Fleeting Moments Created by Ambient Music and the Unpredictable: “Varigate, Variegated” by Matthew D. Gantt

In a Violently Raging Greenhouse

Matthew D. Gantt’s AR work Varigate, Variegated invites us into a domed virtual greenhouse. Inside, trees are blown by fierce winds and their branches shake wildly.
Let’s delve deeper into this scene.

The dome is constructed with a sturdy steel frame. As we admire the structure, ambient music can be heard playing inside.

Speaker-like neon lights are placed between the billowing trees, and—as if in response to the leaves—digital sounds of various tones are generated, creating a mysterious harmony.

Going outside, there is a striped sphere that peacefully orbits the greenhouse and watches over it. A stark contrast to the intense environment inside.

A Continuous Generation of Ambient Music

In Varigate, Variegated, we can experience a magical space created by lush vegetation and ambient electronic music in a virtual greenhouse.

Ambient music, or so-called environmental music, is a genre of music that is said to have been pioneered by composer Brian Eno. It emphasizes tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure and rhythm.

The idea of the greenhouse in this work draws from the history of generative music, and channels composer Brian Eno’s exploration process of music as a bottom-up system.

Rather than a top-down system in which each and every detail is specified in advance, the mysterious, digital sounds spontaneously playing slowly build up—as they do in a bottom-up approach—and change and loop with time.

Fleeting Moments Created by the Unpredictable

In generative music, there will often be moments when accidental overlaps of sound occur. In this work, Gantt focuses on the “fleeting moments” that are created as a result of this process. Like mutations that sometimes occur in plants, there is much unpredictability in this scene.

The autonomous digital sounds and visuals that accompany this AR experience have broken free from structure. With the lack of a predictable finale, Varigate, Variegated will have its own “fleeting moment” between the virtual world and reality.

How to experience an AR scene

If you are accessing this page from a smartphone, please click on the “Try Now” button (*If you are experiencing the scene on a smartphone for the first time, please also refer to the following instructions).

After clicking, the following screen will be displayed.
If you have already downloaded the STYLY Mobile app, please select “Continue on Browser”.

You can then select “Play on Mobile App” to experience the scene.

If you are accessing this page from a PC (web browser), you can experience the scene by clicking the “Try Now” button, selecting the Mobile icon on the scene page, and scanning the QR code.

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For those who want to know more about how to experience the scene
For more information on how to experience AR scenes, please refer to the following article.

Edited by SASAnishiki
Translated by cpnnn