Group items tagged

"Visualizing Sound - Representations of Sound in Contemporary Creation stems directly from the LEV (Laboratorio de electrónica visual - Visual Electronics Lab) Festival. Launched at LABoral in 2007, the festival focuses on the convergence of electronic sound creation and visual arts. Visualizar el sonido [Visualizing Sound] brings the same line of enquiry into the white walls of the art center. The result is an exhibition where sound and image perfectly balance each other. Some works give a graphic, architectural and physical presence to sound, others reveal the sound produced by physical objects we'd otherwise regard as perfectly mute."

"No field of study based on sensory experience seems to be overburdened by terminology to the same extent as that dealing with sound and hearing. The visual sense, of course, has received as much attention as the auditory from physics, psychology, neurophysiology, and the visual arts, which have all contributed terminology and jargon alike, but a great deal of it seems to have entered the common vocabulary already, and at least the general notions involved are seldom foreign to the average citizen or student. Terms such as perspective, foreground, background, colour, spectrum, shadow, focus, image, reflection, transparent, translucent and the wealth of descriptive visual terms, not to mention common visual impairments and the complexity of visual language found in contemporary cinema and photography - all of these have found public familiarity in a way that it is hard to imagine their sonic counterparts ever matching. Almost every school child knows what white light is, and how it is composed, but would he know what white noise is, even though the likelihood of it having an adverse effect on him is far greater? The ability to perceive three-dimensional visual perspective when projected onto a two-dimensional surface, by no means a simple achievement given the lateness of its appearance in our civilization, is irrevocably ingrained in the child's perceptual habits at an early age, and yet the ability to distinguish acoustic parameters, or experience subtle nuances of timbre (supposing he knows what timbre, the sonic equivalent of colour, is) may never be among his perceptual skills."

With the advent of Digital Humanities methodologies the visualization of Humanities data has become more and more prominent. However, once the "wow-effect" of a "cool" visualization - such as a pie-chart, a word cloud, a diagram etc. - has worn off many Humanists begin to react with scepticism: is it worth the trouble? Doesn"t a "word say more than thousand pictures"? Their scepticism seems justified: Most of the current visualization paradigms are derived from engineering and mathematics oriented applications. Most of them are context blind, a-historical and driven by an epistemology that reduces complex phenomena to a series of "data points" - which is exactly the opposite of how Humanists tend to look at their field of interest. - In this lecture series international visualization experts will explore new, philosophically and cultural history informed approaches to Humanities data visualization that respond to the Humanities" needs.

"Visual Record: The Materiality of Sound in Print investigates how artists since the 1970s have employed print-based processes to examine the relationship between sound and its visual representation. The exhibition features 15 artists, including Terry Adkins, John Cage, Bethany Collins, Christian Marclay, Glenn Ligon, Dario Robleto, and Audra Wolowiec, among others. "

My work fuses the raw material of music into visual, emotional and intellectual forms by drawing with cut paper, shaping and layering positive and negative space into rhythms. The paper is meticulously cut and composed, opened and closed, with a focus on creating lines that specify coherent patterns of light and shadows on a grid, forming a visual musical structure. In essence, the paper itself becomes the instrument that draws light into visual musical patterns.

"Crumpling a thin sheet produces a characteristic sound, comprised of distinct clicking sounds corresponding to buckling events. We propose a physically based algorithm that automatically synthesizes crumpling sounds for a given thin shell animation. The resulting sound is a superposition of individually synthesized clicking sounds corresponding to visually significant and insignificant buckling events. We identify visually signifi- cant buckling events on the dynamically evolving thin surface mesh, and instantiate visually insignificant buckling events via a stochastic model that seeks to mimic the power-law distribution of buckling energies observed in many materials. In either case, the synthesis of a buckling sound employs linear modal analysis of the deformed thin shell. Because different buckling events in general occur at different deformed configurations, the question arises whether the calculation of linear modes can be reused. We amortize the cost of the linear modal analysis by dynamically partitioning the mesh into nearly rigid pieces: the modal analysis of a rigidly moving piece is retained over time, and the modal analysis of the assembly is obtained via Component Mode Synthesis (CMS). We illustrate our approach through a series of examples and a perceptual user study, demonstrating the utility of the sound synthesis method in producing realistic sounds at practical computation times."

"Bernie Krause is an American musician and soundscape ecologist. He has been recording, researching and archiving soundscapes for over 40 years. ....It celebrates the work of Krause's work, adding a simple but fitting and room-filling spectrogram to the recorded soundscapes, emerging the listener in sound, and being able to recognise the animals with visual cues. Here's a 360-degrees video, if your browser can play that: The idea is quite simple, but the soundscapes are compelling and diverse. While it can sometimes be hard to get an audience interested in sound-based works in a museum, United Visual Artists did a great job of adding a simple visual counterpart to keep those who aren't used to only listen to sound, interested. If you want to know more about the work of Bernie Krause, I suggest watching this TED Talk about "The voice of the natural world"."

"Digital Acoustic Cartography‹ is an interactive data visualization that transforms sonic events into a readable visual language. "

"Center for Visual Music is a nonprofit film archive dedicated to visual music, experimental animation and avant-garde media. CVM is commited to preservation, curation, education, scholarship, and dissemination of the film, performances and other media of this tradition, together with related historical documentation and artwork."

"VOSIS is a synthesizer that creates complex wavetables by scanning and filtering greyscale pixel data from images, videos, or live camera input. The audification and filtering of pixel luminance correlates visual shape to sound timbre. Scan rate in terms of octave, interval, and scale allows for use as a musical instrument. Thus, VOSIS is a tool for image sonification, sound design, and visual music composition."

"The McGurk effect is a compelling demonstration of how we all use visual speech information. The effect shows that we can't help but integrate visual speech into what we 'hear'."

"Cube with Magic Ribbons is a computer visual and synthesised sound composition for live performance. The piece takes its title from a drawing of M.C.Escher which is rich with contradictory perspectives but it is also inspired by the wrapped spaces found in the two dimensional graphics of early computer games such as Asteroids and Pac-Man. It was created using a custom visual sequencer SoundCircuit, which rather than employing a conventional DAW layout, allows multiple virtual tape-heads to travel through a two-dimensional wrapped space along tracks that can be freely inter-connected. As the tape-heads travel through the resultant network, the topological layout of the tracks comes to directly influence the macro form of the music. Furthermore, as the piece unfolds the nature of this already confusing space reveals itself to be increasingly elastic and complex, yet inexorably intertwined with the musical form."

""Sound design is the main contributing factor to the mood and atmosphere of any film," Charlie Battin wrote in a 2015 piece for the BFI Film Academy. "The visuals are what the viewer tends to mostly focus on and the sound subconsciously alters how the visuals are perceived.""

"The Sound Visualizer and the Chladni Bucket are used to show how vibrations from sound waves are able to create some very beautiful patterns using a few simple pieces of equipment. As compression waves from sound hit a surface it may cause standing waves to form. "

S.T.R.H. Smoleński's installation fills the main exhibition hall of the Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art in Gdańsk entirely, denying viewers a safe distance and pulling them towards its interior. The visual elements consist of massive, static, 3-dimensional objects which generate low-frequency sound at specific intervals. The sound unfolds from a nearly inaudible acoustic pressure into powerful rumblings that shake everything in their path - including the walls of the space and the body of the viewer - and eventually dissipate into complete silence. This way, contact with the work of art becomes a total sensory experience that involves not only the viewer's vision and hearing but their whole body; it is an entirely physical sensation. Though not devoid of a visual presence, the piece makes its impact mainly with sound, which, generated in specific ways, creates the impression of an all-encompassing experience - a synthesis of the senses that combines cues perceived by spatial receptors (eyes and ears) and contact receptors (skin and muscle).

"What is "sound art"? Should we define it within the context of experimental music or the visual arts or both? While the term first came into being in the 1980s, sound in the visual arts has a far longer history, ranging from Modernist experiments with synesthesia to the avant-garde exploits of Dada and Futurism. Sound art also has a distinctly musical heritage, emerging from the compositional experiments of John Cage, Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Maryanne Amacher, and Pauline Oliveros, among others. This conversation will serve as the keynote to an all-day interdisciplinary conference on sound art and experimental music."

"There have been many heated debates over Arizona's newly-implemented legislation SB 1070, a law which targets one of the U.S.'s most vulnerable communities, undocumented workers, and makes them subject to deportation, police harassment, and criminalization. However, in the midst of all the shouting, there has been surprisingly little said about what the role of sound will be in the enforcement of this law. Conversations about racial profiling have been predominately limited to visual aspects: skin color, haircuts, and most infamously, footwear selection. However, in order to fully understand the devastating impact of SB 1070, we need to render sonic examples of discrimination as visible as their visual counterparts."

"Becky Buckle explores the history of artists concealing visuals within the waveforms of their music"

show at the hirshhorn that examines connections between visual art and sound

"Thought to be lost for years, this playful film combines abstract geometry and textures to create a visible soundtrack, and even features the fingerprints of the director himself."