shapes for sound | inspiration

Inspiration: Eva Schindling, Liquid sound collisions

I recently discovered Eva Schindling's fascinating work in sculpture, where she explores the physical shape that spoken words can take. Her work was featured in Etapes:176, the January 2010 issue, which focuses on information design.

As she describes on the Boulder Pavement blog,

Liquid Sound Collision is an aesthetic and interpretive study of the interactions that happen when recorded voices encounter computer-simulated fluids. In a digital environment, audio input can have a more obvious impact on the shape and distortion of liquids than in reality. 

Each study sends two words that can be thought of as poetic opposites - chaos and order, body and mind – as vibration source into a fluid simulation. The waves created by the sound files run towards each other, they collide and interfere with one another’s patterns. The moments of these collisions are then translated into 3D models that are printed as real sculptures. 

The chosen words that depict dualistic world views are opposites, yet are displayed as the turbulent flow that arises between the two extremes.

I really like the way that Eva has used scientific technology - sending sound waves into a fluid simulation - to create flowing forms that are delicate and elegant. 

She talks more about the creation process in her blog entry, Sketch : Liquid Sound Collision.  

Music animation machine

Tonight I came across the Music Animation Machine, a project by Stephen Anthony Malinowski. The Music Animation Machine is a way of visualizing and animating music scores in a way that is easy to understand. Bars scroll across the screen, and the position of the bars on the screen shows the pitch and relative timing. Malinowski describes these visual scores as a way to discover the inner structure of music.  

This is an example of his work with the 1st movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony. 

These animated diagrams can help people who don't read music understand the structure of what they're hearing; they fulfill that job wonderfully. 

While I'm fascinated by the depth and technicality of this project, it seems to me that the graphic component is almost too technical and computer-like to be really "beautiful." I could imagine, for example, that timber/resonance could be represented by bars of different thickness. This would add more visual variation, and allow viewers to really grasp the actual "body" of sound. Just a thought!

These videos are interesting to watch, but what I find most fascinating is the side-by-side comparaison of works using screenshots. This allows you to get a better feeling of the differences between the works without even listening to them.

The Musicanim website contains a great deal of information about the technical and creative processes used in making these videos. I especially found the time-line to be fascinating overview of his work : Time-line of the Music Animation Machine (and related experiments

Music Animation Machine youtube channel