Before the light

Chrysalis, Riccardo Bazzoni’s debut album, opens with a first track entitled ‘Before the light’. The track is a symbol of that original moment, as obscure as it is impenetrable, represented by the birth of life. A mixture of elements impetuously impose themselves on existence, in the overwhelming initiatory path that leads to light.

The initial idea was to describe the origin of a journey through a boundary ready to explode, the instinct for life that violently seeks a way to break into chaos, into the darkness that changes continuously. The resulting changing structure is indissolubly joined to the sound texture.

I started experimenting with artificial generative models (GANs) with the intention of creating a system capable of generating a continuous stream of textures that could be easily controllable.

I also used altimetric images of the earth’s surface as a starting material because they incorporate fractal structures with a lot of detail on different scales. The execution of customized training of the neural network allowed me to elaborate on variations while maintaining the possibility of defining even small details.

The texture generation system was therefore guided by the sound elements and the final result is nothing more than a rendering of the process, crystallized over time, of one of the infinite possible variations.