1st Installation – sound into visuals

2nd Installation – Movement

Design Thesis and Conceptual Design Brief

 

Design Thesis

My grounded theory is that sound can be changed into visuals and that process relies on the feeling projected from the sound.

Movement and culture – When travelling, you are experiencing new cultures and hearing different languages. Everyone that has travelled knows that feeling of isolation because of not understanding the language. Sometimes it’s also hard to blend in because you come from another culture. When you are travelling between countries, you are moving from one place to another and most of the time you pass over an ocean. I hope the user experiences freedom while he walks passed the camera, the viewer should feel like he/she is travelling overseas with the camera and experiences the movement.

Sound in Languages – How can languages be visualised? How can different speed within a different language be visualised? The viewer should express him/herself, by choosing the volume and speed of the voice installation, choosing their own language and sounds. I hope the user feels free to say anything he likes and opens up locked feelings.

Sound into visuals – Sound art is a loosely associated group of art practices that are concerned with sound and the act of listening. Because of the diversity of sound art, there is often a debate as to whether sound art falls inside and/or outside of both the visual art and experimental music categories. How can different sounds in different languages bee described into visuals? How can our thoughts be expressed without talking, without having to understand the other persons language or culture? Do people focus on the music or on the voices, which part of their brain do they use? By watching a video named: “A Colour Box” ‘1935) + “Free Radicals” (1958) by Len Lye, I received inspiration for this installation. I think that the viewer is going to follow the sound, draw faster when the sound is loud or when the sound is in a fast beat. I think it will be interesting to see how many users are going to use their left ear and how many use their right ear, depending on what part of the brain they use to listen.

Conceptual Design Brief:

Movement and culture – To express this experience I thought of making a graphical image of lots of different art that represents different countries. This piece of art will be in a computer program named Processing and interacted with through a video camera. Where you walk past the camera, the image turns into an ocean and there is a wave that follows you and stays for a little while, the viewer is interacting with the image. Following this piece of moving art would be a sound track with different languages and different sounds. While walking over the ocean, through different cultures you can experience the languages and feel the isolation that can occur when travelling.

Sound in Languages – When you speak into a microphone, it gives away audio signals into Processing (a computer program) and turns it into visuals. The louder you speak the faster the visuals are been drawn. The viewer is creating international sound and visuals by speaking his/her own language in his/her own speed. Phonetics inspired me for this project.

Sound into visuals – The user is to use headphones and listen to a soundtrack that I created. The headphones are set so the right ear listens to music and the left ear listens to voices. While the viewer listens to the track, he/she sits in front of a black screen and has control over the visuals being created. The interaction happens when the viewer participates in the soundtrack and makes a piece of art by drawing his/her emotions or feelings triggered by the soundtrack.

Visuals “sound-drawing”

Process – Sound editing in Avid

For the Audio I decided to use Avid Express Pro, which is a editing program.

Flash – sound into visuals

I decided to make my project in flash, it is mend to be plain and strong. The viewer is supposed to listen to the sound track with head phones and make his/her own visuals.

The next viewer can choose if he/her presses the Erase button and starts again or keeps it and overlaps the drawing.

Len Lye “A Colour Box” ‘1935) + “Free Radicals” (1958)

This is a video of Len Lye. I think he is a good inspiration for my project!

Relieve Mental Stress Using The Latest Brain Psychology

Music has traditionally been a palliative for anxiety. And stress; as William Congreve noted in his oft-repeated quote, “Music hath charms to sooth a savage breast…….” However, a new category called “Mind Music” is appearing; these recordings use a variety of brain/body phenomena to impact stress. Some of them are:

• Entrainment – This is the alteration of brain/body rhythms using cyclic sound at particular frequencies and durations coupled with the binaural sound perceptive properties of the human brain. The cyclic brain/body synchronicity resulting from presenting unique sequenced tones in each ear simultaneously is caused by both brain hemispheres synthesizing a derived pulse, or “beat frequency.” Carefully crafted, this can yield beneficial, stress-relieving brainwave activity.
• Audio+Visual – These DVD media products combine carefully crafted music with soothing visuals. One producer features waterfalls and streams, sunsets, landscapes, beaches, and even a fireplace!This creates more of an immersive experience of escape that can be a great anxiety relief method as well as a general stress reducer.
• Sculpted Sound – Today’s mood-altering composers use modern psycho-acoustic research that shows stress-relieving music must emphasize certain elements:

• Ultra slow zero beat tempo
• Frequency restriction
• Absence of dominating rhythm and percussion
• Subtle melodic and rhythmic elements
• An “overlay of sound approach” that is continuous music with little empty aural space
• A variety of melodic and emotional elements
• Gradual changes in sound/music with an absence of jarring elements

Cultural Art – process

The Auditory Pathways

The outer ear gathers and transmits sound waves down the auditory canal where they reach the tympanic membrane and this vibrating membrane of the ear drum passes the vibration of the sound into the ossicles which consist of the malleus, incus and stapes (hammer, anvil and stirrup respectively).

Picture from www.prenticehall.com

The stapes fits into the oval window of the cochlea which responds to different pitches according to the location between the head and tail of the cochlea.

Picture from www.prenticehall.com

The cochlea contains the sensory elements called cilia which send the impulses into dendrites of nerve fibre neurons whose axons make up the fibres of the auditory portion of the VIII cranial (vestibular-cochlear) nerve.

These neurons are the first order neurons of the neural pathway, and proceed toward the brain stem where they form synapses with the cochlea nuclei located in the lower pons and upper medulla and consist of some one dozen different masses of cell bodies concentrated into three main groups of the olivary body.

The olivary body sends the auditory signals to the motor system of the ear and may be involved in reflexes. The inferior colliculus is involved in the creation of motor responses to auditory stimuli and the medial geniculate body which is located in the thalamus, serves as a relay station on the way to the auditory cortex. The auditory cortex lies in the temporal lobe, where low frequency sound is discriminated anteriorly, whilst high frequency sound is discriminated posteriorly. The auditory association areas surround the auditory cortex, and it is here that the brain integrates, remembers and analyses various types of sound input – it takes about 10 milliseconds for sound impulses to travel from the outer ear to the auditory cortex.

Sound induces an audio-evoked-response in the EEG and is a powerful psychological test of hearing because it indicates that stimulation by sound has caused a response in the auditory system and the brain. When the brain is exposed to rhythmic, evenly spaced on/off tones, brain wave following or ‘entrainment’ follows. Following usually occurs within seconds of exposure to the sound, and the ‘trance’ usually follows after about six minutes.