FORMS – Streaming Bot

Forms is a real-time visual music score generator.

From a set of rules of graphic generation, driven by randomness and probability, a custom software generates a series of visual compositions created in realtime and never repeating. It is permanently streaming at Playmodes’ Twitch channel at https://www.twitch.tv/playmodes

These scores can be framed within the “tradition” of graphic musical notation that gained strength among twentieth-century composers (John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mestres Quadreny, Gyorgi Ligetti …), and which allowed music to be released from the rigidity of classic staves.

Thanks to a real-time “sonification” engine, the resulting graphics are transformed into sound using spectral synthesis algorithms. A header runs through the image from left to right, interpreting that small vertical fragment of the image. The luminance captured by this header is transformed into bass (if at the bottom of the image) and treble (if at the top of the image).