Building on the initial concept behind Plant Rhythms, 4 bar fence loop explores the idea of translating visual rhythms found in video footage, into musical rhythms. The source material for the piece was a series of static videos of a wire fence with wooden slats tied to it. The slats are attached in different patterns on top of a wire grid creating a visual effect similar to that of a piano roll; a common means of displaying musical notes in digital audio workstations. Inspired by the similarity, I devised a process to transcribe the patterns into a rhythm which could be displayed visually as a GIF. The diagram below shows how each segment of the fence was broken up into three sections (frames) and the rhythmic values then extracted from the position of the slats.
To visually portray these rhythms, 4 bar fence loop attempts to imitate the visual effect of a playhead moving along a piano roll. This effect is achieved using an animated a mask (a tool that allows you to only reveal a selected portion of an image) to only show the vertical portion of the image connected to the active rhythmic value. Unlike in Plant Rhythms where the whole image is revealed at the start of each GIF, 4 bar fence loop only reveals a single slice of context at a time, adding an extra layer of contextual interest to the GIF.
