Karel Martens

Karel Marten's work occupies a unique place in the present European art and design landscape. While working in the tradition of Dutch modernism, he maintains distance from the main developments of his time: from both the practices of routinized Modernism and the facile reactions against it. His work is personal and experimental, while at the same time publicly answerable.

He has published a book called 'Printed Matter'.

I especially enjoy his work when he uses overlapping and layering in print to create wonderful pieces. The multi-layered work is also what I intend to do for my degree. He also uses a lot of colour in his work.

Lesquatrestacianos

Mot Studio had come up with a series of graphic information system, posters, book & stamps on Vivaldi's Four Seasons. They have broken down the song and have mapped them using a graphic information system. (www.motstudio.com)

These posters are accompanied by a handbook which describes the mapping.

Why would breaking down sound help?

When you break down sound into it's basic layers, giving each of those elements a shape or form on different layers would portray sound better through visuals.

Sound as we know is 3D. It travels in a spherical way in all directions from its point of origin. If visuals were to describe sound, the best possible way would be to break sound into parts that can be defined using rules and guides. Then to show them on different layers.

Physics of Sound

Overtunes

Overtones are the other frequencies besides the fundamental that exist in musical instruments. Instruments of different shapes and actions produce different overtones. The overtones combine to form the characteristic sound of the instrument. For example, both the waves below are the same frequency, and therefore the same note. But their overtones are different, and therefore their sounds are different. Note that the violin's jagged waveform produces a sharper sound, while the smooth waveform of the piano produces a purer sound, closer to a sine wave.

Physics of Sound

Sound is produced when something vibrates. Every sound that reaches our ears and sounds the way it does is because of it's parts that comprise of it.

There are four main parts to a sound wave: wavelength, period, frequency and amplitude.

Wavelength - The wavelength is the horizontal distance between any two successive equivalent points on the wave. That means that the wavelength is the horizontal length of one cycle of the wave. The period of a wave is the time required for one complete cycle of the wave to pass by a point.

The longer the wavelength, the lower the pitch.The Shorter the wavelength, the higher the pitch.

Period - The period of a wave is the time for a particle on a medium to make one complete vibrational cycle. So, the period is the amount of time it takes for a wave to travel a distance of one wavelength.

 








Frequency - Every cycle of sound has one condensation, a region of increased pressure, and one rarefaction, a region where air pressure is slightly less than normal. The frequency of a sound wave is measured in hertz. Hertz (Hz) indicate the number of cycles per second that pass a given location.

Frequency and period are distinctly different, yet related, quantities. Frequency refers to how often something happens. Period refers to the time it takes something to happen. Frequency is a rate quantity. Period is a time quantity.

Amplitude - The amplitude of a sound is represented by the height of the wave. When there is a loud sound, the wave is high and the amplitude is large. Conversely, a smaller amplitude represents a softer sound. A decibel is a scientific unit that measures the intensity of sounds. The softest sound that a human can hear is the zero point. When the sound is twice as loud, the decibel level goes up by six. Humans speak normally at 60 decibels.

The higher the amplitude, the lower the sound. The lower the amplitude, the higher the sound.

Pitch - How the brain interprets the frequency of an emitted sound is called the pitch. We already know that the number of sound waves passing a point per second is the frequency. The faster the vibrations the emitted sound makes (or the higher the frequency), the higher the pitch. Therefore, when the frequency is low, the sound is lower.

Apart from these major divisions, the sound can still be divided into -

Timbre, Bass, Beats, Envelope, Attack etc.

The shape of my song

What does music look like? The Shape of Song is an attempt to answer this seemingly paradoxical question. The custom software in this work draws musical patterns in the form of translucent arches, allowing viewers to literally see the shape of any composition available on the Web.

Click here to go to the site.

The artist Martin Wattenberg is a New York-based digital artist whose work centers on the theme of mapping information.

The mapping is fairly simple. Each arch connects two identical passages. To clarify the connection between the visualization and the song, in this diagram the score is displayed beneath the arches.

Lumia

Thomas Wilfred (1889-1968) was one of the pioneers of visual sound and music and called his art Lumia, the art of light. He created Clavilux Machines that would compose compositions of coloured light over a surface of projection. Wilfred’s instruments were designed to project coloured imagery, not just fields of colored light as with earlier instruments.

This marked a shift in change of how sound was being seen. The Lumia projections were new and different from what artists had already tried with motion graphics. It was truly abstract and had no fixed shape.

“You could look at a piece of Lumia and feel that you’re hearing music, or feel a sensation of warmth or cold, or taste a flavour – or it may even evoke the fragrance of flowers or recall a memory. It’s a visual synaethetic expression.” - Stadnik

Below is a still from Wilfred's 'Opus 140'.

Multi - layering of Sound

We now know that sound has many parts that make it sound. Any change in one of these elements drastically changes the sound itself.

So, sound basically is multi-layered. If paper were to show the dynamics of sound, it would be better to show it on different layers rather than on one. Also, using different shapes and colours for each of the parts would make them easier to read.

So, even if only one part of sound is changed, we can easily replace the layer of that element with the other's.

Visual Music

The journey of the discovery of a visual sound actually started when the Ocular Harpsicord was discovered by Father Louis Bertrand Castel in 1730. This usually involved candles being places behind coloured glass in holes above an organ. Flaps covering those holes were linked to keys of the instrument which when pressed would reveal the coloured light from the candles.

The invention of kaleidoscope was another step towards visualising sound better. I personally do feel that kaleidoscopes are a brilliant way to portray sound. They change form and colour just as easily as sound does. They are as kinetic as sound really is.

Visual Music

Visual music, sometimes called "colour music", refers to the use of musical structures in visual imagery, which can also include silent films or silent Lumia work. It also refers to methods or devices which can translate sounds or music into a related visual presentation.

Visual music also refers to systems which convert music or sound directly into visual forms, such as film, video or computer graphics, by means of a mechanical instrument, an artist's interpretation, or a computer. The reverse is applicable also, literally converting images to sound by drawn objects and figures on a film's soundtrack. Filmmakers working in this latter tradition include Oskar Fischinger (Ornament Sound Experiments), Norman McLaren, and many contemporary artists. Visual music overlaps to some degree with the history of abstract film, though not all Visual music is abstract. There are a variety of definitions of visual music, particularly as the field continues to expand. In some recent writing, usually in the fine art world, Visual Music is often confused with or defined as synaesthesia, though historically this has never been a definition of Visual Music. Visual music has also been defined as a form of intermedia.

Since ancient times artists have longed to create with moving lights a music for the eye comparable to the effects of sound for the ear. – Dr. William Moritz, the best-known historian of visual music writing in English, his speciality being the work of Oskar Fischinger.

Sometimes also called "color music," the history of this tradition includes many experiments with color organs. Artist or inventors "built instruments, usually called 'color organs,' that would display modulated colored light in some kind of fluid fashion comparable to music." Several different definitions of color music exist; one is that color music is generally formless projections of colored light. Some scholars and writers have used the term color music interchangeably with visual music.

Wikipedia

Jules Engel (1909-2003) was a very well known animator who worked with relations between sound and vision. He was a part of the group obsessed with creating a link between the senses, blending of the senses if you may say so. 'Silence' was one of his pioneering works towards creating sound through only visuals. The use of motion graphics to produce sound was not previously done and this laid the bricks of a beginning of visual sound.

Sound Waves

This video does a great job of creating the visual patterns associated with sound waves with salt. The patterns created are unbelievable!

Rubin's Tube: The Physics of Music

This is a Physics experiment on sound.

Research

This chart was created by David McCandless and is referred to as "A visualisation of the meanings of different colours in diferent cultures".

Why is colour tricky?

Colour symbolises and emotes. So, even though it is a very universally accepted theory, it is still very personal.

To show sound through colour alone and to expect each person in the audience to understand the sound exactly as the other would be impossible.

Colour has to be paired with a method of usage, otherwise it would be too big a field to enter.

Why is colour important?

Colour is one of the most important factors when trying to create visual sound. All the three said methods have one thing in common - the use of colour to the artist's advantage to portray emotion or content can be seen in all three methods.