Waves by Daniel Palacios

Waves is a wonderful installation created by Daniel Palacios. Using just a piece of elastic string, spun around by two electro motors, the most wonderful waveforms are shown, from simple sine wave patterns to complex smoke-like images, moving lines woven together, floating in the air:

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Soundaroid: Polaroid Camera Capturing Sound

The Soundaroid is a weird thing: it works like a Polaroid camera but instead of capturing the an image, it captures sound. After one minute of recording the device, created by Wei-Hao Chang, spits out a piece of paper just like a Polaroid camera, but instead of a photograph, a visual representation of the sound you just recorded becomes visible.  

To be honest the result is not great, but what I like about the Soundaroid is how it tickles the imagination. We know we can not capture sound instantly like a photograph captures a moment, but what would it look like if we could? As if being able to hear sounds is not magical enough, somehow we like to make things visible even if they are not. We have already seen examples of sound sculptures here, here and here.

Music visualization: Narratives 2.0

In his keynote for the Sonic Acts festival last week, Dirk de Kerkhoven spoke about data visualization and he briefly showed Narratives 2.0 by Matthias Dittrich. The program visualizes music by segmenting it in different channels and showing them in a fan-like manner. The angle of the line is determined by the frequency of the channel while high levels are colored orange. 

In the image above we see the result for Beethoven’s fifth symphony. Quite beautiful. It makes me want to listen to the piece and see if I can follow the lines and intensities. It is nice to look at a piece of music from a different perspective. The purpose of the project is not to create an exact mapping of the frequencies, but to have an aesthetic, artistic representation of it.

Cymatics: Visualizing sound

It is inspiring to see what sound can do with the things around us. In this TED talk Evan Grant tells us about cymatics and how sound waves can be visualized. These visualizations can provide us with information about the sounds we analyze, and they can form beautiful designs as well.