Youtube

And though it may not seem that way, all projects here have had major or minor help from Excel.

Happy Birthday


Using the melody I created last year (https://youtu.be/Rv8GZs67wZ0) but with different instruments. And new visuals. And it's my birthday tomorrow!

Pylon Revisited


3 years ago I made my first sonification, Pylon in 50 Hz. In 2018 I intended to have more tonal sound, compared to the atonal stuff in 2018. But this one is microtonal :-)

Sonification of Graphication of a Dvorak piece


I was challenged, again, this time to use the graphication of classical pieces by Cor de Man (https://www.pieterseuren.nl/galerij/muziek-grafiek-aanvulling-1/) in anyway I like. The animation is a straight line version of the image, moving along. The main sound is where the light beam hits the ceiling, in the background where the light beam ends.

Sound from the Sun


There are 50 bands in this image. Some colour freqeuncies are missing. So I've added notes in their place. From left to right - but you would probably believe it if it where the other way around :-)

Piece of Table


Inspired by a inlaid wooden table top at Bistrot Centraal, while having an equally inspiring conversation with fellow-musician, -electrical engineer, - woman, -multipotentialite.

Looking at a picture through a small crevasse


How does a picture sound? Listening to a piece of music is like looking at a picture through a small crevasse - and then you're supposed to have an opinion about the piece as a whole. Can you see which famous Dutch Icon is used here?

Microscopic Wood Crying


What if every bubble in this little piece of wood was able to shed a tear?

Performance


At October 5th, 2018 I gave a performance / lecture on Art with Excel at De Waag in Amsterdam, on an invitation by Lost & Found.

Waag Anatomic Theater Floor Mosaic


The floor of the Anatomic Theater in the Waag building in Amsterdam has a beautiful mosaic.
That begged to be turned into something prismatic.
This time the length of the lightbeam is translated to (guitar) sound, the longer the lower.

Guess Who


Beneath the (vertical) lines lies a portrait. The average colour of the top horizontal lines is for the right hand, similarly the middle band is for the left hand, the bottom part is for the pedal....
Hint, the portrait is of an organ player that lives a few blocks from me.

Hooi


I took me 3 years to finally turn this pastoral image into sound. What if the hay bales on the land were pins in a music box (in this case a grand piano)?

Puttytribe Mixed Tape Contribution


I made a cartoon and a poem, so I could not not make a contribution for a tribal mixed tape. Not sure it works for audio only. So the full work can be appreciated here on Youtube.

Pong


I was challenged to make a video with a story and that is clearly made with / in Excel. What story do you hear?

Fröbel Fengur


60 second present for Mirella and her equine friend Fengur. Fengur acting as a prism for probably too many light beams, his silhouette is slowly emerging. Pitch is determined by the horizontal end position of the light beam after 10 passes, so, quite random.

Text Morphing Prism


As an ever evolving concept, this is the current state of affairs.

Doelenkwartet Initials of Players (Text Morphing Prism)


Using the first letters of the first names of the members of the Doelenkwartet, morphing from one to the other.
Meanwhile each instrument has it's own 'lightbeam' and as they go through the lines/prisms of the letters, as soon as the light returns to the side of the start of the lightbeam, the pitch is calculated.
I've left out some notes to make it more tonal.

Just Me (Text Morphing Prism)


Using the letters of my name morphing from one to the other.
Written for string quartet where each instrument has it's own 'lightbeam' and as they go through the lines/prisms of the letters, as soon as the light returns to the side of the start of the lightbeam, the pitch is calculated. Only the notes that are in the chords that were used in 'Just me' were allowed to sound. Just Me on Soundcloud.

Doelenkwartet (Text Morphing Prism)


Using the letters of "Doelenkwartet", morphing from one to the other.
Meanwhile each instrument has it's own 'lightbeam' and as they go through the lines/prisms of the letters, as soon as the light returns to the side of the start of the lightbeam, the pitch is calculated.
I've shortened the very long notes, in order to not have a sound-mud. This one is again a-tonal - although 2018 was supposed to be a tonal year :-)

Prisms of Freedom


Entry for the Prism of Freedom theme of "the one minutes".
The Prism concept has ben extended with sound.

The One Minutes

Movement & Sound


Made entirely with excel, the nodes in the picture represent note-pitch and duration. The walk through the picture is a random-walk.

This is a 'better' version of Origami Part I

Pretty Lady by Annelies van der Schuit


A colourful painting by Annelies van der Schuit.
Sonification by Sledgehammer Productions.

Every block of 9x5 pixels is split in R,G,B, values that are mapped unto 80 chords that have their origin in the letterfrequency of A.N.N.E.L.I.E.S. in de Dutch language.
In between cadenzas from the FHK/HHK tool (© Sledgehammer Productions) to get from one chord to another.

One change at a time


Within an ambitus of 2 octaves a list of all possible tetrachords of thirds is made (dom7, maj7, min7, minmaj7) including all the inversions.
Then all possible 'next chord's are determined, that is, chords that differ just one note. With this a random walk is established.
As the changing note might not always end up in the same voice, and extra adjustment has been made to have steady notes remain in the same voice.
As for the visuals: as the new laptop came with a an upgrade of Excel, I discovered a new graph type.
The colour of each balls is a combination of the value of 3 voices (midi 55-79 translated to colour value 0-255).
And there are 12 permutations with 3 items out of 4.

It used to be for four hands


4 Mains by Wim Mertens was completely disassembled and then stochastically re-assembled.
Every note you see is at that position (within the 8 bar context) it originally was.
The 'ground' has been omitted, as it doesn't add anything meaningful to the new piece.

Bach Equalised A Version


What happens when you turn yet another of the voices in a 4-part choral into one of the most boring things to play?

Bach Equalised T Version


What happens when you turn another of the voices in a 4-part choral into one of the most boring things to play?

Bach Equalised S Version


What happens when you turn one of the voices in a 4-part choral into one of the most boring things to play?

Going nowhere - or anywhere ...


Another collaboration with Wendy Wallace.
This time with a painting with the title "If a book".
The image is divided in sections that are individually filled with the RGB colours of the final pixel. The pitch is mapped onto a dominant 7 chord spanning 2 octaves.
If a square is 'hit' for the first time the sound is low, the second time an octave higher, the third and last time another octave higher.
The dominant chord resolves in it's tonica, but by taking that too with an added 7, leads to a never ending sequens ("dominant ketting" in Dutch).
Like when you're reading a book, your going nowhere and anywhere at the same time.

Image © Wendy Wallace
Audio & video © Sledgehammer Productions

Vivaldi's Telephone Number


Nicholas Rougeux of OffTheStaff was so kind to let me use his "image-anation" for all parts of The Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi and sonificate it 'back'. I used the chord progression known as Vivaldi's Telephone Number for assigning pitch to colour.
More information in the description of the video!

Once upon a time

To this day, hour and minute (December 29th, 2017, 8:47 CET), 49 years ago I decided to show myself to the world.
A bit premature, but that didn't stop me becoming the person that I am today.


Happy Birthday to me!

Messing around with the pitches of 'Happy Birthday', "Lang zal ze leven' and 'Zij leve hoog' - assigning them to colour values based on where they are in the melody.

Inside Looking Out

While in Tübingen for the GENERATE! festival seeking a silent refuge in the Sankt Georg Stift.
Got inspiration from the modern stained glass windows.
One panel, from one window, split into RGB values.
Sorting the RGB value and then using the coordinates for pitch.
This time some playing around with the available sounds.


Experimental Black & White


Using a black and white image (a study on contrast/texture by Sven van Echelpoel), taking the RGB values of each pixel (which are equal, making a grey value). Rearranging the order by sorting the x- and y coordinate and bringing that back to the pixel art. X- and Y-value are used to create the pitch, R left, B right, G the middle.
So there are some pixels that are coloured when they appear, until all pixels are processed.

Art © Sven van Echelpoel
Sound and video © Sledgehammer Productions

IRMA


On September 6th, 2017 Hurricane Irma wreaked havoc on the Dutch Caribbean island of Sint-Maarten. I took a full colour of a meteorological image, and spiraling out from the eye, three 'arms' were translated to sound (red-harp-left, green-marimba-middle, blue-vibraphone-right). New in this soundscape: the grey-value is used for controlling volume.

Melting the Melted Watch - Salvador Dalí


Taking the pixels of a fragment of a Dalí painting (the melted watch).
Red value, diagonal zigzag, from one corner to harp sound in left ear.
Green value, diagonal zigzag from another corner, marimba sound in the middle.
Blue value, diagonal zigzag from yet another corner, vibraphone sound in right ear.
Grey scale value, zigzag from the last corner transformed to volume of the above sounds.

Miró - Remembering Barcelona


Taking the mosaic by Joan Miró, located on Barcelona's Rarmbla, splitting it into red/green/blue, translating those values to musical pitch for instruments panned left/middle/right on your headphones.

Remembering the Barcelona attack on August 17, 2017

Art: © Joan Miró
Sound & video: © Sledgehammer Productions

Gråmånefløyte

Pixel by pixel
the grey moon
becomes sound

Breathing Grid Prism

This is NOT an instructional video :-)

Warholesque Rainbow Box

Pixel by pixel
a tilted box
in rainbow colours
becomes a
Warholesque
soundscape

What became of

Submission for "Call for Scores" by VONK on Social Change, a 2 minute opera.

Sibelius has no real voice, so this is an instrumental version.

Conceptual ideas:
Tenor sax: 12 notes / 12 bars, representing the letter frequency of characters in 'social change' in the English alphabeth.
Vibraphone: melody based on the cumulative thirds on the tone of the sax.
Clarinet: melody of the vibraphone, mirrored (on the base note) and reversed.
Voice: has all 12 notes in the octave, where ever they fit best. Text is supposed to be sung in a recitative style.

6 historical events that led to change, each in 2 bars.

Planet Earth

Pixel by pixel
red, green and blue
become sound

Let's take care of this beautiful planet, shall we?

Exercise for Angles Prism Project

The feedback I received about my Excel Art was mostly: we actually can't see it's made with Excel.
Although this video is 'just' the exercise to get the formulae right for my PRISM project, I thought this would be a good opportunity to do a full screen capture.

Marching Forward A Musical Interpretation of Color using Excel

In an unprecedented international collaboration, Dutch programmer and artist Henriette Hamer uses Excel to musically map U.S. artist Wendy Wallace’s “Marching Forward #1”.

GO ICO RGB


GO: a painting by Geert Oosterhof
ICO: used as a favicon for my website, so reduced to16x16 pixels
RGB: the RGB values are, quite straight forward, translated to pitch

The background color is the actual colour that you hear, the height of the pyramids the amount of R, G, B in it - so also an indication of the pitch.

Another Logo in Prism


I'm smelling a series of logos or other icons turned into prisms.

Logo in Prism


Something that came into existence and turned out worth sharing.
Turned out to be a little big for a animated GIF, so made it a video.
Also an Excel file that can be used in a 'live' performance.

Mesmerizing little green balls


Screen capture from the first two minutes of a game scene in Unity that - further developed - will be part of bigger experience aka Project C/H2O aka graduation-concert-without-degree.
A very keen viewer might recognize a little "walking through the un-intentional Mandala" in it.

Breathing Grid


inspired by an installation by Moving Machines.
I've added sound, based on the surface area of the 4 areas in a corner (if the areas are numbered 123456789, it's 1245 / 2356 / 4578 / 5689, and as the outcome of the calculation in excel (of course) looked a bit like frequencies I have calculated the corresponding midi number, added an instrument to it and recorded it with a small external camera.
There are a lot more variables to it, let me know if you want the excel sheet :-)

Diamonds are Forever


Random Walk on all the edges of a diamond.
4 voices, sheet music available by request.
Audio and video made with Excel.
New visual trickery included.

Diamond Rim


Random Walk on the rim of a diamond.
4 voices, sheetmusic available by request.
Audio and video made with Excel

Diamond Point


Random Walk on the point of a diamond.
4 voices, sheet music available by request.
Audio and video made with Excel

Diamond Facets


Random Walk on the facets of a diamond.
4 voices, sheet music available by request.
Audio and video made with Excel

Diamond Full 3 parts


Random Walk on the rim, facets and point of a diamond.
4 voices, sheet music available by request.
Audio and video made with Excel.

Cubes


Take a cube, assign 3 voices to x, y and z.
Divide the edges in n parts - and divide an octave in n parts. each vertex becomes a note (chord, actually).
And then walk through the cube.
One restriction - actually two - only one voice moves at a time, and only one step up or down. Or it doesn’t move.

3 parts:
n=4 (+1), each vertex is 3 semitones from its neighbor
n=12(+1), each vertex is 1 semitone from its neighbor
n=7(+1), the vertices form a major scale.

If you want to play around with the excel file, find it here.
If you want to download the zipped version.

Make sure to allow macro’s to work.
And, yes, there are a lot of hidden worksheets, feel free to look at them (I’ve made some progress in making it user-friendly, but so far I’ve been the only user). Don’t blame me when you break it

Rhino 3D


How to get from a rhino to a icosahedron!?

Despite the fact that I was down with a severe cold this week, I did manage to produce something coherent. I think.
The trail of thought went something like this:
Somehow I'm getting less and less happy with the audio - found out that background noise is picked up after all :-(

SHP intro and slow verson (on a dying battery)


The new intro for my channel videos, followed by the slower version. On soundcloud a version in which the battery doesn't empty while playing.

Daughters of the Dragon


Daughters of the Dragon – June 2016, Henriette Hamer

Inspired by the documentary Twisting the Dragon's Tail and the fact that I had this idea of using Morse code as a way of translating text to rhythm, this composition saw the light of day on June 23, 2016. Which is no particular special date, by the way.

In order to keep it simple, I translated the 14+1 elements that are in the decay-chain of Uranium (the dragon, and her daughters) to rhythm, according to the Morse Code standard of dit’s and dah’s.

The basic parts of the score are in this document
The whole score can be found here

The name of the element is in the upper voice (uranium) where the more symbolized name is in the lower voice (U238). How long a section lasts depends on the length of both, and it’s finished the moment both voices are about to start over at the same time. So there are a few very short sections, where the text in lower and upper voice have the same length.
The YouTube version is quite fast (soundcloud even faster), so the rhythm is really not discernible. But it sounds much like a Geiger counter (in a very dangerous area!).
On dropbox I have put 2 versions that are a little slower and a lot slower.
There is one mistake that I know of – if you find it and let me know (and I agree) I’ll buy you a drink when we meet.
The picture is made by By User:Tosaka - File:Decay chain(4n+2, Uranium series).PNG, CC BY 3.0

Bach fugue with akward metronome


Instead of taking a picture and converting it to sound, I decided to start with a musical piece. As I wanted to explore the effect of having 5 voices, I took a Bach Fugue that had already put in Sibelius (for an analytical exam). The voices are each in their own 'column', the height being the pitch (can't get it much simpler than this). Playing around with the segments between the notes (color, alpha, number of 'echo-lines') gave me this.
By the way, the interna metronome that excel uses when playing has some major issues :-)
One might recognize fugue XXII from Wohl Temperiertes Klavier Buch I

Beautiful Formula - a timelapse through the Rose diagram


Composition based on the combined rotation of Venus and Earth around the Sun, seen from Space with Earth in the middle.
No Random Walk his time, just forward walking through elegant simple mathematical formulae.

More documentation available at these links:
conception document
score
midi
mp3
CC SA-BY

Origami Part III


Inspired by TEMKO's logo.
Made entirely with excel, the nodes in the picture represent note-pitch and duration. The walk through the picure is a random-walk.

As promised, a link to the conception document

Origami Part II


Inspired by a logo that I'm not going to reveal yet (wait till part III).
Made entirely with excel, the nodes in the picture represent note-pitch and duration. The walk through the picure is a random-walk.
Kudo's if you recognise the logo from this first part!
With the last part I will prvide links to the conception-document and mayby a link to the excel sheet.

Resonance in Cygnus too


Same audio (except for the very free interpretation of metrum by the performer), different video. Same excel-sheet :-) as Resonance in Cygnus

Resonance in Cygnus


Planetary resonance of Keppler 223 audio-visualised.
And now it becomes obvious that excel has no feeling for steady rhythm :-/ .
Still looks nice, doesn't it?

Origami Part I


Inspired by a logo that I'm not going to reveal yet (wait till part III).
Made entirely with excel, the nodes in the picture represent note-pitch and duration. The walk through the picure is a random-walk.
Kudo's if you recognise the logo from this first part!
With the last part I will prvide links to the conception-document and mayby a link to the excel sheet.

Blind


Audio: tekst van gedicht over "vertrouwen" - letters vertaald naar toonhoogte op basis van letterfrequentie in het Nederlands. Toonlengte is aantal lettergrepen in het woord.
Video: Braille weergave van de letters. In de excel versie staan het perfect onder elkaar, bij de screencapture niet. Grrrrrr.
Uitgebreidere uitleg Excelsheet (met vba macro)

Sneak Preview


Audio and video in perfect sync, as they both come from an Excel Sheet.

Iron 16 (Mach 22, 2016)


My reaction what happened in Brussels on March 22, 2016.
Link to score (CC BY-SA)
Link to concept
Links to Wikipedia articles:
List of non-state terrorist incidents
* 2016 Brussels bombings
* March 2016 Istanbul bombing
* 2016 Arish attack
* 2016 Maiduguri suicide bombings
* 2016 Peshawar bus bombing
* March 2016 Ankara bombing
* 2016 Grand-Bassam shootings
* 2016 Tel Aviv stabbings

What to believe in Babylon


Inspired by bar 36 of BWV 542.
The whole story of conception
Sheetmusic (CC BY-S)
Youtube

Star Wars Soundscape


Finally a picture that does somewhat resemble it's sound (with AudioPaint). Or the sound resembles the picture?
Applied some tweaking with 2 mirrored channels.

Happy New Year


Sound and Video completely generated with excel. With a little help from some auxilliary programs :-)

La Tour Eiffel 13 11 2015


La Tour Eiffel translated into frequencies on this dark day for France. Let's make sure that we unite in peace and calm, like the top of the tower that comes together in one frequency.

Walking through the Unintentional Mandala


This video has for a soundtrack the Unintentional Mandala (published earlier on Soundcloud). The four parts that are the original vocals parts, each follow their own path through the picture.
Score for piano/percussion version via this link.

Pylon, 4 octaves, 50 Hz


How would an electricity pylon sound.
4 octaves wide, "do" is 50 Hz.