Synaesthesia is a repository for my exploration of the relationship between imagery and sound design. Presented as a quadriptych (Grace, Solitude, Light and Dark), it is also a place to consider perceptions, emotions and responses to audio-visual stimuli. A personal playground, if you will.
Glade
Palmiry National Memorial, Poland
52.33488° N, 20.74425° E
In his last letter […] my brother wrote that he was being deported, probably to agricultural labor, and that we should not worry. That was on 20 June 1940. I received the piece of paper at 08:00. On that very day I went to the Prisoners Care Committee and was told that many of the people removed from the prison were being shot by the Germans in the Młociński Forest. I later learned that on the said day, 20 June 1940, a mass execution was carried out in Palmiry.
Flicker
Muranów, Warsaw, Poland
52.24342° N, 20.98736° E
Walking the shady streets of Muranów, Warsaw, it is impossible not to feel the presence of the past. Under your feet lie the ashes of the ghetto; the buildings, made from the pulverised rubble of forgotten homes, lean and taunt. Voices whisper their grief around every corner, as children play and leaves scatter.
Meadows
Fort IX, Kaunas, Lithuania
52.94461° N, 20.86940° E
A sun-dappled meadow slopes gently down from the hilltop towards the city of Kaunas. The grass is freckled with yellow and purple wild flowers, a peaceful summer scene that belies an unimaginably brutal past.
Forest
Lake Perespa, Sobibór, Poland
52.41831° N, 25.57329° E
I took the measure of how time had passed ; the railway station is now in greater disrepair than it was then. Only one train per day makes the round trip between Chelm and Włodawa. The ramp where 250,000 Jews disembarked, which was a grassy slope, is now roughly covered in cement in order to allow for the loading of logs.
Museums and commemorations institutionalise forgetting as much as they do memory.
Claude Lanzmann
Border
River Bug, Włodawa, Poland
51.54470° N, 23.56270° E
I like the idea of all of us looking at the world with less of an emphasis on national borders and with more of an emphasis on shared humanity.
Fireflies
Warszawa, Poland
52.24343° N, 21.00180° E
Cultivation, old civilisation, beauty, history! Surprising turnings of streets, shapes of venerable cottages, lovely aged eaves, unexpected and gossamer turrets, steeples, the gloss, the antiquity! Gardens. Whoever speaks of Paris has never seen Warsaw. [...] Whoever yearns for an aristocratic sensibility, let him switch on the great light of Warsaw.
Audio Explanation
The audio in Synaesthesia was, for the most part, created using Norns and SuperCollider.
Norns is a monophonic synthesiser created by Monome. It is known for its unique approach to sound design and user interaction. Norns runs on open-source software and offers a variety of synthesis engines, including FM, granular, and subtractive synthesis.
SuperCollider is an open-source programming language for real-time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition. It offers a flexible and expressive environment for creating complex sound designs and musical structures.
As the project evolved, however, a wider range of audio sources and instruments were used including:
Teenage Engineering (OP-1 Field; OP-XY; TP-7; TX-6 & CM-15), Organelle M, Polyend Tracker, X-Synth, Borderlands and Tardigrain.
