Glitchometry

June 21, 2013 10:00 AM

Glitchometry
In Glitchometry, I manipulate simple shapes (black squares, circles, triangles, stripes) in a sound editor, breaking them down into new forms. The earliest work in the series is here. The tumblr is where new work appears.

Because the tool is used in an unconventional way, there's no immediate way to monitor the effect. I have a sense of what each effect does, but no precise control over the result. It is a wrestling with the computer, the results of which are these images.

Role: image manipulator

posted by rottytooth (4 comments total)

cool. unexpected beauty.

I've seen some people experimenting with Processing 2 to get similar effects, I like your throw it in the blender and see what happens method better.

what controls the output resolution?
posted by bobdow at 11:38 AM on June 21, 2013

If you mean the resolution of the sound effects themselves: for some of them, you can set the period, which controls how large the change appears in the image. Like for the stripe pieces, I use very slow dynamic delay and flanger. Other effects are just going to look very different if you're working on a small image vs. a large image.

But none of this process changes the resolution of the original file: pixel data changes, but the filesize will be exactly the same. The early pieces were pretty low resolution, but I tended to crop/resize more then. For the new ones, I tend to use large images and very rarely crop.
posted by rottytooth at 12:07 PM on June 21, 2013

These are gorgeous, and occasionally eye-twisting. Way cool! I kinda want to listen to some of them, but I suspect they'd either be very painful, or pretty much inaudible.
posted by egypturnash at 4:30 AM on June 27, 2013

Thanks! Yeah, each one is about three hours of pure noise.
posted by rottytooth at 10:54 AM on June 28, 2013