Today guest lecturer Liz Miller held a workshop for us where she discussed her work 'Circular Scores', a sound visualisation project which explores links between repetitive, musical motifs and organic natural patterns. Liz essentially created a notation system that could be followed and read by those who are not trained using the traditional system. Her design featured a circle with its radius being the pitch of the sound and, the circumference being the time elapsed. The small inner circle represented the piano, whilst the huge outer circle represented the violin.
Liz asked us whether we found this system useful in reading music. As someone who has never been able to read music, I felt there was some confusion present in her design. For example, I couldn't keep up with where current notes playing where represented in here system. It was difficult to find this out since if you wanted to read the pitch you'd need to tilt your head upside down in some cases.
The main task was to create a visualisation from the sound we picked from the British Sounds Library. My sound consisted of people gathering to witness a geyser explosion and this is the visualisation I created:
The idea behind this is that it shows the intensity of sound in the area around the geyser. The 'before eruption' visualisation shows these short lines in a circle which represent the people which have gathered around the geyser. They are waiting for it to explode so they are just chatting amongst themselves as is heard in the audio file. The 'during eruption' visualisation shows to the intensity of the people increases however, this time the intensity of the geyser is present in the visualisation. Notice how it fills the whole area around the geyser because it is a really loud sound.
Comments