ScratchSynth
Turning scratched film into sound — creative coding meets analog cinema
ScratchSynth is an audio-visual project inspired by Norman McLaren's pioneering film sonorization techniques, where painted visuals were used to generate sound directly on film. This project reimagines McLaren's approach by transforming scratches engraved on celluloid into immersive soundscapes — revisiting historical analog methods with contemporary computational techniques.
Video Gravure
The source material comes from direct engraving on unexposed film stock. Instead of discarding blank leader, a needle is used to engrave micro-images directly onto the celluloid — treating the film strip as a subtractive drawing surface.
How It Works
Using Python, the system analyzes patterns in the scratched film and divides the screen into quadrants — a framework inspired by the spatial mapping of the human retina. This visual data is streamed via OSC messages to Max/MSP, where it controls an ensemble of 21 oscillators. The oscillators, grouped in sets of three, are tuned to an atonal symmetric scale.
Arranged to emulate the interconnected loops of the brain's visual cortex, the oscillators dynamically frequency-modulate one another, mimicking neural interactions.