Spectrogram: Mislata

Edu Comelles is a Valencia-based sound designer, musician and curator. His works often make you aware of certain sociocultural elements, or your everyday surroundings.

For his latest project, Spectrogram: Mislata, Edu recorded the city of Mislata for a whole month. The resulting archive consisting of local urban, rural, social and cultural soundscapes was analyzed and turned into a spectrogram: a visualization of the spectral information in an audio-file.

By doing this, he makes the intangible heritage of Mislata visible without being very intrusive. The murals combine various spectrograms from different recordings. The image is full of details, complexities and graphic nuances. The murals are composed of parts of spectrograms of sounds from birds, cars, sirens, buses, church bells and all kinds of hums, hisses and roars that Edu found in the city of Mislata. Those textures, put together, form a portrait of the city and it’s inhabitants.

Sound art often takes time to immerse yourself in. Pieces in public space, even if they do tell a story about the neighborhood they’re in, can be an annoyance to the locals. By visualizing the soundscape, Spectrogram: Mislata blends in with the surroundings. The viewer can wonder about the sounds visualized on the mural at their own pace, when they pass it every day.

Sounds Like Silver

Synaesthesia is the neurological phenomenon in which the brain mixes up the senses; stimulation of one of the senses leads to experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. For “Sounds Like Silver”, Kevin Blake worked with a group of three people with sound to colour induced synaesthesia, documenting and illustrating the visual experiences of the group upon hearing his composition. The work explores the concept of synaesthesia being both a blessing and a curse, and explores visual spaces that are both real and surreal. It was completed as part of a thesis exploring the use of “Synaesthesia as a Creative Tool” - for the Music and Media Technologies Masters Degree at the Trinity College of Dublin.

As the work is based on direct input of the test group, the visual aesthetics of the piece might be hard to pin down, though it is definitely interesting to see a representation of what people with synaesthesia experience. What do you think? Is the video a good visual representation of the composition?

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.

Sonic Water

The most amazing results come from the simplest ideas, presented in a beautiful way. In this case, it’s a bottlecap filled with water, vibrating on a large speaker. The result: wonderful, complex patterns, recorded using a camera shooting in macro mode and projected on a large screen behind the installation. Sonic Water treats us to a great example of cymatics - the visualization of sound. 

Next to the installation there’s a room, a laboratory, where people can experiment with their own sound input: by playing a synthesizer, singing into a microphone or playing song from their phone, and see if Mozart indeed looks more harmonious than Slayer. 

The installation, created by Sven Meyer & Kim Pörksen has been shown in the Olympus OMD Photography Playground in Berlin from April 25 till May 24, 2013.

Fotos by diephotodesigner.de

Trinity

An audiovisual interactive dance piece from Electronic Perfomers. We’ve seen some of their work before, and Trinity explores the sonification and visualization of movement further, in a refined, beautiful way. 

What I love most about this is the way dance, sound and visuals come together and interact, with the dancer’s body as leading force. And while we know a lot of technology is needed to accomplish this, the result is clean, alive and organic, as you can see in this short video of the piece: 

Voice Array

It records your voice, then plays it back, cross fading into a cacophony of previously recorded samples. Voice Array, an installation created by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, also gives a visual representation of what’s being recorded by blinking its white LED’s.

In total, the installation can hold up to 288 samples, so your message won’t be captured inside of it for ever. When it gets pushed to the end of the row by a series of new recordings it gets one last moment of fame, before it will be deleted for ever:  

Photos by Photo by: Antimodular Research - Found via The Emergent Locality

Audio Visual

Audio Visual, a project by Peter Crawley, shows us the waveforms of popular songs, neatly stitched on a piece of cardboard. Here we see a visual representation of Whole Lotta Love, with the waveform of one minute of audio on each line. 

Next to these visualized waveforms Peter Crawley also creates stitched art themed around architecture and typography. Printed versions of his artwork can be found at Print Process. 

Visual Soundscapes

Looking at these images, is there a sound that comes to mind? What do shapes and colors do with that sonic image in your mind? Pablo Padilla Jargstorf, the creator of these Visual Soundscapes, calls them “intuitions of visual sound”. 

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The Space In Between / Alpha-ville festival

The Alpha-ville festival is a new London-based digital arts, music and culture event that will take place on the 17th and 18th September 2010. The theme of this year’s festival is Visionary Cities.

One of the acts performing live at the festival is The Space In Between, a collaboration between electronic composer Nikka and visual software developer Alba G. Corral. Their video “Melophase” (shown above) gives you a impression of their work. It is a good example of how sound and visuals can come together and interact in one experience.  

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Soundw(e)ave

Soundw(e)ave (2004) shows a spectrogram of an audio file, woven into a beautiful piece of Jacquard cotton. Soundw(e)ave was created by Christy Matson. Visit her website to have a look at her other projects and watch a video of Movements, an interactive sound installation which allows visitors to influence sounds by touching the fabric on the walls.    

Also have a look at Alyce Santoro’s Sonic Fabric and Kathrin Stumreich’s Fabric Machine, both combining sound and fabric. 

Found on Noise for Airports