Break out your headphones for this one. Maxime Causeret has created a beautiful animation for Max Cooper's instrumental track "Order from Chaos." Seemingly random elements slowly coalesce into lifelike forms as the track moves from raindrops to increasingly complex sounds.
Quoth Max Cooper:
The idea for this part of the story started on a day when there was really heavy rain hitting the roof window at my old flat. I got out my binaural mics and put my head right up by the window with the big raindrops hitting all around. They made nice individual percussive noises, with great spatial positioning, so I decided to use them to seed a piece of music.
This track is the most explicit representation of the idea of emergence in the album, because the rhythm of the track is created by the raindrops in an emergent manner – I took the audio samples, mapped the transients for the raindrop hits, and then forced the mapped points towards the nearest drumming grid positions. This meant that the random raindrops were pushed into a quantised grid, and the result was that a percussive rhythm emerged, one that I hadn't created myself, but was the closest rhythm to that particular section of rain. I then played the sansula over this rain rhythm, and added lots of pads and saturation layers, finally with some vocal snippets from Kathrin deBoer to complete the track. Maxime Causeret selected this track to work with, under the brief to map the emergent rhythm to an exploration of emergence in living form.
• Max Cooper – Order from Chaos – Official Video by Maxime Causeret (Vimeo via Animaterra)
