The visual cadence of rail transit is transformed into a composition of “visual music” in the sound/tracks.  This visual and acoustic mapping reveals the implicit in this installation.  The connection is often overlooked in multimedia systems, as the visual and the audio are often compartmentalized in research endeavors and are joined often through discrete correlations.  Sound/tracks reveals to us a related score between what can be heard in what we see.

Overview

When travelling on a train, many people enjoy looking out of the window and watching the landscape passing by. The fleeting impressions of the moving scenery and the composition of the passing objects generate a piece of visual music with its own tempo and rhythm, its own colours and harmonies.The project sound/tracks aims at capturing these visual impressions and translates them into a musical composition in real-time – producing an immediate soundtrack to the train journey based on the passing scenery. The view out of the window is captured with a camera and translated into instantaneously played back piano music. This yields a reflection of the visual impression, adding a synaesthetic sound dimension to the visual experience and deepening the state of contemplation. The passing scenery can be considered the score of a musical composition which is going to be interpreted based on outside conditions such as weather and lighting, the speed of the train, and the quality of the camera. Thus, every journey will produce a unique composition. In addition to intensifying the experience of a train journey, sound/tracks permits to persistently capture and archive the fleeting impressions of journey and composition and allows for re-experiencing the trip both visually and acoustically at a later point.