NXO25 – The Xenakis Emulator

While it predates the founding of the Nexialist Organization, the Xenakis Emulator encapsulates what the intention behind its founding was ... 

... the Nexialist Organization was conceived as a transdisciplinary platform connecting architecture, music, and visual design through shared creative methods and theoretical inquiry. 

An audiovisual homage to architect–composer Iannis Xenakis, the Xenakis Emulator recreated the structural logic of his composition Metastaseis and Le Corbusier’s monastery facade La Tourette through synchronized digital sound and animation.
The Xenakis Emulator is a digital reinterpretation of two key works by architect–composer Iannis Xenakis: the orchestral piece Metastaseis and the facade design of the monastery La Tourette by Le Corbusier. The project transformed the mathematical and musical relationships underlying both works into a synchronized audiovisual experience.
In the 1950s, Xenakis collaborated with Le Corbusier on La Tourette, developing the rhythmic spacing of the vertical facade elements. These intervals mirrored the glissandi patterns of Metastaseis, composed at the same time. The Nexialist project translated this relationship into sound and image: each facade interval became a corresponding note value, its density and spacing mapped onto musical pitch and timing.
A sequencer controlled a synthesizer programmed with four distinct patches, each representing one facade strip. Percussive accents and hi-hat patterns marked points of maximum and minimum structural density, while continuous glissandi formed a background texture uniting both musical and architectural motifs.
Visually, the animation displayed abstracted facade strips floating through space. A camera tracked their movement in synchrony with the composition, accompanied by a scrolling waveform of the generated sound. This merging of architecture and sound reimagined Xenakis’s principle of polytopic composition — structure and music as one continuum.
Created by Mark Kammerbauer and Alexandra Schnellbögl in 1999, Xenakis Emulator stands as an early expression of the Nexialist ethos: architecture as sound, sound as design.

This is a special NXO25 – 25th Anniversary of the Nexialist Organization post.