Messier87 by The Last Ambient Hero

Hi all,

  Just released my next tape, Messier87.  Deep space listening with all sounds made from image sonification of the recently published M87 black hole picture.

Enjoy!

TLAH

...how does that work ("image sonification"), exactly? seems a lot more tonal than i was expecting.

this is great! reminds me a bit of the limbo soundtrack - https://limbogame.bandcamp.com/

Hi there,

   Thanks for the tip - I'll check out the Limbo soundtrack, sounds up my alley so far.  Glad you enjoyed Messier87.  Regarding the image sonification, I basically used various software programs (Sonic photo, photo2sound, etc.) to generate audio from the image (each app/prog gives different results) until I had a big pool of sounds of varying lengths (from a few seconds to 45mins!) and tonal qualities.  What I discovered is that as a lot of the image is black you get quite consistent, steady frequencies which is a help when creating instruments out of the sounds.  I loaded up the sounds into my Akai Z8 and tuned them into chords and layered them up and resampled them through fx.  Another thing I did was to use some of the longer sounds to sidechain other parts and control the parameters of some of the fx (so they were just used as control signals rather than anything audible). 

As a further note, Messier87 was done as 5 live passes that were then edited.  NGC 4486 was one edited pass (much less dsp going on) and Sagittarius A* was done Radigue-style, mixed completely live in one go.  I don't recommend that for a 39min track lol  I took two attempts to get it right (literally messed up the ending on the first take!).

actually really digging this

cheers

Thanks for listening and also for the Limbo tip.  It's a great soundtrack, it's gone straight on my (ever-expanding) wishlist!