I often wonder about how our material world came to be, and how life can form out of the microscopic. When I view textures, patterns, structure, and randomness in our world, I see noise. This video is my visualization, coming to fruition through my exploration of procedural generation in digital work spaces.
I am referencing noise as in what one may view as television static, image grain, or noise as in white noise sound. It is a supposedly random generation, but it isn’t truly random—it just appears so because of its perceived unpredictability. Take the stars, for example: they are bright specks in the night sky that seem to be scattered at random, but which are structured star systems when enhanced. In this video piece, I look into the process of creation, micro and macro views, and how structure comes from noise. Additionally, I challenge the viewer’s perception of chaos vs. structure and try to provoke different feelings from these contrasting but related elements.
There are two chapters: Generation and Formation.
- Generation begins empty, as bright specks start to form. This relates back to the motif of the universe and the stars. But quickly, our perception changes as these specks form white noise—not stars, but perhaps particles or energy. Now this noise takes on many different forms: randomness becoming identifiable. This is an animation of generated noise I created, but the first image we get is not a generation—it is a picture of the snow, where water droplets ate away at it, creating an intense micro-structure. This is our first hint of the material world. Moving forward, procedural generations of dirt, leaves, and weather appear, showing a semblance of nature, but ones I also created procedurally in Blender.
- Formation transforms the noise into clouds, which dissipate and reveal the ocean below—moving from the microscopic to the large-scale real world. The video sequences are no longer computer-generated, but now recognizable as nature, and at the end of this chapter, we are brought to the scale of life: birds chirping.
The audio follows this progression. Unidentifiable white noise builds and oscillates, matching the energy on the screen. Noise becomes the sounds of static, movement, and wind, then the ocean, later forming into notes and becoming music. At last, when the music fades, bird sounds emerge as the first piece of audio that is recognizable as recorded and real. All other audio was generated through node-based sound sculpting, where oscillating sounds turn into music. This was achieved by setting a range of frequencies and timings, with the notes played in randomly generated sequences.
In all, the progression in this video can be perceived as views of varying scale. Formation and Generation mean the same thing, and the sounds are all built from the same building blocks—just played at different levels of segmentation.
While making the video, I noticed different feelings in myself. In the first stages, there was anxiety in the uncertain chaos, but in the latter half, the structure and pleasant music brought me to peace. Others responded in kind—some hated the intense uniform sounds, while others were comforted by it, with the end always finishing in calmness. Perhaps this shift to calmness in nature can be related to my other projects and a sense of escapism in outside environments?
Additional Credits:
- “Aerial View of Sea Waves Crashing on Rocks Cliff in the Blue Ocean.” Vecteezy.com, 2024.
- “Sea Of Clouds.” Pixabay.com, 20 March 2017.
- “Sound of a Bird Chirping.” Pixabay.com, 27 July 2022.
