Presentation at Seeing Sound 2, Bath Spa University, UK, 29th and 30th October 2011. This is a ‘script’ of the ‘talking to slides’ presentation I gave at the symposium - reconstructed from memory, my presentation notes and also some subsequent research and writing. While it lacks the spontaneity of the original presentation, it’s probably more erudite though it’s also much longer because I’ve since included plenty of things I probably didn’t mention. The thumbnail guides are complete… but to avoid duplication of text I’ve: • linked to rather than included my ‘A Visual Music Manifesto’ which seems to deserve its own post - http://phd.lewissykes.info/a-visual-music-manifesto/; • not included text for the fjnal section on my prototype analogue tonoscopes. Initially I thought my working journal entry on ‘Experimental Development’ might provide the basis for this section - but I’ve ended up documenting and critiquing my studio experiments in far more depth than I was able to do in my presen- tation so it too is a separate post - http://phd.lewissykes.info/experimental-development/; The video of the slideshow is online at - http://vimeo.com/38349207. Introduction Hello. I’m Lewis Sykes, currently in the 2nd year of my Practice as Research PhD project - The Augmented Tonoscope - at the Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design (MIRIAD), Manchester Metropolitan University. Firstly, I welcome this opportunity to be amongst peers who are intimately familiar with the context of my study. It makes such a refreshing change. I was planning to present some half-baked ideas about a tension I suspect there might be between the acts of watching and listening and how this might impact on the creation of audiovisual work. But I’ve changed my mind. Instead I’m going to show lots of images and videos that illustrate the practical development of my PhD project. So to start, my research question: How far can artistic investigation into Cymatics - the study of wave phenomenon and vibration - contribute towards a deeper understanding of the interplay between sound and image in Visual Music? Central to answering this is for me to design, fabricate and craft my own hybrid analogue/digital instrument to explore the aesthetics of cymatic patterns and forms - the Augmented Tonoscope. Here’s an early ‘artists impression’ of what the Augmented Tonoscope might look like in a gallery setting. Though this contains most of the essential elements - a physical device with a control interface that produces an analogue visual output, captured by camera and projected on a screen, overlaid with a digital visualisation - you’ll soon see it’s already developed beyond this initial conception.
I’m doing this from scratch - currently focusing on the design and build of analogue prototypes - including a custom-made Sine Wave Generator driven by the Arduino platform. I’m using micro controllers, open sound control and open- access fabrication technologies because they are the tools of this time at my disposal. I’m actually interested in trying to identify, explore and hook into some underlying paradigms that can inform and guide my practice and research. So what motivated me to undertake this PhD? Bored, bored, bored, bored, bored... I’ve been a musician for more than 30 years and experimenting with visuals for not much less. I’ve performed, recorded and produced work with numerous ‘barely’ notable bands and studio production projects and audiovisual creative partnerships and artistic collaborations. I started using computers to make music back in 1989 with Creator on an Atari ST. Not long after I began freelancing as a graphic designer using Aldus PageMaker 3.0 on a Windows 3.1 Intel 386 home PC. Bar the analogue pursuits of playing live bass guitar, DJing with vinyl and making ‘hand-drawn’ experimental fjlm I’ve used computers for my creative outputs ever since. I’ve spent the past decade or so focusing my interests through an MA in Hypermedia Studies at the University of Westminster in 99-00, curating audiovisual experimentation for the sound, music art and technology festival, Cybersonica and pursuing my own artistic practice in audiovisual collectives such as The Sancho Plan. Yet I pretty much stopped making music in 2009. I haven’t really analysed why I withdrew from an activity that was so familiar to me. I understand myself well enough to know that my ‘creative self’ has natural peaks and trough and my praxis has its own pulse and trajectory - and currently that’s been learning to code in Java via Processing and more recently making physical sonic things using Arduino. But in the process of undertaking a PhD I’ve had to contemplate, to make my implicit practitioner knowledge explicit. I’ve also started to read, consider and engage with contemporary philosophy and strategies of thought, to explore the possibility that they are important in illuminating/analysing/deconstructing the visual and experiential aspects of what surrounds us, to apply these theoretical models to wider practice within my fjeld and to situate my own work within current critical debates. So a recent lecture and reading of Martin Heidegger on boredom - The First Form of Boredom: Becoming Bored by Something switched on a light in my head (despite him being a Nazi). Had I become bored of making music? And not just in a superfjcial way - of feeling a bluntness in operating all too familiar music software, a dullness in the intricacies of the systematic production process, a tedium in the everyday act of making music - as Heidegger asserts these feelings are just a ‘shadow of boredom’. I suspected I’d become deeply and ‘profoundly’ bored with the process of making music using computers… as Heidegger describes, I’d “drifted into a remarkable indifference”. But Heidegger also argues that this condition of boredom is also a condition of thought and only by engaging with it will we understand ourselves in more detail. Moreover it can be useful if used in the right way. It describes a condition of potentiality, of a state of creativity, of being about to produce something.
I think this is in large part why I started my PhD and why my research has focussed at its outset on audiovisual fundamentals. Getting back to the essential building blocks of Visual Music and trying to look long and deeply at the simple interplay and elemental relationships between sound and image. A Visual Music Manifesto http://phd.lewissykes.info/a-visual-music-manifesto/ Cymatics This image shows a relatively common view of Cymatics - a non-Newtonian fmuid such as corn starch in water vibrated in a speaker cone. The term Cymatics (from Greek: κῦμα “wave”) was coined by the researcher Dr Hans Jenny (1967, 1972) who studied this subset of modal wave phenomena using a device of his own design - the ʻtonoscopeʼ. Jenny’s work has no prior or subsequent match in terms of a detailed empirical investigation into the effect of sound and vibration on physical matter. I was inspired by this excerpt from a documentary on Jenny. If he could produce such an engaging and direct link between what you hear and what you see almost 50 years ago then what could I realise using the technology, computational power and access to a global network of knowledge currently at my disposal? Of course a recognition of the effects of sound on materials dates back much further than Hans Jenny - most notably the German physicist and musician Ernst Chladniauthor of Discoveries in the Theory of Sound (1787) who documented the patterns that emerged when a metal plate sprinkled with sand was bowed with a violin string.
This apparent geometric quality of cymatic forms, displaying clear harmonic relationships, has been explored more recently by John Telfer through Cymatic Music (2011) - his “audiovisual science and music project investigating the possibilities of creating a system of visual, or rather visible music”. Telfer also asks if cymatic patterns can be interpreted musically but argues that Equal Temperament - the thirteen equally spaced steps of a keyboard octave embedded in the piano and fretted string instruments which has dominated Western Music since the C18th - obscures the fact that this musical structure actually has harmonic inconsistencies. He responds with his theory of harmonicism - a system of proportional Just Intonation - and his work in developing the two distinct harmonic and arithmetic progressions (overtones and undertones) of the Pythagorean Lambdoid (which re-emerged in the C19th in its completed form as the Lambdoma matrix) as a practical creative resource in music. Telfer favours manufacturing acoustic musical instruments to interpret the harmonicism within the Lambdoma matrix but recognises - and to my mind points to - the possibility of an electronic (and digital) approach which I plan to adopt. Benlloyd Goldstein’s Cymatica (2009), “An architectural thesis investigation exploring the synthesis of spatial proportion and form generated from sound” explores Cymatics as a means to reveal a deeper understanding into spatial form. As well as a wide range of contemporary artistic output exploring Cymatics: Carsten Nicolai – Milch (2000); and Thomas McIntosh with Mikko Hynninnen and Emmanuel Madan – Ondulation (2002).
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