Cosmic Senate Impulses

Cosmic Senate Impulses is a complete audiovisual experimental electronic experience. All elements of the composition were created electronically or synthesized in form and arrangement. Being experimental, the work lends itself to a variety of interpretations, but it is one basically of the celebration of logically-derived imagery, and the imagery generating itself by repetitive processes. Can a composition be inspired purely from logically-created sources? Can patterned constructions alone be the source of an audiovisual expression? Concepts behind the work included various shape primitives - lines, dots and curves. Added to this was the confident creation of reliably-proportioned X-Y counter logic using accurate binary divisions - 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc for the horizontal and vertical planes. These binary divisions were created in Microsoft Powerpoint, then exported as a video file. To create inverse and exclusive OR (XOR) effects, various logical blending modes were used in the Grass Valley Edius software. Here, accurate emulations of the X-Y counter combinations created by the EMS Spectron video synthesizer (1974) was the main goal. Only binary division ratios can create the proportioned effect that this video synthesizer could create instantaneously by logical AND/OR/XOR permutations. Variations on the circle primitive was sought - modulated circles, circles modulated by noise, and Spirographic rosettes and kaleidoscopic forms derived from repeating modulated ellipse forms. All shapes presented were based on the fundamental circle form, but not using a mask or wipe shape, but by using gradients to create the form. Of the backgrounds; the X-Y counter checkerboard logic provided the most dynamic forms, particularly the XOR background - which consisted of at least four planes of XORed X-Y counter patterns. Various circle derivative forms were overlayed on the background, some modulated by noise. The Spirographic forms were created by two methods. The first method used a hard-edged globular matte animation, and extracting the edge information and superimposing this delayed animation on itself to create many "contour maps" of an animated line form. The second method was to modulate a circle outline by a sinewave at two different rotations. This then was superimposed by angled repetitions to create complex snowflake and kaleidoscopic forms of detailed complexity. The music was composed purely electronically using the Eurorack modular synthesizer system. Various sound "textures" were created by adding oscillator sources, ring-modulating those sources and by feeding the results into a frequency shifter to create the swirling shimmers. The complex shimmer chords were then fed into a dual resonating filter controlled by an LFO. Many tracks of such swirling chords were multitracked, and mixed together to create one sound texture. To aid the visuals, two audio tracks of various sound textures were assembled together for the prime atmosphere. Added to this main atmosphere were "shimmer shrill" sounds created purely by signal generation techniques only - sinewaves being flanged, modulated sped up and slowed down. The result is a piece of ambient experimental sound textural form that is very "shimmery". The work was inspired by a large degree by logical visual constructions - synthesized visuals and synthesized/electronically-generated music background. There is still much hidden potentiality in synthesized logical creations - particularly visual creations. It is very tempting to explore as many possibilities as can be accessed to create aesthetically-pleasing combinations. Perhaps the composition explores the concepts of form, birth and creation as it does the concepts of logically-created compositional elements.