︎HISTORY III
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For years and years I had this idea in the back of my mind and I wondered how to go on with it some day. In the meantime I had a practical course at ponton-media-art-lab, Hannover (with Benjamin Heidersberger and Salvatore Vanasco), which had a artistic motivation at that time. We were thinking about music and sound in 3-D-space. Some years later I was working at "Steinberg" (Cubase etc.) in the service department. There I had some contact to developers and programmers. All these years I talked about that topic with my filmmaker-friend Jan Peters and other musical and artistic colleagues again and again. Until I suddenly knew how to make it. It has to be a software, which transforms video-data in real time into audio-data! But I could not do it myself, because I am not a programmer. Some programmer-friends of mine tried to work on the project but they never had enough time and energy for it. Then after a while, I started trying something with Pure-Data - and - it worked!
After all that years I realized that it was not only my idea which was not ripe - when I started thinking on that idea the computers weren´t able yet to do such a job. At that time I had an ATARI ST 1040!
I have been at the Synthesizer-Fair "Superbooth 16" (Berlin) in 2016 with a first prototype-setup. I named it "videovox", ("video"="to see", "vox"="voice), but many people had the misunderstanding, that they thought it was a machine to generate pictures from sound, a VJ-machine. From a distance they didn't get the point that it was just the other way round: pictures create sound. So I changed the name to "SILHOUETTE", what suits well the fact that the main-idea was to get into the shapes of audio-waveforms by performing with silhouettes, e.g. your hand.
Since then I have performances (with a concert-part and a discussion-part) with
SILHOUETTE to get more experience with it, how to use it and what is the effect on an audience. At the moment it seem not only to be a sound-synthesizer where you can get an inspiring approach to sounds but also a machine which shows its visual material on an screen.
In summer 2018 I built the first SILHOUETTE prototype. It was made of wood and HDF-plate. Maybe also as a reaction to the experiences of Superbooth 16 I was planning to make an offensive design. So I added 2 joysticks. In the beginning the build-in computer was my Laptop.
When Superbooth 19 came into view I wanted to get my synth to the point that other musicians and artists could buy and use it. Of course it should be made of metal. The building was kindly supported by friends. But time was short and the migration of the technique plus new features from Prototype 1 to 2 brought many problems.
So our appearance at Superbooth 19 was close to workshop. But fortunately I managed to get the camera and the lighttable back to work the night before 1st day of Superbooth. Many visitors reacted very kindly.
Now I finish SILHOUETTE Prototype 2 with kind electronic help by René Schmitz , who added 2 analog filters.
In 2020 the corona virus paralyzed the world. Superbooth 20 became an online event, where I did not appear with Silhouette.
I used the time gap for a further, deeper concept. René Schmitz and others gave some good feedback and so I developed a concept which mainly includes the function to generate waves not only for audio but also for slow use for modulation and sequencing. This new concept is called "Silhouette eins".
I would like to finsh this text with a memory of Edwin Welte and his "Welte-Lichttonorgel" (1930), which is kind of a predecessor for SILHOUETTE.
- Pit Przygodda, June 2019 -
youtube.com/watch?v=VnupTQW7_7E
youtube.com/watch?v=Wv_JWwu1um0
youtube.com/watch?v=KTFwYBmcGoE
︎︎︎ INSPIRATION/ THANKS
︎︎︎ HISTORY I