Uploaded May 2020 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
This epitaph belongs to Marcus Caecilius, found in Rome, written around the 1st century before Christ. Here the tool Virtual ANS is used to convert a picture to sound. Virtual ANS is a software emulation of the ANS synthesizer.
The original ANS synthesizer is a photoelectronic musical instrument created by Russian engineer Evgeny Murzin from 1937 to 1957. The technological basis of his invention was the method of graphical sound recording used in cinematography (developed in Russia concurrently with USA), which made it possible to obtain a visible image of a sound wave, as well as to realize the opposite goal—synthesizing a sound from an artificially drawn sound spectrogram.
Murzin named his invention in honour of the composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (ANS): Scriabin (1872–1915) was an occultist, theosophist, and early exponent of color-sound theories in composition. The synthesizer was housed in the electronic-music studio situated above the Scriabin Museum (just off of the Arbat in central Moscow) before moving to the basement of the central university on the corner of Bolshaya Nikitskaya. It was saved from the scrapheap thanks to Stanislav Kreichi, who persuaded the university to look after it.
This epitaph belongs to Marcus Caecilius, found in Rome, written around the 1st century before Christ. Here the tool Virtual ANS is used to convert a picture to sound. Virtual ANS is a software emulation of the ANS synthesizer.
The original ANS synthesizer is a photoelectronic musical instrument created by Russian engineer Evgeny Murzin from 1937 to 1957. The technological basis of his invention was the method of graphical sound recording used in cinematography (developed in Russia concurrently with USA), which made it possible to obtain a visible image of a sound wave, as well as to realize the opposite goal—synthesizing a sound from an artificially drawn sound spectrogram.
Murzin named his invention in honour of the composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (ANS): Scriabin (1872–1915) was an occultist, theosophist, and early exponent of color-sound theories in composition. The synthesizer was housed in the electronic-music studio situated above the Scriabin Museum (just off of the Arbat in central Moscow) before moving to the basement of the central university on the corner of Bolshaya Nikitskaya. It was saved from the scrapheap thanks to Stanislav Kreichi, who persuaded the university to look after it.
![[Experimental] One chord requiem for virtual piano](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/aUGN7PIJmts/mqdefault.jpg "[Experimental] One chord requiem for virtual piano
Some weeks ago, a 13 year-old took her own life after being bullied and physically assaulted inside and outside of school and harassed online. Literally everyone she reached out to for help (school, police and social media moderators) did literally nothing to help, in some cases brushing it off as not worthy of their time, culminating into tragedy. For some reason this news story hit hard and the way I feel most comfortable to deal with such news is to express it in sound.
In this experimental piece, I use a form of minimalism, repeating the same 24 note wide dissonant chord spread over the virtual piano keyboard over and over, only varying individual note volumes and timings, bringing out some patterns hiding in the mess. Many attempts to say the same thing in a different way, ending in emptiness.")
