murmur - video edit - AkA and Cat

Murmur is a 59-minute immersive soundscape by Henri Sizaret (AkA), created in 2026 from Murmurations, a 3.60-metre drawing by Catherine Vermeiren (Cat). Rather than composing about the artwork, Henri translated it into musical data, allowing the drawing itself to become the source of the composition. The twenty-four scans of Murmurations were digitally assembled into a single image and converted into MIDI sequences. Through granular synthesis, evolving filters and layered textures, the original drawing found its sonic counterpart. Slowed to around 30 BPM, the composition naturally expanded into a hypnotic journey lasting nearly one hour—an invitation to wander through the drawing with the ears rather than the eyes. The Murmurations drawing itself was created spontaneously during an AKDT workshop in 2022. Executed on perforated computer printer paper from the 1980s using acrylic markers and handmade dry pastels, the suspended work unfolds like a breath or a meditation. Its flowing lines, shifting densities and swarms of dots evoke a murmuration—the mesmerizing collective flight of thousands of starlings moving as one living body. Although created four years apart, the drawing and the composition share the same philosophy: an intuitive process with minimal intervention, preserving the freshness of the first gesture. This video edit clips murmur in a 7 min excerpt. AkA & Cat is an electro-figurative platform founded in 2020 by Henri Sizaret (AkA) and Catherine Vermeiren (Cat). The duo explores a continuous dialogue between image and sound, where Catherine's organic visual expressions inspire Henri's hypnotic sonic landscapes, and vice versa. Following the critically acclaimed Les Résonances Hyménoptiques, Murmur is their second opus, continuing their exploration of the intimate relationship between visual expression and sound.