Waveforms by Carrie Bodle :: October 28 - November 28, 2010 :: Harborview Eye Institute, 7th Floor, Ninth & Jefferson Building, 908 Jefferson St., Seattle, WA.

Part of her Sewing Sonifications series, Waveforms originated from a collaboration with UW Oceanographic Scientist Dr. Neil Banas and is an exploration into using data from ecosystem models along the Washington coast to create tangible experiences of research through art. Sound is translated from data, then visualized and made tactile by the artist embroidering the combined waveform into a continuous sound wave.

Waveforms was made with the support of Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs, 4Culture, and Harborview Medical Center.

Sync/Lost: an Immersive, Multi-User Visualization of Music History :: Sync/Lost [3bits.net] is a multi-user data visualization installation that allows users to become immersed in the history of electronic music. Starting from a complex timeline, user interactivity allows rhythms and sub-rhythms to merge into new sounds. The user interaction is accomplished with wiimote controls, wireless handheld pointers which are relatively easy to use and learn. The audible feedback is provided via wireless headphones.

The project’s objective is to create an interface where people can explore all the connections between the main styles of electronic music through both visual and audible feedback. The interaction with the resulting network graph leads to “a collective consequence in the spatial visualization of information”. [From infosthetics.com.

Stephen Hurrel’s Beneath and Beyond: Seismic Sounds is an audio visual installation at Glasgow’s Tranway, as part of the annual GI festival for Visual Art. The installation presents a realtime feed of seismic shifts recorded from data of 100 of so seismic monitoring stations around the Earth. We are presented with the sound of the various vibrations going on within the Earth’s core at that very moment. We also see two visual screens showing graphical displays of particularly large tectonic shifts or events at that one time. Continue reading

From Information Aesthetics, January 28, 2009: Rubens’ Tube: Real Life Sound Visualization with Fire and Propane: A classic physics experiment called Rubens’ Tube involves sound, a tube of propane, and fire. A length of pipe is perforated along the top and sealed at both ends. One seal is attached to a small speaker or frequency generator, the other to a supply of a flammable gas. The pipe is filled with the gas, and the gas leaking from the perforations is lit. If a constant frequency is used, a standing wave can form within the tube. When the speaker is turned on, the standing wave will create higher and lower pressure points along the tube. Continue reading

(image: a graphical visualization of the electronic score Artikulation by György Ligeti from 1958)

The music predates the modern analog synthesizers of the late 60’s & early 70’s, as the sound sources are a combination of generated sound and tape manipulation. The score is based on a timeline measured in seconds, using shapes & colors instead of notes on a staff. Dots represent impulses & combs for noise. Colors stand for variations in timbre & pitch.

The resulting movie can also be seen here.

Thanks to information aesthetics.

A set of giant posters located in Madrid, London, Berlin, Brussels & Milan that monitor the noise level on a high-traffic roads. ambient noise levels are displayed via decibel meters connected to LED screens embedded in billboards, in homage to Noise Awareness Day (April 16). The posters were part of AEG-Electrolux’s advertising campaign supporting its new silent washing machine. The accompanying Web site also compares decibel levels of the major urban areas on line graphs to learn more about the detriments of noise pollution.

“Local school kids are taking it a step further and are deliberately shouting at the sign in unison in order to make the numbers change. The Manager of the night club is finding the poster helpful too – he is taking photos of the sign in the early hours of the morning to show the local council that he is not making too much noise.” [From information aesthetics]

RASTER-NOTON SHOWCASE — SIGNAL + solo sets by Alva Noto, Frank Bretschneider, and Byetone :: May 15, 2008; 9:00 pm :: Middlesex Lounge, 315 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA.

SIGNAL is a Raster-Noton supergroup, featuring Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto), Olaf Bender (aka Byetone), and Frank Bretschneider. The trio performs intense, hypnotic music to a spectacular backdrop of graphical information that reveals the complex geometry of the sounds in play. Continue reading

Visit pank.tv (click on DNA)to see a video and hear the sonification of GENE - LUXR :: ORGANISM - VIBRIO :: FISCHERI TRANSLATION - CNA :: It’s a one-minute sample and quite beautiful.

According to the very limited information on the site, DNA, mRNA and Protein sequences are translated into MIDI to generate the sound and control the image variables in realtime. When presented in live performance a MIDI controller is used. The gene information and sequences are available here. Other audio samples are available here.

Sound Chair begins as a sound that is precisely crafted to form the physical shape of a chair when visualized as a 3-dimensional object using a volume, time, frequency line plot. The life-size chair is an exact replica of the soundwave graph. The result is a product with dual existence as both a “sound” & a “chair”. Continue reading

A music- & musician-synchronized visualization illustrates the role of musicians & their mappings to the musical notes, based on “Being and Nothingness” by the Vienna Klangforum. As the notes pass through the picture, the musicians of the Klangforum Wien ensemble appear & disappear according to their acoustic contribution. “the result is a “choreography of sound & the music’s transience & vastness is turned into a ballet of bodies which lie somewhere between presence & absence”. See the animated visualization below: Continue reading