Kakofoni Orquestra
Collaborator + Programmer (audio + reactivity) · 2022
Now in the Madison Museum collection
KAKOFONI ORQUESTRA is a generative audiovisual piece made with Rangga Purnama Aji and published on fxhash in 2022. Edition #37 is now part of the collection of the Madison Museum of Art and Technology in Wisconsin.
A composition assembled in real time
The audio engine runs on the Web Audio API: 16 loops recorded in complementary pairs across 10 instruments and two relative scales — A harmonic minor and C major pentatonic. Randomized effect chains shape volume, filtering, compression and IR convolution. At 89 BPM, the complete cycle unfolds over roughly 16 minutes.
The composition method follows the same logic Brian Eno used on Ambient 1: Music for Airports: each loop pair is designed so the ADSR envelope and timbre of one complements the other. The system chooses how those materials meet, but the relationships between them are composed.
One system for sound and image
The visuals are a collaboration. Rangga built the textures and the initial visual concept. I developed the FFT-driven colour modulation on top using Hydra, the open-source live coding environment I have worked with since 2021. Two FFT readers analyse the audio in real time and map its spectrum into RGB and HSV gradients in DIFF mode. The colours on screen are the spectrum of the loops playing at that moment.
The work is not a recording with a video placed on top. Sound and image are outputs of the same loop, the same code and the same moment. That shared running system is what lets the piece feel alive rather than merely configurable.