APD - Week 7 - Play and Sound

Theme

In responds to this week's theme play and sound, I am trying to visualize the audio, so that people can visually feel the rhythm of the music, the ups and downs and changes.

Context

In this week, I was thinking about the connection between music and visuals. As Fireside Studio (2020) argued, visual music can be seen as a time-based visual image that creates a temporal architecture in a similar way to absolute music. The related work is called Rhythmus 21, created by Hans Richter (1921). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_kceafWtbE. He uses pure black and white geometric forms, growing and shrinking squares and circles to capture time, in this way to visualize rhythm. I wanted to find a balance of visual and musical rhythm in the model as well. This week’s project includes two theories which are symbolic play and sensory play. I use undulating cubes to show the rhythm in the music, and they move with the size and rhythm of the music decibels. Also, this is a kind of sensory play. Sensory play is any activities that stimulates 5 senses. Both auditory and visual senses will be stimulated in this animation.  

Methods

I used C4D to create the whole animation, especially the Mogragh Sound Effector. I collected the sound of the waves before the storm and used it as a base, while the cubes reacted according to the size/volume of the waves and the wind.

Response

The Final animation is here:

https://youtu.be/w7mi1t9Dqys

Reflection

After finishing this short animation, I released that this model is not just a visualization of selected audio, it can be applied to many software or interactive works. For example, this model can be applied to weather forecasting or similar weather-related projects. People can visually visualize the weather. The strength of the wind, the size of the rain, etc.