Hentai-Oto-Ma

Thursday 11 December 2008

(This post is dedicated to the Slavic readers who can’t get enough of the two censored anime pictures on this page.)
Months ago I posted a spectrogram of a passage from my composition Hentai-Oto-Ma, and completely forgot to upload the sound file of the same section for comparison. So here it is.

Hentai-Oto-Ma was made using Coagula Light, a shareware “colour-organ” that interprets digital images as sound spectra (height=frequency, width=time). The image source for this piece was a pornographic Japanese manga comic: each digitally scanned frame of the comic was interpreted with five different, variable time-frames and pitch ranges. The five sequences of frames are played simultaneously, each subjected to different filtering and panning processes. In effect, the piece is a type of timbral canon, with the same series of tone structures transposed into different frequencies and durations – this can be heard most clearly at the end of the piece.
The left half of the picture above shows selected frames from the original comic. On the right is a spectrographic analysis of right channel of Hentai-Oto-Ma (0’28” to 0’39”) showing the images transformed across time and frequency.
Click here to hear an mp3 of the above excerpt; or listen to the whole thing (11 minutes, 17 MB mp3.) If that’s not enough, you can read more about this and related pieces for cheapo digital synthesis (and get another mp3).