For the first video in our two-part music video series, we asked seeming polar opposites Spekki Webu and Arash Akbari to make something together.

Spekki is a multidisciplinary artist based in Delft who performs live, produces music and works as a sound designer and DJ. Next to that he runs two music labels called Mirror Zone and Optic Portal. Arash is a music producer and new media artist based in Tehran. He’s interested in exploring computational processes to identify potential loopholes that address questions about our existence, culture, society, and nature, which are being dissolved within these computing networks. He uses real-time technologies along with experimental and custom algorithms that enable us to interact with a dynamic, almost living system capable of communicating with external signals.

While Spekki’s sound for the track came from field recordings he made in and around nature and urban areas during his tour in Australia. He processed these audio segments into complex rhythmic structures and scapes, drones and generative audio. If you listen very carefully you might recognize some sounds, but because of heavy processing and lots of resampling that will be very difficult.

Arash de- and reconstructed the sound in visual form through custom computational processes. Together, they tried to connect the dots, to find an aesthetic of structured noise and chaos that still harken to the peaceful, natural environment from which the sound originates.

Arash developed a custom graphics shader that responds to extracted data from the music piece in real-time. This was challenging because Spekki's track was both rhythmic and abstract, and because the visuals needed to maintain synchronicity while presenting the data flow, which can be arrhythmic and chaotic. 

At its core, the visual piece is an exploration of binary data as the substratum of the digital space, offering viewers a journey through what is behind digital representations. The visual components of the piece emerge from the very essence of the audio file itself. By extracting binary data from the WAV file, combined with real-time machine listening algorithms, it unveils hidden patterns and structures within the audio wave file. These data were mapped to the parameters of the visual representations, giving rise to pulsating colors, abstract shapes, textures, and motions.

In his work, Arash often translates physical spaces into abstract visualizations that still maintain some recognizable spatiality. In this video, the whole system comprises a three-dimensional array of 3D points, forming a cubic morphing block. The data mentioned controls all aspects of this block, including color, position, movement, and FOV parameters. Consequently, this simple 3D block is capable of generating an infinite number of forms and motions. This plasticity can capture the subtle temporal nuances in both data and sonic fluxes.

The video aims to reveal the potential narrative underlying the data flow and sequences, independent of our contextual framework. Additionally, the temporal data series extracted from the audio analysis algorithms are utilized to explore Spekki's compositional choices in visual format. The end result is a trippy, tessellated and mesmerizing video that seems totally abstract, almost aseptic at first - until you are sucked in to a story of your own making.