Fleshtones - artist creates lyrical piano music from out of pixelated pornography?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrRcrexEV7Y

The concept of a correlation between sound and vision is as old as antiquity. One starry night on the island of Samos as Pythagoras stood contemplating the skies, it seemed that the very rhythm and motion of the heavenly bodies appeared governed by a cosmic harmony.

Later, renaissance artists such as Leonardo da Vinci produced sophisticated spectacles for court festivals that combined music and colour. The first instrument that could play light and sound was built by the Jesuit, Father and mathematician Louis Bertrand Caste. In 1760 Castel constructed an Ocular Harpsichord or as he described it a " harpsichord for the eyes". Castel's instrument was a harpsichord above which were 60 small windows, each with different coloured-glass and a small curtain. Each time the player depressed a particular key, the relevant curtain would rise to show a burst of colour.

In the next two hundred years many instruments that combed light and sound were built. British painter A. Wallace Rimington developed a Colour Organ which provided a changeing light accompaniment to the 1916 New York premiere of Scriabin's symphony Prometheus: A Poem of Fire. Scriabin had scored not only the music but also the precise colours he wanted to accompany specific passages.

Such colour music forms the conceptual starting point for Fleshtones, a piece for extreme pixelated porn and auto generated accompaniment. Footage from webcams and other online sites is broken down into a simple tableau of colour bands, at times rather like the paint charts one might find in a DIY store. Given the subject matter this palette is either predominately pink or coffee coloured thus producing a sequence of flickering fleshtones. Using the wonders of max/msp/jitter to construct a 21st century light organ these Fleshtones are turned into lyrical piano music. A music that rises in falls in response and exact correspondence to the onscreen movement. The motion of earthly bodies thus is transformed into something of beauty, harmony and contemplation.

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