Cylinder: Beautiful sound sculptures

We can't see sound. We can only judge the beauty of it by listening. Sometimes it seems like people who work with sound don't really know or care about visual aesthetics. Look at a website like this, for instance. On the other hand I think the opposite is also true.

Now what if we could look at the sound waves coming out of our speakers? What would it look like? We've seen physical representations of sound before, but this one is absolutely worth looking at. It's so beautiful.

Andy Huntington and Drew Allan took musical and non-musical sounds and ran them through their own software to create a model for their sculptures. The result is Cylinder, a set of eight sculptures. The ones you see here are Market (left) and Breath (right).

This is what sound looks like

Sound is made audible air vibrating air molecules. Sound is a form of energy, we can’t see it, and we can only hear it when the volume is high enough and if it exists between 20Hz and 20kHz, the audible range of the human ear.

Sound also moves through liquids though, and Eva Schindling created a computer model which simulates the collision of two sounds in a fluid environment. The resulting form is then modeled out of Styrofoam. Now we have a sound we can touch, but we can’t hear it!