontal lines. For this video, I used a spectrogram from an old project. The spectrogram used has the duration of 1/24 second, the duration of one frame in the video. Using software, the sound was resynthesized (conversion from image to sound) and used as a sound transmitter.
The spectrogram	A loop of the resynthesized sound
Sound transmitter and recorders I positionned the spectrogram in the middle of the image. I call this image a sound "transmitter". If I don't modify the image, the resynthesized resulting sound will be constant. In this project, I'm altering the spectrogram with the motion vectors extracted, by software, from my "wind" project. The image deforms according to these vectors. I placed "recorders" (sound resynthesis) on the left, in the middle and on the right of the image.
The spectrogram altered by the motion vectors	The 3 recorders
The 3 recorders resynthesized The recorders are extracted and saved as three images. They are new spectrograms ready to be converted into sound. In this video, the image is distorted to the left and to the right, new sounds are formed. The image plays rapidly across the frequency range.
The 3 spectrograms; left, middle et right	A loop of the left sound resynthesized A loop of the middle sound resynthesized A loop of the right sound resynthesized All sounds together
To the source ... This video has been done with one sound sample (1/24 second). Where this sound is coming from? I choose one image from the film Synchromy (Norman McLaren). I converted the image to an audible sound. From that sound, I generated a spectrogram image then I resynthesized this image to a sound. At the beginning of the video you can hear the sound and see the image (spectrogram) repeating themselves (see at the beginning of that text). This may seems complicated but I have used this process in another project called, "Study of Synchromy".
Image from Synchromy	Process for creating the loop

DESCRIPTION | IMAGES | MAKING


Wind direction creating sound diffraction and a no sound zone