Saturday Synth Porn: Sound of Life (SoL) is a very unusual audio-visual performance by noise performer 23N! that explores the idea of generating noise music from the movements of spermatozoa:

SoL consists in generating sounds and visual dynamically through the tracking of the movement of individual spermatozoa of the semen of the performer observed under a digital microscope. The obtaining of the semen is an intrinsic part of the performance.

Details on the work below.

According to 23N!:

Artist Statement

When spermatozoa are the ones generating sounds, who is the performer ? Are the spermatozoa the performer or are they already a distinct autonomous living entity ?

Sound of Life is trying to address these questions by limiting the interaction between the performer-creator, as the one who gave birth to the spermatozoa, and the spermatozoa to a minimum. Spermatozoa that enter the field of vision of the microscope are all potential performers and the sounds they generate depends mostly on their movements that are not controlled.

While the act of selecting the candidate spermatozoa can be seen as an action of the performer that limits the freedom of the spermatozoa, it is meant to be done in the case of a staged performance. In the case of an installation, random selection or selection of all moving spermatozoa can be easily implemented instead.

By making the act of obtaining the necessary fresh semen a part of the performance, the artistic creation is voluntary confused with the creation of life. The created life, the spermatozoa, becomes an artistic creator, blurring the border between life and art.

The software behind the performance is put together with the usual experimental electronic music culprits, including OSC, PureData, & Wiimote.

Interesting experimental concept or intellectual wankery? Leave a comment with your thoughts!

If you’ve used pOSCa, leave a comment below and let us know what you think of it!

Description:

pOSCa is an Open Sound Control compliant controller for audio and multimedia software such as Ableton Live, Reaktor, Plogue Bidule, Traktor, Max/MSP/Jitter, Pure Data and OSCulator.

Using the controller from the iPhone allows the electronics music performer to get up from behind the laptop and interact with his audience. pOSCa sports a nice dial, up/down and left/right buttons and ten programmable buttons. Programming the buttons is easy: just select a button and set a value with the dial, then you can set another button to another value. When you hit the first button again, the dial will spin in place and give the desired value. This allows for easy pre-programming up to the performance and quick interactivity.

In order to have no surprises in concert, the settings are kept in the iPhone/iPod’s Settings area. Be sure to set the settings to interact with your audio software.

Here you can set your computers IP address and what UDP port your software is listening to. You can also set a name for the device so that you can have multiple devices controlling the same synth without causing confusion. Also you can set default min and max values. These are by default set to max and min for MIDI as many of the synth come from a MIDI heritage, but they can be set to anything you want.

pOSCa works best using WiFi and works equally well on the iPhone and iPod touch, although when using it in concert you might want to turn off the phone functionality first.

FantaStick (App Store link) is a minimalistic remote interface for the iPhone for use with software such as Max/MSP or Pure Data.

Features:

• Minimalistic, fullscreen control area with nothing on it but what you provide.
• Multitouch-events on the device are forwarded to your host via UDP. Information includes the touch state (begin, move, end) and coordinates.
• Designed for no-hassle: zero-click startup, the device does not sleep or suspend network connection, flicker- and lag-free.
• Displaying images (fetched with URLs) and caching them locally for use on non-networked locations.
• Basic drawing with lines, boxes and text.

Visit http://pinktwins.com/fantastick for quick start and usage examples.

NOTE: this app works together with other software. When launched you get a black screen, what happens then is up to you. Visit the website for examples and documentation.

This allows you to remote control and receive feedback from software and hardware that implements the OSC protocol such as Pure Data and Max/MSP.

The interface provides a number of different touch controls to send/receive messages:

• Faders
• Rotary controls
• Push buttons
• Toggle buttons
• XY pads
• Multi-faders
• Multi-toggles
• LEDs

The program comes with four layouts that are organized in multiple pages.