Juno
Programming music with sounds from space
Juno is an audio-visual performance inspired by sounds from space.
The foundation of the piece is an audio sample of a satellite (Juno) leaving the stratosphere of Jupiter. It is one of many audio samples sourced by NASA from different parts of the galaxy contained in an open-source library on the website.
Processing + Ableton
The visual is an abstraction of orbiting planets which functions as a MIDI sequencer. Each orbit triggers a note on the diminished C scale when it completes half a circle. This MIDI note is then sent to Ableton Live where the signal is modified to output an eerie echoing effect. Each of the planets can be ‘played’ using their unique keyboard keys. The played sequence can create different beat sequences.
The arrangement
A collection of sounds from NASA’s soundcloud
The project was programmed entirely in Processing using its MIDI audio library. The base audio sample was stretched 100 times using an open-source Python tool called Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch.