The A.S. Mixer* was a software proof-of-concept project that created arbitrary associations between moving image, sound and color. On the top of the screen were a row of buttons with a label. When one of the buttons was clicked, a corresponding silent movie file would pop up in its corresponding place on the screen and a music part would play. All of the musical tracks were synchronized so that when parts were turned on and off, they would form a single musical piece. iterally bleeding into one another than a properly charted piece of music with defined notes. This made representation difficult, but not impossible.

The labels were meant to show the general feeling of both the musical and video parts, not referring to either the instrumentation or the video content. When the orange colored "dance" section was turned on, the sound channel played a rhythmic percussive instrument synchronized with a video channel displaying a hula girl dancing. When the green colored dream section was turned on the sound channel played a soft organ chord synchronized with a video channel showing a boy lying on his bed in the act of daydreaming.

The A.S. Mixer was my introduction to playing with color labels, image and musical content as one synchronous piece. Sounds are generally given the role of short-burst feedback in software applications, such as when the Mac OS system gives you an alert or a warning. I hadn't seen it played out in a long, musical format like this before.

It would be an interesting alternative to either musical sequencing or video DJing to cram both media into one place in a fully-functioning piece of software based on this idea. If I had more time, I would like to add the capability of replacing both the videos and the audio on the fly and introduce the video's own audio track to the mix as well. A playback sequencer using video keyframes and piano roll notation could also benefit this application.

contents ©2009 colin owens