Re: (idm) thingie which converts images to sound

From Greg Clow
Sent Wed, May 5th 1999, 18:13


On Wed, 5 May 1999, Hzichku Ryuchi wrote:

>> I believe it's called MetaSynth. No idea where you can get it, though.
>> Strangely enough, I played a track on my rdio show last night that was
>> composed using this software.
> 
> oh, how odd, so you played pretty much any recent afx or aurechre track on 
> yr radio show, how strange.....must be some kind of lunar eclipse going on 
> or something.....please inform us of any other st-raaangggee occurrences of 
> the supernatural mr. mystical idm man....

Oh, do fuck off.

The reason I found it strange was because it was explicitly mentioned in
the liner notes of the disc that the track I played was composed using the
software - i.e. it was the whole point of the track, as opposed to being
some random electronic work that happened to use MetaSynth in passing.

For less snippy folks who might find it interesting - the track in
question was "Ch'il Futurismo" by a composer and graphic designed named 
Paul Szp. It appears on a compilation called Futurismo put out by P22, a
type foundary that is also a record label. The concept behind the
compilation is that it's "a soundtrack to a font" - in this case, a font
called Il Futurismo created by P22 and inspired by the Italian Futurist
art movement.

For his track, Szp created image files using the Il Futurismo font set,
and then ran them through MetaSynth to create the sound. So unlike the
other tracks which are simply "inspired" by the Futurists and/or the font,
this one is literally a soundtrack to the font. 

If you wanna find out more, check http://www.p22.com/. The comp isn't
really IDM - more avant garde/experimental - but still an interesting
concept.


Greg