APD Week 6 | Sound

Context

This week I was inspired by artists that have found ways to convey the properties and emotions of sound into physical and digital artifacts. Specifically, I chose to look at how auditory-tactile synaesthesia—the ability to interpret sound as shapes and colour—could be represented to those that do not experience it. 

I also wanted to use sounds that people would ordinarily take for granted, such as the ambient noise of travelling via a train in metro Melbourne. This is something that most people would actively ignore by playing music through headphones or by simply tuning it out. For this project I wanted the audience to actually focus on the rhythm and layers of sounds.

Method

The first consideration I had was how I was going to determine what colour matched what sound. Would it be by audio frequency, the note it corresponded to or my own personal interpretation. Eventually I found an online program called Sovis, that has a visualiser that matches the frequency of a sound and outputs a gradient of colour. 

By playing the recorded audio whilst recording my screen as the program visualised the colours I was able to capture the different hues for each frequency. 

I then took this into Premier and overlayed the waveform so that the colours could be seen through it. The sound was then synced to a white bar that moves along the bar to show where the listener is.

Response

https://youtu.be/tDO0B8kkADc

Reflection

Initially I had wanted to also represent the sound with abstract visual elements inspired by Picnic (McQueen, 2006) but I found myself over thinking the strokes and I was unable to get a result I was satisfied with.