week 8 ass1
Internet and Network Art
Reading through the module study guide, I was quite confusing. I did not know which brief to choose, from where to start and what to do. Then I started to do some researches about brief 4 “Make: Mobile Networked Media”.
I am really attracted to music and colours and how the music can be represented.
The article, “Colour, Form, and Motion Dimensions of a Musical Art of Light”
of Fred Collopy, says: “Lumia are an art that permits visual artists to play images in the way that musicians play with sound. … In designing and play Lumia, three principal dimensions require attention: colour, form and motion. …”
One of the digital artist who can let us see what we cannot see but listen to is Martin Wattenber.
Have you ever wonder what music looks like?
“The Shape of Song” tries to answer this paradoxical question. The software, written entirely in Java, draws “translucent” arches depending on the sequence of notes and on the difficulty of each musical piece, so that viewers can really see the shape of any composition.
Each arch connects two repeated, identical passages of a composition. By using repeated passages as a sign, the diagram in The Shape of Song shows the deep structure of the composition. Of course more complex is a composition more intricate is a diagram.
For example, if we consider a very simple piece of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”, we can see how simple the draw is. Each arch connects two identical passages. To see clearly the connection between the visualization and the song of this diagram, the score is displayed beneath the arches.
Another example is the folk song “Clementine”. Because the refrain of this song consists of multiple repetitions of the same passage, the diagram shows exactly that.
An example of a complex diagram built from a complex song is “Goldberg Variations” Bach. As we can see this piece is divided into two main parts, each made of a long passage played twice.
I contacted him asking about his style in particular in “The Shape of Song” and why he chose this kind of art. He replied writing: “In general my style is to make invisible structures visible, through the use of hand-coded software. I have done this in a variety of domains ranging from the stock market to language, but The Shape of Song is my favourite – it feels like the most successful of my pieces at revealing hidden mysteries. Part of the reason that I try to represent music visually is that I am a visual thinker at the core – If I were musically inclined, I suppose I would be composing symphonies about painting instead.”
Another digital artist is Adriano Abbado, who studied the relation between sound and shape which is still very interesting.
The animation he creates is an experiment aiming to test the audio capabilities of metasynth, a piece of software that creates sounds by interpreting an image. Pixels which appear high in the image generate high frequencies, and vice versa; brighter pixel produce louder sounds.
In metasynth an image is put into the diagram and scanned horizontally in a time given by the user. For every column of pixels, brightness values are read and the sound created, given buy the sum of all sine generators.
Once all so
unds were produced, they were edi
ted one after the other and associated to their original images, which are revealed by simulating the scanning process that generated the sounds. Image colour is not a parameter used in the process of sound creation, and is shown subsequently to reproduce the original image.
To see few seconds of his artworks, simply go to:
http://www.abbado.com/events/exhibition/corpo.html
In an email I received he explains the software “Metasynth” he used: “Regarding shape = sound, basically I first created all the images, and then I used a program called Metasynth to get the sounds. Metasynth reads the brightness of each column of pixels and emits a sine wave whose intensity is proportional to the pixel brightness, so it uses additive synthesis. The higher the pixel in the image, the higher the sine wave frequency. You can decide what the frequency range is, that is, what are the upper and lower borders. Each image is read left to right, sort of scanned. That is why it appears that way.”
Light and sound give to most of us simple pleasures and wonderful feelings, they can be: the sight of a sunset and the song of a bird - or man-made - a familiar painting or a favourite song. Their sensations give a personal delight that creative people have always understood. Painting and music-making employ colour and sound as their basic tools, and an infinite variety of expressive results comes of these simple means - from the colours and forms of the visual arts and the pitches and rhythms of music.
Some artists re-evaluate the way these elements are used; Schoenberg's music and the painting of Mondrian were achieved by strict explorations of the basics.
The expressive powers of light and sound are not the sole province of the fine artist.
Attempts have been made to regulate the use of our senses even further, by specifying relationships between colour and music themselves. Most often, arrangements of this kind serve the most exulted purposes, aiming to paint a picture of heaven with light and colour, and to describe it with musical notes.
Perhaps the most pervasive doctrine of this kind emerged in the 17th century, when Sir Isaac Newton first analysed the coloured properties of sunlight. Newton felt obliged to divide the naturally-occurring spectrum into seven colours, one for each note of a musical scale. In this way, the phenomena of light and sound were united in the one mathematical matrix.
His simple array has survived as a colour-music code, as well as a commonly-accepted way of describing the rainbow.
SIR ISAAC NEWTON'S COLOUR MUSIC WHEEL. The colours of the spectrum, as they appeared in "Opticks" of 1704, are shown in sequence from red to violet, as wedges between musical notes. This diagram delineates an idealized musical system, as the metaphorical framework for the newly-discovered pure colours of sunlight.
In 1704, Sir Isaac Newton, Master of the Mint, President of the Royal Society and the most renowned natural philosopher of Europe, revealed the secrets of light and colour to the world. The insights he had uncovered in forty years of experiment and analysis were laid forth in "Opticks: Or a Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light." Through its three Books, each of several Parts, the reader is privileged to an inside view of Newton's laboratory technique, starting with simple experiments with a glass prism that anyone might conduct at home. Taking the process one step further, the same colours (focused with a lens) can be sent through a second prism: the colours recombine into a beam of the same white light from which they originated.
Newton's sums gave the first quantitative proof of his revolutionary theory of colour, in support of his rather more qualitative experiments. His lectures at Cambridge, around 1670, had covered similar ground, with a great theoretical emphasis only hinted at in "Opticks". But there were limitations to both mathematical and experimental approaches. Newton never settled on a single method to account for all the coloured rays; he also treated light as if it were only refracted once, not twice, on passing through two faces of a prism. Acknowledging the weakness of one such generalization, he wrote:
"Moreover, if all the other kinds of rays were considered simultaneously, that assertion, though no longer absolutely true, would still so closely approach the truth that it could be taken as true with respect to sense and a mathematical calculation. Consequently, since a geometric calculation of the refraction... can be undertaken rather difficultly, I will not be afraid to do it in a way which, however mechanical, is more suited to practice, being confident that no fault aught to be attributed to me if, when I perform computation in physical matters, I omit the minutiae, that entail burdensome and fruitless work."
Illustration 1: MUSICAL DIVISIONS OF THE PRISM from "Opticks" of 1704.
“The colour-music layout, shown above, delineated notes as vertical lines, with the key note on the left at AG. The chord, or string length, that gave every note its pitch, ran from G to M at the other end of the spectrum (covering the whole octave, or eighth), and was extended the same distance to X, providing a second, reference octave from M to X. AG gave the lowest note, with GX as the chord of greatest length; at the other end, the note FM determined a string half the length, MX, sounding a full octave higher. … … … … … … …
The seven colours red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet (ROYGBIV), fill the seven intervals between the eight notes, starting from the highest note on the right.
… … … … … … “
The image cannot be added check the web site: http://home.vicnet.net.au/~colmusic/welcome.htm
Illustration 2 : NEWTON'S EXPERIMENTAL DATA FOR COLOUR MUSIC (not to scale).Newton found spectral colours took on different appearances, according to how they were produced. Those from prisms (top row) appeared to run one way, while plates produced colour orders (bottom row) that seemed to be reversed. His musical scale, of symmetrical ratios, could accommodate both,
while keeping the working figures of both string lengths and sines intact.
The explanation and diagrams may result quite complicated, but this shows how scientists, artists and philosophers tried to understand the relation between music and colours and their translation.
Colour and music are often used for more general purposes - they can, and have been used as means to the ends of religion, politics, commerce, recreation and therapy.
Just as therapy, I had the idea of my project.
Besides I read an article about Victor Wong.
Victor Wong, a graduate student from Hong Kong studying at Cornell University in New York State, had to read coloured maps of the upper atmosphere as part of his research.
To study "space weather" Mr Wong needed to explore minute fluctuations in order to create mathematical models.
A number of solutions were tried, including having a colleague describe the maps and attempting to print them
in Braille.
Victor Kai-Chu Wong studies a map of the upper atmosphere on which atmospheric density is represented by colours, by reading the colours as musical notes. Behind him are the project developers (L-R) electrical engineering student Ankur Moitra and Research Associate James A. Ferwerda
Mr Wong eventually hit upon the idea of translating individual colours into music, and enlisted the help of a computer graphics specialist and another student to do the programming work.
"The images have three dimensions and I had to find a way of reading them myself," Mr Wong explained.
The software assigns one of 88 piano notes to individually coloured pixels - ranging from blue at the lower end of this scale to red at the upper end. "As the notes increase in pitch I know the colour's getting redder and redder, and in my mind's eye a patch of red appears."
The application is still very much in its infancy and is only useful for reading images that have been created digitally but Wong hopes that one day it can be developed to give blind people access to photographs and other images.
Mr Wong has been blind from the age of seven and he thinks that having a "colour memory" makes the software more useful than it would be to a scientist who had never had any vision.
So I thought that it would be nice if deaf people could finally listen and understand music.
Personally I do not have any experience with deaf people, but because the music gives me so much strong feelings, I just want to give, in a way, the same feeling to people that are not able to listen to music.
My idea is to create software that transforms music into colours. Maybe it would be easy, at the beginning, to use sounds instead of music, because otherwise there would be an overload of sounds and tones.
Then I am thinking even to add to my idea a vibration device.
I am thinking about a platform where he/she will place his hand. This platform will transmit vibrations while the music is playing.
Actually there is an article about Speaker that allows deaf to feel music.
Different instruments, rhythms and notes can be felt through five finger pads attached to the "Vibrato" speaker.
The idea of hearing music through vibrations dates back long time ago. Ludwig van Beethoven was completely deaf by 1818, but continued to compose for another 10 years.
He is said to have cut the legs off his piano and played while sitting on the floor so he could feel the vibrations better.
There have been some studies on the brain and how it helps deaf enjoy music.
Scientists believe they have discovered why deaf people can enjoy listening to music.
Dr Dean Shibata, assistant professor of radiology at the University of Washington, has found that deaf people sense musical vibrations in the part of the brain other people use for hearing.
These musical vibrations are, he believes, likely to be "every bit as real" as actually hearing the sounds.
Dr Shibata told the 87th Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, in Chicago, that deaf people and those with hearing may have similar experiences when they listen to music.
The cost of the software has to be affordable to anyone or even free downloadable from internet.
So anytime someone wants to listen to music from internet or just simply play a cd from his/her computer, he/she can play it through the software and enjoy the music.
He/she will place his/her hand on the vibrator device and while the music is playing he/she will feel the vibrations. At the same time he/she will watch the changing and movement of the colours on the screen depending on the melody played.
The colours, of course, depend on the tone and sound;
higher is the tone, lighter is the colour.
This is an example of an ancient Persian scheme provides the following correspondences between musical tones and colours:
B rose
A green
G bright blue
F black
E yellow
D violet
C blue-black
(Based upon Jewanski 1999: 70, which is based upon Wellek 1927)
Another interesting article is about people suffering of synaesthesia.
A lot has been written as synaesthesia - the stimulation of one sense by something which is meant to stimulate another.
The type of Chris Goddard’s synaesthesia relates to music and colour.
The major keys have brighter colours while the minor keys have darker ones. He tends to see the minor keys as overlaid with something like a layer of black dust. Sharp major keys have a "red" feeling to them, while flat keys tend to have a "blue" feeling to them.
It will not be easy associate the tone with the colour, but I think it is important first to find an easy and standard diagram between music and colour. Actually it will be much easy to use sounds instead of music at first, so there will not be too much confusion between sounds.
The diagram, in this case, will be really simple to understand, using just simple notes and simple colours.
Of course, like Mr Wong said, having “sound – memory” makes the software more useful than it would be to someone who had never had any hearing.
Personally I wouldn’t be able to realize and program the software all by my self, but I really believe that this is a good start and with the right persons it will reach a great goal.
Bibliography
http://www.turbulence.org/Works/song/
http://rhythmiclight.com/
http://www.abbado.com/
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~colmusic/welcome.htm
http://kh.bu.edu/artwithbraininmind-l/1663.html
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Jan05/Wong.software.to.html
http://home.comcast.net/~sean.day/art-history.htm
http://www.webrarian.co.uk/index.html
Jewanski 1999: 70, which is based upon Wellek 1927
Reading through the module study guide, I was quite confusing. I did not know which brief to choose, from where to start and what to do. Then I started to do some researches about brief 4 “Make: Mobile Networked Media”.
I am really attracted to music and colours and how the music can be represented.
The article, “Colour, Form, and Motion Dimensions of a Musical Art of Light”
of Fred Collopy, says: “Lumia are an art that permits visual artists to play images in the way that musicians play with sound. … In designing and play Lumia, three principal dimensions require attention: colour, form and motion. …”
One of the digital artist who can let us see what we cannot see but listen to is Martin Wattenber.
Have you ever wonder what music looks like?
“The Shape of Song” tries to answer this paradoxical question. The software, written entirely in Java, draws “translucent” arches depending on the sequence of notes and on the difficulty of each musical piece, so that viewers can really see the shape of any composition.
Each arch connects two repeated, identical passages of a composition. By using repeated passages as a sign, the diagram in The Shape of Song shows the deep structure of the composition. Of course more complex is a composition more intricate is a diagram.
For example, if we consider a very simple piece of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”, we can see how simple the draw is. Each arch connects two identical passages. To see clearly the connection between the visualization and the song of this diagram, the score is displayed beneath the arches.
Another example is the folk song “Clementine”. Because the refrain of this song consists of multiple repetitions of the same passage, the diagram shows exactly that.
An example of a complex diagram built from a complex song is “Goldberg Variations” Bach. As we can see this piece is divided into two main parts, each made of a long passage played twice.
I contacted him asking about his style in particular in “The Shape of Song” and why he chose this kind of art. He replied writing: “In general my style is to make invisible structures visible, through the use of hand-coded software. I have done this in a variety of domains ranging from the stock market to language, but The Shape of Song is my favourite – it feels like the most successful of my pieces at revealing hidden mysteries. Part of the reason that I try to represent music visually is that I am a visual thinker at the core – If I were musically inclined, I suppose I would be composing symphonies about painting instead.”
Another digital artist is Adriano Abbado, who studied the relation between sound and shape which is still very interesting.
The animation he creates is an experiment aiming to test the audio capabilities of metasynth, a piece of software that creates sounds by interpreting an image. Pixels which appear high in the image generate high frequencies, and vice versa; brighter pixel produce louder sounds.
In metasynth an image is put into the diagram and scanned horizontally in a time given by the user. For every column of pixels, brightness values are read and the sound created, given buy the sum of all sine generators.
Once all so
unds were produced, they were edi
ted one after the other and associated to their original images, which are revealed by simulating the scanning process that generated the sounds. Image colour is not a parameter used in the process of sound creation, and is shown subsequently to reproduce the original image.To see few seconds of his artworks, simply go to:
http://www.abbado.com/events/exhibition/corpo.html
In an email I received he explains the software “Metasynth” he used: “Regarding shape = sound, basically I first created all the images, and then I used a program called Metasynth to get the sounds. Metasynth reads the brightness of each column of pixels and emits a sine wave whose intensity is proportional to the pixel brightness, so it uses additive synthesis. The higher the pixel in the image, the higher the sine wave frequency. You can decide what the frequency range is, that is, what are the upper and lower borders. Each image is read left to right, sort of scanned. That is why it appears that way.”
Light and sound give to most of us simple pleasures and wonderful feelings, they can be: the sight of a sunset and the song of a bird - or man-made - a familiar painting or a favourite song. Their sensations give a personal delight that creative people have always understood. Painting and music-making employ colour and sound as their basic tools, and an infinite variety of expressive results comes of these simple means - from the colours and forms of the visual arts and the pitches and rhythms of music.
Some artists re-evaluate the way these elements are used; Schoenberg's music and the painting of Mondrian were achieved by strict explorations of the basics.
The expressive powers of light and sound are not the sole province of the fine artist.
Attempts have been made to regulate the use of our senses even further, by specifying relationships between colour and music themselves. Most often, arrangements of this kind serve the most exulted purposes, aiming to paint a picture of heaven with light and colour, and to describe it with musical notes.
Perhaps the most pervasive doctrine of this kind emerged in the 17th century, when Sir Isaac Newton first analysed the coloured properties of sunlight. Newton felt obliged to divide the naturally-occurring spectrum into seven colours, one for each note of a musical scale. In this way, the phenomena of light and sound were united in the one mathematical matrix.
His simple array has survived as a colour-music code, as well as a commonly-accepted way of describing the rainbow.
SIR ISAAC NEWTON'S COLOUR MUSIC WHEEL. The colours of the spectrum, as they appeared in "Opticks" of 1704, are shown in sequence from red to violet, as wedges between musical notes. This diagram delineates an idealized musical system, as the metaphorical framework for the newly-discovered pure colours of sunlight.
In 1704, Sir Isaac Newton, Master of the Mint, President of the Royal Society and the most renowned natural philosopher of Europe, revealed the secrets of light and colour to the world. The insights he had uncovered in forty years of experiment and analysis were laid forth in "Opticks: Or a Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light." Through its three Books, each of several Parts, the reader is privileged to an inside view of Newton's laboratory technique, starting with simple experiments with a glass prism that anyone might conduct at home. Taking the process one step further, the same colours (focused with a lens) can be sent through a second prism: the colours recombine into a beam of the same white light from which they originated.
Newton's sums gave the first quantitative proof of his revolutionary theory of colour, in support of his rather more qualitative experiments. His lectures at Cambridge, around 1670, had covered similar ground, with a great theoretical emphasis only hinted at in "Opticks". But there were limitations to both mathematical and experimental approaches. Newton never settled on a single method to account for all the coloured rays; he also treated light as if it were only refracted once, not twice, on passing through two faces of a prism. Acknowledging the weakness of one such generalization, he wrote:
"Moreover, if all the other kinds of rays were considered simultaneously, that assertion, though no longer absolutely true, would still so closely approach the truth that it could be taken as true with respect to sense and a mathematical calculation. Consequently, since a geometric calculation of the refraction... can be undertaken rather difficultly, I will not be afraid to do it in a way which, however mechanical, is more suited to practice, being confident that no fault aught to be attributed to me if, when I perform computation in physical matters, I omit the minutiae, that entail burdensome and fruitless work."
Illustration 1: MUSICAL DIVISIONS OF THE PRISM from "Opticks" of 1704.
“The colour-music layout, shown above, delineated notes as vertical lines, with the key note on the left at AG. The chord, or string length, that gave every note its pitch, ran from G to M at the other end of the spectrum (covering the whole octave, or eighth), and was extended the same distance to X, providing a second, reference octave from M to X. AG gave the lowest note, with GX as the chord of greatest length; at the other end, the note FM determined a string half the length, MX, sounding a full octave higher. … … … … … … …
The seven colours red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet (ROYGBIV), fill the seven intervals between the eight notes, starting from the highest note on the right.
… … … … … … “
The image cannot be added check the web site: http://home.vicnet.net.au/~colmusic/welcome.htm
Illustration 2 : NEWTON'S EXPERIMENTAL DATA FOR COLOUR MUSIC (not to scale).Newton found spectral colours took on different appearances, according to how they were produced. Those from prisms (top row) appeared to run one way, while plates produced colour orders (bottom row) that seemed to be reversed. His musical scale, of symmetrical ratios, could accommodate both,
while keeping the working figures of both string lengths and sines intact.
The explanation and diagrams may result quite complicated, but this shows how scientists, artists and philosophers tried to understand the relation between music and colours and their translation.
Colour and music are often used for more general purposes - they can, and have been used as means to the ends of religion, politics, commerce, recreation and therapy.
Just as therapy, I had the idea of my project.
Besides I read an article about Victor Wong.
Victor Wong, a graduate student from Hong Kong studying at Cornell University in New York State, had to read coloured maps of the upper atmosphere as part of his research.
To study "space weather" Mr Wong needed to explore minute fluctuations in order to create mathematical models.
A number of solutions were tried, including having a colleague describe the maps and attempting to print them
in Braille.Victor Kai-Chu Wong studies a map of the upper atmosphere on which atmospheric density is represented by colours, by reading the colours as musical notes. Behind him are the project developers (L-R) electrical engineering student Ankur Moitra and Research Associate James A. Ferwerda
Mr Wong eventually hit upon the idea of translating individual colours into music, and enlisted the help of a computer graphics specialist and another student to do the programming work.
"The images have three dimensions and I had to find a way of reading them myself," Mr Wong explained.
The software assigns one of 88 piano notes to individually coloured pixels - ranging from blue at the lower end of this scale to red at the upper end. "As the notes increase in pitch I know the colour's getting redder and redder, and in my mind's eye a patch of red appears."
The application is still very much in its infancy and is only useful for reading images that have been created digitally but Wong hopes that one day it can be developed to give blind people access to photographs and other images.
Mr Wong has been blind from the age of seven and he thinks that having a "colour memory" makes the software more useful than it would be to a scientist who had never had any vision.
So I thought that it would be nice if deaf people could finally listen and understand music.
Personally I do not have any experience with deaf people, but because the music gives me so much strong feelings, I just want to give, in a way, the same feeling to people that are not able to listen to music.
My idea is to create software that transforms music into colours. Maybe it would be easy, at the beginning, to use sounds instead of music, because otherwise there would be an overload of sounds and tones.
Then I am thinking even to add to my idea a vibration device.
I am thinking about a platform where he/she will place his hand. This platform will transmit vibrations while the music is playing.
Actually there is an article about Speaker that allows deaf to feel music.
Different instruments, rhythms and notes can be felt through five finger pads attached to the "Vibrato" speaker.
The idea of hearing music through vibrations dates back long time ago. Ludwig van Beethoven was completely deaf by 1818, but continued to compose for another 10 years.
He is said to have cut the legs off his piano and played while sitting on the floor so he could feel the vibrations better.
There have been some studies on the brain and how it helps deaf enjoy music.
Scientists believe they have discovered why deaf people can enjoy listening to music.
Dr Dean Shibata, assistant professor of radiology at the University of Washington, has found that deaf people sense musical vibrations in the part of the brain other people use for hearing.
These musical vibrations are, he believes, likely to be "every bit as real" as actually hearing the sounds.
Dr Shibata told the 87th Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, in Chicago, that deaf people and those with hearing may have similar experiences when they listen to music.
The cost of the software has to be affordable to anyone or even free downloadable from internet.
So anytime someone wants to listen to music from internet or just simply play a cd from his/her computer, he/she can play it through the software and enjoy the music.
He/she will place his/her hand on the vibrator device and while the music is playing he/she will feel the vibrations. At the same time he/she will watch the changing and movement of the colours on the screen depending on the melody played.
The colours, of course, depend on the tone and sound;
higher is the tone, lighter is the colour.
This is an example of an ancient Persian scheme provides the following correspondences between musical tones and colours:
B rose
A green
G bright blue
F black
E yellow
D violet
C blue-black
(Based upon Jewanski 1999: 70, which is based upon Wellek 1927)
Another interesting article is about people suffering of synaesthesia.
A lot has been written as synaesthesia - the stimulation of one sense by something which is meant to stimulate another.
The type of Chris Goddard’s synaesthesia relates to music and colour.
The major keys have brighter colours while the minor keys have darker ones. He tends to see the minor keys as overlaid with something like a layer of black dust. Sharp major keys have a "red" feeling to them, while flat keys tend to have a "blue" feeling to them.
It will not be easy associate the tone with the colour, but I think it is important first to find an easy and standard diagram between music and colour. Actually it will be much easy to use sounds instead of music at first, so there will not be too much confusion between sounds.
The diagram, in this case, will be really simple to understand, using just simple notes and simple colours.
Of course, like Mr Wong said, having “sound – memory” makes the software more useful than it would be to someone who had never had any hearing.
Personally I wouldn’t be able to realize and program the software all by my self, but I really believe that this is a good start and with the right persons it will reach a great goal.
Bibliography
http://www.turbulence.org/Works/song/
http://rhythmiclight.com/
http://www.abbado.com/
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~colmusic/welcome.htm
http://kh.bu.edu/artwithbraininmind-l/1663.html
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Jan05/Wong.software.to.html
http://home.comcast.net/~sean.day/art-history.htm
http://www.webrarian.co.uk/index.html
Jewanski 1999: 70, which is based upon Wellek 1927
posted by Unicorn76 at 10:00 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home