Culture
Steve Reich's Hypnotic Soundtrack Fits This Trippy Video Perfectly
Listen to the masterpiece Music for 18 Musicians synced to the mind of machines.
Anyone who has listened to the way notes dance around one another in a Steve Reich composition knows that his innovative phasing technique is pretty psychedelic. It’s fitting that his masterpiece Music For 18 Musicians has been used as the soundtrack for this pioneering machine learning video experiment.
Damien Henry, the co-inventor of Google Cardboard, a virtual reality headset, shot footage from a moving vehicle and then trained a machine learning algorithm to generate this beautiful video in real-time. All the graphics were generated in one shot without any post-production or editing. As Henry explains, “all frames are calculated one by one by a prediction algorithm that tries to predict the next frame from the previous one.”
The result is a mesmerizing, minimalist work of video art: colors shift and shapes morph, all set to the brilliance of Reich’s score. Watch it below and bliss out.
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Read more: Music for ringtones: hear a Steve Reich smartphone symphony
