Camera shutter sounds are photographers’ ASMR and they can be oddly satisfying. But have you ever thought about creating a song using these recognizable clicks? Folks at MIOPS have created a camera symphony in the literal sense of the word. Teaming up with a sound artist, MIOPS recently published a song that was composed and played using the shutter clicks of various cameras.
Like most good ideas, this one was born by accident. As MIOPS CTO Erkan Yigiter explained, it came up during an internal meeting when one employee compared MIOPS’s camera triggers to a maestro because they fire triggers with precision. The idea was there, now they needed to find an actual maestro to turn it into reality.
Enter Kuntay Seferoğlu, an Istanbul-born sound artist and designer based in Berlin. He’s no stranger to creating experimental music with various objects, so I believe that he was the perfect choice for this project. Still, even for him, this was a new and exciting experience. “The idea of making music with the sounds of everyday life always excites me,“ the artist said. „The shutter sound of the cameras was one of the sounds that especially caught my attention.” Of course, none of this could have been done without cameras to provide the sounds. MIOPS and Kuntay teamed up with regional Canon, Nikon, Fuji, and Sony offices to get 27 different cameras that they needed for the project. It took Kuntay around a month of work to put everything together. He first recorded the shutter sounds, analyzed the recordings, and finally narrowed down his selection to nine cameras: Canon 1D-X, Canon 6D, Nikon D850, Nikon Z7, Nikon Z6 II, Sony Alpha 7R, Sony Alpha 9, Fuji X-S10, and Fuji XT3. These were used in the final symphony, along with a bit of synth. The result is a symphony we haven’t heard so far. It’s a short, but catchy tune that had me dance a little in my chair while writing this article. I generally admire artists who can turn random sounds into music (hi The Kiffness!). But I also love this tune because it features one of my favorite sounds: the camera shutter click. How do you like it?
