WAVES

Light and sound are two types of waves. Like radio and the waves that our cell phones make to communicate with each other. We are continuously surrounded by waves, but we never see them.

GLOW Festival is a huge, annual light-art festival which happens every November in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. It provides a platform for artists, designers and architects working with light to expose their works in the public space. I visited yesterday, and the city centre was very, very crowded. A few minutes from the city centre, GLOW Next is organised, with more experimental and often smaller works.

One of these interesting projects is WAVES, by students from OPENLIGHT: the creative lab of intelligent Lighting Institute of the TU Eindhoven (with whom I’ve worked in the past), in collaboration with 15 sound experts from Sorama. The latter created a “sound camera”, a device with 1024 microphones which can very precisely locate a sound in a space.

The students from TU/e took this technology, placed it in an industrial space, and visualised the sound waves. People are encouraged to make sounds, whistle, stomp their feet, or play one of the instruments hanging in the room to visualise their sound waves. It was an amazing sight to see a dark space full of people actively engaged in making different sounds, amazed by the projected visuals they created.